Theatre and Quarantine Culture

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
During my presentation, I focus on theatre: the theatre scene has undergone a major transformation in the last few years. On the one hand, the high degree of uncertainty that characterised the cultural industry has deepened as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and on the other hand, theatres have been trying to operate beyond their own limits in a period of temporary quarantine culture. In this paper, I will review the terminology of quarantine culture and pandemic.I do this with the intention of taking a provisional sample of the practice of the main, or Hungarian, theatre era through a specific 'filter'. In the remainder of the theoretical introduction, I will present the logic of the main and peripheral cultural industries and briefly describe their characteristics, and outline a narrative of a transformation that has taken place in the cultural industries. Following the introduction, I will organise the paper along these concepts, thereby discussing the phenomena of presence, performance, reception and mediatisation through the solutions of the Hungarian theatre scene in a given period, and show how the theatre field was able to achieve a transformation through a process of mediatisation, which I believe was not organic or 'violent', and which also implied a partial integration into the mechanisms of the main cultural fields.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Zsanett Lengyel is currently a student of the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Debrecen. She has teaching and research experience. She has 5 degrees for now. In her researchers, she deals with different aspects cultural studies within theatre and museums. She has earned many research sholarships during the past 8 years – in the last semester, she was a short term scholar at University of New Mexico (US).