• Posted 08-Dec-2020

OPEN UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS: INTERNATIONAL ONLINE CONFERENCE “MAKING THEATRE AT A TIME OF GLOBAL CRISIS”

A three-day Online International Conference was co-organised by the Open University of Cyprus, in the context of the research project “Mapping Crisis Theatre on the Contemporary European Stage”, and the Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival on December 4-6, 2020.

The social, political, cultural and health turbulence that is profoundly shaking the second decade of the third millennium – including the pandemic of Covid-19, the migration/refugee drama of displacement, the alarming instances of global terrorism and religious intolerance, the crisis of ecology and the anthropocene, the failure of neo-liberalism and the establishment of neo-tyrannical political and media formations all over the world— have precipitated a climate of profound social and cultural instability and trauma, which may well be the material of modern tragedy.

This conference, aptly placed within the framework of the Buffer Fringe Festival 2020, intended to explore perspectives by international theatre scholars as well as local Cypriot artists, in an attempt to respond to the quandaries that are affecting society and our way of perceiving theatre-making beyond anything that could ever be imagined. Τhe conference also sets out to disseminate the findings of a two-year research project funded by the Open University of Cyprus, entitled “Mapping Crisis Theatre on the Contemporary European Stage: Theatrical Representations of the Refugee/Immigration Problem; Global Terrorism and World Financial Crisis”. The project was co-ordinated by Dr. Avra Sidiropoulou, Associate Professor at the M.A. Programme in Theatre Studies at the Open University of Cyprus (OUC).

Source: Open University of Cyprus News (https://bit.ly/39TAwjA)