Panel

This panel discussion took place in hybrid form during the Performance Studies international (psi) annual conference in London, on June 21, 2024. The idea was to bring theater practitioners, scholars, and dramaturgs together in conversation to identify challenges and discuss transformations currently underway across various European city-and state-funded theaters. As a result of recent activist momentum (and artistic direction scandals!), European public theaters are currently being held accountable for structural inequality, power abuse, racism, and sexism, resulting in a moment of reckoning and reassessment that inspired our panel discussion. In the conversation below, our expert panelists were able to report on the situation of theater institutions across various national contexts. As a starting point, we looked at the move toward more horizontal and democratic institutional cultures dating back to the late 1960s in the German and Flemish contexts, which resulted in a recognition of issues of class and minoritarian identities, respectively. On the other hand, the radical equality enshrined in the Norwegian theater context has actually constituted a challenge for artistic freedoms, articulating a tension between democratic structures and artistic processes. The discussion also explored the colonial legacy that has yet to be fully accounted for in the French and Belgian contexts. As such, it continues to have implications for Afropean artists struggling for recognition and is perpetuated in the tokenization of guest artists from the African continent. Adding to the nuance of the discussion was how the activist momentum of postcolonial discourse resonates differently from the postmigrant discourse, opening distinct avenues of activism within different national contexts. The term postmigrant potentially enables us to go one step further: to recognize the native/migrant binary as false and instead to perceive human societies as always already shaped by migration. Our discussion was to a large extent framed by concrete examples of current challenges and, at the same time, signs of progress in European public theater. It succinctly delineated how our panel assesses the current situation and what they hope to see undertaken in the years to come. If there is one unifying thread through the conversation, it would be the panelists' urgent appeal for openness and transparency that needs to accompany processes of democratization and diversification. This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.