Viviana Iacob

The project focusses on the relationship between the global trajectories of illiberal regimes and their theatre cultures before and after 1989. Its main thesis is that Cold War trends in state socialist Eastern Europe can constitute an interpretative baseline for contemporary usages of theatre by illiberal diplomacies and networks. Although illiberalism has become a buzzword in response to the populist wave since 2010, the term "illiberal democracy" has its own ambiguous history. Nonetheless, the concept aptly connects the pre- and post-1989 eras, and allows for promising research vistas centered on states that have, at various times since the 1970s, rejected the primacy of liberal democratic political and cultural values. These countries’ representatives engaged in their own theatre globalization alternatives, but these were not wholly disconnected and separate from both international organizations and Western-centric circulations within the field. The proposal advances a perspective on the relationship between theatre and globalization that has hardly ever been studied by existent scholarship.