Adam Czirak (University of Vienna, Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies)
In the last decades performers on European and US-American stages tend to explicitly speak on behalf of others instead of portraying them. Those privileged enough to take the stage often do so in order to turn it into a political arena for raising their voices and interweaving it with the voices of others through the (auto)fictional strategies of narration, translation or reporting. For many of these socially engaged productions – reaching from performances of re-writing, Institutional Critique and decolonialization – the notion of translation may offer an operative conceptual framework.
The lecture gives insight into new directions in socially engaged performance art and introduces the concept of translation as a useful tool in analyzing contemporary theatre and dance performances.

Theresa Eisele (University of Vienna, Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies)
Waltzes, local beer, and a visit from the emperor in front of wallpaper scenery. In 1892, a baroque reconstruction of Vienna celebrated its premiere in the city’s amusement park Prater. The “Vienna” experience it offered was so popular that it was exported to the Chicago World Fair just one year later. Yet, the circumstances were completely different: in Chicago, the Viennese exhibitors had to respond to their curation as a “colonial sight”. By understanding the representations of Vienna 1892/93 as a set of cultural performances, the different strategies of the two ensembles can be analyzed, as well as the logics of marginalization and cultural dominance negotiated with and through performance/theatre. The lecture explores the performances of “Vienna 1892/93” within the framework of global theatre and performance studies, applying concepts of entangled history as well as theories on gender and colonialism