How do we actually study and research this topic? We need a somewhat different approach to the established methods of doing theater historical research. This has tended to focus on three main fields. People, mostly great directors, or actors or playwrights. Cities and countries. For example, the history of theater in London or England, and often, the history of English theater is just a history of theater in London. And performance practices, such as acting, singing, or dancing. Now this is a simplification, of course, and theater historians today follow a wide range of methods informed by an equally large number of theories. They tend, however, to focus on relatively narrow spatial and temporal fields, and make use of their archives accordingly. Our approach here is different. We will move beyond the national and local paradigm. The theater and theaters we are interested in are transnational. This move beyond the national paradigm brings with it an important shift in perspective. This also means that we'll be less interested in the work of certain individuals such as playwrights, actors or directors. Instead, we will focus on the work of theater managers and impresarios who organize the touring of theater productions or the dissemination of plays. They often did so out of commercial interest, but they also functioned as cultural brokers because they mediated between different cultural backgrounds. Through their work, theaters become contact zones, not only between different cultures or languages, but also between different media. Often, theater buildings would be used for showing other kinds of entertainment, such as cinema, comedy acts, or even circus. Likewise, touring theater troupes often played in cities or small towns, which did not have their own purpose built theater, but they had to perform in town halls, churches, pubs, or ballrooms, as a consequence. When talking about the venues where theater was performed, we'll be interested not only in purpose built theater or opera houses, but also in multifunctional venues in which artists entertainers and local citizens met to see what was on tonight. Theater historians working within a national framework have invested considerable effort into analyzing and describing different forms of theater and how they were perceived by their audiences at a given time. Just as in literature or the fine arts, the main focus has always been the aesthetics of the work, an author, or a time, but all arts have always had an economic side, as well. Someone had to pay the artists and enable them to develop their skills to a professional level. Whether it was a rich patron, a powerful prince, or the local citizens of a town through paying in order to see a show. Therefore, global theater history is also more interested in the question of how the institution of theater actually worked, how it changed, and how these changes happen. Theater was always embedded in various networks of exchange of which aesthetics are only just one. This also implies that we treat the distribution of various forms of theater over space as equally important as their changing over time. We will follow the routes of theater troupes as they traveled from one region or country to another, or show how specific concepts of theater traveled between cultural communities. In the traditional framework of theater research, these movements over space were less important than the historical development. In this course, we will show you how to treat both dimensions as on a par and follow both the temporal, as well as the spatial dimensions of theater. Now as you can imagine, this kind of research often comes with a lot of difficulties. One single person may find it hard or even impossible to travel to dozens of places, read newspapers, play bills, and texts in multiple different languages, to say nothing to the various cultural traditions involved. In fact, one individual alone can hardly do all the work. Global theater history heavily relies on the cooperation and collaboration between many people from various academic disciplines, backgrounds, or languages. Moderating between them and finding new ways of collaborating is an important part of this kind of research. It has only become possible through new electronic tools such as databases, wikis, and the internet as our basis of communication. Global theater histories is not the solipsistic endeavor of one researcher but is the result of the work of many. The big advantage of this is that our sources are also increasingly becoming accessible from different localities. Newspapers, documents, and public records are increasingly being digitized and made accessible online. Often even for free. Online resources form a new kind of archive. One that is not only accessible in one place, but is itself deterritorialized, meaning you can often research global developments from home. Now this may seem all rather abstract, so we need to demonstrate how we can research theater and globalization.
