Future Stage Manifesto: Eastern Europe

In October 2021, the futureStage research group published the Future Stage Manifesto, which has been translated and published in thirteen languages, including Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, and Russian. This panel of international researchers and translators discussed the impact of the Future Stage Manifesto on the Eastern European performing arts scene, and the opportunities it opens for transcultural collaborations, access, and political engagement. The panel was moderated by Kasia Lech, Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and metaLAB principal, Magda Romanska.

This event was co-organized with the Department of Performing Arts Studies at the University of Gdańsk in Poland, and Janovics Center for Screen and Performing Arts @ Babes-Bolyai University in Romania.

Panelists:

Ágnes Karolina Bakk (Hungary) is a narrative designer and researcher at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design’s Innovation Center. She focuses on immersive storytelling & the science of magic and currently leads two research projects: on romantic relationships in Metaverse-like environments, and on psychological restoration in a specific VR prototype. She is the founder of the Zip-Scene conference (next edition 2022 November); cofounder of Random Error Studio, a lab that supports various VR productions, and the curator of Vektor VR section. She teaches immersive & VR- storytelling, and speculative design. She presented at various conferences and platforms from Moscow to Montreal and at festivals (e.g. DokLeipzig). She is currently involved in several video game productions and works on her own artistic VR creation.

Olga Danylyuk (Ukraine) is a researcher, director, dramaturg, curator, and designer. Olga completed her Ph.D. using PaR methodology at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, under the title: ‘Virtually True’. Intermedial Strategies in the Staging of War Conflict (2015). Olga continued her research by conducting fieldwork in the war zone in Eastern Ukraine. She worked with CIMIC Ukraine and different volunteer organizations in the Zone of the Antiterrorist Operation. Her performative research resulted in a large-scale promenade performance with 16 teenagers from the war zone: Letters to an Unknown Friend from New York (2018) and the performance project Contact Line(2020). Currently, Olga is a Member of the Law and Theory Lab at the University of Westminster, and a Research Fellow at Birkbeck School of Arts in London. She is Head of the Center for International Mobility and Integration Projects at NACAM and the founder of “I-DO” NGO in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Kasia Lech (Poland) is a Polish scholar, actor, multilingual storyteller, puppeteer, and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. She received her Ph.D. from University College Dublin. Her research and creative practice explore theatre through practice-based and traditional scholarship and primarily focus on theatre in the context of multilingualism, acting training, verse, translation, and transnational experience. She published on verse and verse drama in contemporary performance, theatre translation, multilingual theatre, multilingual actors, European theatres, theatre and animal rights, and puppetry. Her monograph Dramaturgy of Form: Performing Verse in Contemporary Theatre was published by Routledge in 2021. Her new book Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards a New European Theatre is forthcoming with Palgrave. Kasia performed internationally and co-founded Polish Theatre Ireland, a multilingual theatre company based in Dublin. She is an Executive Director at TheTheatreTimes.com, and a co-convener of the Translation Adaptation Dramaturgy working group at the International Federation for Theatre Research.

Cristina Modreanu (Romania) is a curator, theater critic, and scholar based in Bucharest, Romania. She holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the National University of Theater and Film “I.L.Caragiale” in Bucharest and she is the author of six books on Romanian Theatre. Her first book in English, A History of Romanian Theatre from Communism to Capitalism. Children of a Restless Time, was published by Routledge in 2020. She also contributed to Routledge Companion for European Theatre (due to be published in 2023). She is a Fulbright Alumni and she was a Visiting Scholar at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Performance Studies Department, New York 2011-2012. Modreanu is currently the editor of the Performing Arts Magazine Scena.ro and a theatre researcher affiliated with Babeș-Bolyai University.

Ilinca Tamara Todoruț (Romania) is a theater scholar, teacher, dramaturg, and translator of the metaLAB futureStage Manifesto into Romanian. She earned her doctorate from Yale School of Drama, and now teaches at the Faculty of Theater and Film within Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. She published articles in journals such as Theater, Journal of Poverty, Theatre History Studies, and collaborated with Scena.ro and The Theatre Times. She contributed to The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy. She is the author of Christoph Schlingensief’s Realist Theater (Routledge 2022).

Tomasz Wiśniewski (Poland) is the Head of the Department of Performing Arts Studies at the University of Gdańsk in Poland, where he was Deputy Director for Research in the Institute of English and American Studies (2016-2019). He is the founder of the Between.Pomiędzy Research Group. He has published Complicite, Theatre and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Kształt literacki Samuela Becketta [Literary Works of Samuel Beckett] (Universitas, 2006), and (co-)edited several academic publications, including Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Phenomenon of “Gardzienice”(Routledge, 2022). He is on the editorial board of the literary quarterly Tekstualia (Warsaw), a Regional Managing Editor for TheTheatreTimes.com, a member of the board of the Polish Association for the Study of English (since 2018), a member of the Progamme Board of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre (since 2018), and a member of the Editorial Board of Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance.