Lunch & Learn • Contemporary Czech Drama and Theatre – In Search of New Themes in Democracy

The key to understanding today‘s Czech theatre lies in the nineties – with the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the transformation processes towards democratization and a market economy, new themes and artistic approaches to reality had to be found. The lecture will give some insights into the Czech theatre landscape of the last thirty years and outline some important thematic areas in Czech theatre today: coming to terms with the past (World War II, post-war traumas, communist state security), reckoning with the era of Václav Havel, national identity, and political theatre as a critique of capitalism and oligarchic structures.

Lunch registration open to UNC faculty, staff and students only. REGISTER HERE.

Dr. Barbora Schnelle is a Berlin-based Czech theater translator, researcher, critic, dramaturg, cultural manager, curator and editor. In 2009, she founded Drama Panorama: Forum for Translation and Theater, where she works as artistic director of various projects and workshops dealing with contemporary drama and international theater exchange. She is the founded of the festival of contemporary Czech theater in Berlin Ein Stück: Tschechien, which she has produced and curated ever since. In 2018, she published the anthology of contemporary Czech drama in German translation Von Masochisten und Mamma-Guerillas (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag). She also translated and published the plays of the Czech political playwright Roman Sikora under the title Frühstück mit Leviathan (Breakfast with Leviathan; Berlin, Neofelis Verlag).

Presented by UNC Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies and Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. This event is open to the public. But please note, lunch registration is open to UNC faculty, staff and students only.