The RESONANCE Reading Group is a monthly encounter of the wider academic community of the project RESONANCE invested in thinking-with one key text or book a month.

RESONANCE Reading Group

Session #4: Independent Music Theatre in Berlin, by Martina Stütz

The RESONANCE Reading Group is a monthly meeting that brings together members of the academic community, colleagues, friends, and enthusiasts of contemporary cultural history to reflect on and discuss a fundamental text or book. It is part of the project RESONANCE — Epistemologies for the Documentation of Affect and Becoming in Cultural Manifestations in Performance (1969-1979). This group meets in person at NOVA FCSH or online, during lunchtime on a weekday. Each participant brings their own lunch, and for in-person sessions, coffee and biscuits are kindly provided by the project.

The fourth session of the RESONANCE Reading Group focuses on the chapter “Independent Music Theatre in Berlin: Breaking Out of Traditional Discourses and Building New Structures,” by Martina Stütz. This chapter traces the development of independent musical-theatre in Berlin since the 1990s, drafting its ecologies of practice through forms of diversity and interdisciplinarity. It demonstrates some of the ways in which these nodes expand into the creation of production and collaboration networks, affirming musical theatre as a multimodal hybrid practice. In doing so, however, it expands this medium’s formal currency into paradox: how can such a capacious, vibrant, networked set of manifestations still be so scattered, fragmented, and invisible within institutional circuits? This reading group is going to be led by Filipa Magalhães (CESEM — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST).

You can register by emailing Hélia Marçal at heliamarcal@fcsh.unl.pt, to receive an online meeting link and a PDF copy of the chapter.

More information about the RESONANCE project here.

This event is part of the RESONANCE’s Spring Seminar Series. Public events will also include the Seminar Performing the Archive, led by the curator and scholar Paula Parente Pinto, which will take place on the same day, April 29, at 6 PM, Auditorium B1 (Tower B), NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Picture: Persimmon, axial view, MRI. Alexandr Khrapichev, University of Oxford. Source: Wellcome Collection, United Kingdom (CC BY)

The RESONANCE project is supported by the Programa Regional Lisboa 2030, Portugal 2030 and the European Union (LISBOA2030-FEDER-00914500). This work is also co-funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the reference 2023.17624.ICDT (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/2023.17624.ICDT).