Theatre and Resilience: Looking Back at the 34th Annual CDE Conference in Prague

In early June, the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, hosted the international conference Theatre and Resilience (the 34th Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English – CDE).

Organised as part of the CoRe project and co-funded by the Irish Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs under the ISP-Irish Studies Program, the event brought together over 40 delegates from across the globe, including the Czech Republic, Germany, the UK, Ireland, the USA, Australia, Austria, Turkey, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, China, and Slovakia.

The conference focused on the multifaceted issue of resilience in contemporary Anglophone drama and theatre, aiming to evaluate current theoretical approaches to performativity and identity. The conference explored four key questions:

1. How drama and theatrical productions create space for resistance, survival, and hope in the context of intersectional crises of personal, collective, and political identity.
2. Whether contemporary Anglophone theatre complicates the narratives of passivity vs. activity or vulnerability vs. agency, which are often associated with the neoliberal understanding of “resilience”.
3. Whether approaches to resilience in theatre and performing arts differ across cultural and political contexts.
4. Whether it is possible to define a specific “aesthetics of resilience” within 21st-century drama and theatre.

Prof. Tony Fisher (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London) and Dr. Miriam Haughton (University of Galway), both supported by the CoRe project, examined the political efficacy of theatre in the age of “capitalist melancholia”, and the impact of arts funding policies on contemporary theatre practice across Europe, respectively. Doc. Alice Koubová (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) explored the genealogy of the term “resilience” in a wide interdisciplinary context and outlined the possibilities offered by performance practice in building up resilience. Deirdre Kinahan and Louise Lowe (acclaimed Irish playwrights and theatre-makers) shared insights into staging historical memory, community engagement, and site-specific performances.