New Perspectives on Russian Theater and Performing Arts IV: The Aesthetics and Politics of Capitalism: People, Money, and Labor in Russian Theater

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines the complex and dynamic relationship between theater and economic activity. Theater has often been at the vanguard of exploring the potentialities and contradictions presented by economic modernity. But how exactly does theater respond to the capitalist and socialist economic and political imaginaries? What conceptual frameworks does it employ to understand capital, economics, and the dynamics of private finances and public monetary exchange?
The papers presented in this panel offer a rich analysis of how theater engages with wartime economies, private and state visions of capitalism, and socialist and post-socialist economic experiments.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Spencer Small, Yale U

Papers

• 'Vot denezhki! Kopeechki! Voz’mite!': The Liberating Force of Private Capital in Alexander Ostrovsky’s Koz’ma Zakhar’ich Minin, Sukhoruk - Chloe Simone Papadopoulos, U of Southern California

• Maxim Gorky and the Capitalist Aesthetics of Late Imperial Russia - Valeria Mutc, UC Davis

• The Theater of Labor: On the Critical Potential of Proizvodstvennaia Drama, Then and Now - Natalia Plagmann, U of Colorado at Boulder

Discussant

• Tatiana Klepikova, U of Regensburg (Germany)