Twice-mapping Romania: Towards a performative gridding of politics and a political cartography of theatre in communism and post-communism

Broadly conceived, this dissertation's research area is positioned at the crossroads of performance theory, history of political thought, and theatre historiography. In brief, this research project (in its two components, the social stage and the theatre stage) consists of an examination of the multiple and multifaceted layers of theatricality of communism in Romania between 1945-1989 and of the ways in which this theatricality has shaped the social and political spectacle during and after the Revolution; simultaneously, it involves an investigation of the different forms in which, and the means through which, the theatre stage of the country has been, and is, “haunted” by the memory of the nation's political oppression in the recent past.;The pre-1989 social stage is analyzed at three levels (stages): the secret stage of political prisons (with a focus on the deliberate use of torture as spectacle in the “The Pitesti Experiment”; on women's life and art in political prisons; and an overview of theatre practices unofficially functioning in prisons); the public stage of the national territory as prison (with a focus on the official spectacle but also addressing elements of the spectacle of resistance ); and it includes references to the regime's spectacle in the international arena. After a brief overview of the key elements of its pre-1989 theatre landscape (including harsh political censorship), Romania's post-1989 “theatre stage” is analyzed strictly from the point of view of its reworking of the memory of the country's traumatic past, as illustrated through the works of the three theatre directors, Andrei Şerban, Silviu Purcărete, and Mihai Măniuţiu who engage explicitly in such an endeavor. This study does not aim to provide a history of Romanian theatre in the historiographical sense of the term; rather, it simply aims to outline, strictly speaking, a cultural and political “map” of theatre as memory-processing machine in post-1989 Romania.;Taking literally the metaphor of the “world as a stage” and paraphrasing Richard Schechner's definition of performance as “twice-behaved behavior,” Twice-Mapping Romania: Towards a Performative Gridding of Politics and a Political Cartography of Theatre in Communism and Post-Communism employs Deleuzeoguattarian principles of cartography and decalcomania in order to highlight both the traces left in collective and individual memory by an overtly over-theatrical political regime (hence the pre-1989 Performative Gridding of Politics), and the role of this traumatic memory in reshaping the aesthetic forms, the direction of development, and the overall politics of Romanian theatre (hence the post-1989 Political Cartography of Theatre). The aim of this dissertation is, thus, two-fold: on the one hand, to map the historically-documented pre-1989 political theatricality, and on the other hand to highlight (a second mapping) the post-1989 theatre-archived memory of this theatricality.