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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.2 (2000) 78-84



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Joachim Fiebach
Director, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft und Kulturelle Kommunikation, Humboldt Universität

Berlin Conversations

MARRANCA: We have known you for over 10 years now, having first met before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let us begin by asking you to comment on your work as director of the Theatre Institute at Humboldt and the nature of arts education there, specifically theatre studies. Can you give us a sense of what changes were brought about in the last ten years?

FIEBACH: As far as our seminars were concerned, there had been one major change, and that began in the late 80s, before 1989, when we decided to open up to what we call cultural communications. And we tried hard to get it established, specifically my conception of theatricality and of cultural communication, my experiences with African culture, with anthropology, with ethnology, and so on. So we tried not to shift, but to emphasize new fields of teaching and research. The first step was forming the research team, which resulted in four doctoral theses looking into changes in modes of perception and corporeality, mobility, visualization around the turn of the century, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Connected with it was the unfolding and development of the new technological revolution of that time, the new milieu, with films, cars, planes, etc., and we focused on Berlin because the city then was maybe the focal point of the world. Potsdamer Platz we learned had the densest traffic in the world in 1903. There are memories and descriptions of how people adapted to those new changes within a decade, and that is what we tried to underpin in our teaching activities in cultural communications. Then we added new courses in 1988 about modes of communication, something which hadn't been done before.

MARRANCA: Was this following a trend in the DDR at that time?

FIEBACH: Not at all. I think we were the first group to do that in all of Germany, and it was quite avant-garde to do that. One example: I don't know if you know the book by Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale, published in Paris in 1983. When I came back from Africa a friend of mine, an avant-gardist in the DDR, he talked about that book which I recommended for translation, and it was then published here, and that was one indication. Also, my background came in helpful in that I had been able to watch some cases of still extant singers and oral performers [End Page 78] in Africa. I was gaining knowledge not only through reading but by experience. And that prompted and propelled me to pursue this shift in research. But it needed some time to prepare and to incorporate work available at that time.

DASGUPTA: But were books in the field of cultural communications and cultural anthropology available to students widely before 1989?

FIEBACH: That was a problem, which is why I didn't teach African or Asian theatre before although I had been very much preoccupied with this. My first trip to Africa was in the late 60s, early 70s, and since then it was my second field. But I refrained from teaching that because I knew it was no use; it was as complicated as teaching students West European theatre because our students couldn't watch it live. I started pursuing these fields in 1988 because we felt that something essential was going to change in our society.

DASGUPTA: You emphasize these new fields of cultural study, but what about the more traditional ways of teaching theatre and drama. I thought that that was the primary purpose of your department, to train students to go and work in the professional theatres.

FIEBACH: I wouldn't put it this way. It was a big issue in the late 60s and early 70s in the DDR as the powers that were tried to turn our department into professional teaching. It goes without saying...

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