A large number of publicly funded theater institutions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are currently undergoing complex reformation processes with regard to topics such as diversity, care, and sustainability, which many theater professionals consider urgently necessary due to social change. How can structural transformation in theaters be described, tested, and implemented at the interface of artistic and organizational practices, and how and under what conditions do theater practitioners from diverse professions attain the possibility of independently co-designing the institution, i.e., how do they achieve “institutional authorship”?
The planned research project investigates the institutional conditions of production for contemporary theater and asks for artistic and structural methods to redesign theater enterprises in a sustainable, discrimination-sensitive, power-critical and caring way. "The Emancipatory Theater" is conceived as research directly at the company and takes place exemplarily for the German-speaking theater at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, where under the artistic direction of Benjamin von Blomberg and Nicolas Stemann since 2019 various institution-transforming processes have been initiated, which are designed and implemented by different “institutional authors”. Based on the analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with employees of various professional fields, the project aims to make a scientific contribution to the theoretical discourse of institutional critique in the field of performing arts. At the same time, the goal is to develop artistic practices and methods that can be tested and applied in theater organizations. Outcome of the project will be a thesis as a contribution to scientific research and an artistic workbook (a manual, an atlas, or similar) that gathers institution-transformative practices for versatile application.