Hello and welcome to this course on theater and globalization. My name is Christopher Balme. I'm professor of theater studies at LMU Munich and director of the Center for Global Theater History. Over the next six weeks, we will explore together exciting topics that link theater, which we all know something about, with globalization, which we have all heard about, but might perhaps not be so sure exactly what it means. So, let's start with our two terms, theater and globalization. As you can see, I am in a theater. In fact, a very old theater built between 1751 and 1755 as the royal court theater in Munich. Then, it was used mainly to perform Italian operas. Today, you can watch anything from opera to contemporary drama. Theater we can define in different ways. Etymologically it is first and foremost a place. The Greek word is theatron, meaning a place for looking. Theater in this sense is usually encapsulated in buildings such as this one. Theater is also an event. For an act of theater to take place, we only need a basic formula. As the theater critic Eric Bentley once said, a enacts b while c watches. This means theater can happen anywhere, in a thousand seat auditorium or on the street. A doesn't even need to be human. A can also be a puppet. This act of watching different kinds of enactment forms the basis of theater aesthetics, or what is sometimes called the theatrical contract. Theater can also be an institution when it reaches a high level of complexity within a society. Many countries now have theaters which enjoy the status of being national or municipal institutions. As I said, this theater was built to be the court theater, and it was later superseded by a bigger building within the Royal Residence. And it became part of the Bavarian State Theaters when the monarchy was abolished in 1918. A key element of theater's institutional dimension is its function as a business. Throughout history, theater has been a commercial enterprise. Although much theater today is conducted on a non-profit basis, this is a relatively recent development. Theater is also a social practice, in the sense that going to the theater may be as important as what one actually sees there. Just look at these boxes. I have a better view of the boxes opposite me than I do of the stage. So perhaps, it is more important to be seen in the theater, than what one actually sees. [MUSIC] Now, if we look at these four different aspects, place, aesthetic event, institution, and social practice, then we get an idea how complex theater is. And we need to keep all these functions in mind when we ask how theater relates to globalization. This also means that we will be working with a broad definition of theater, which includes opera, dance, perhaps even circus, as well as more conventional plays. So for our course, we will call everything theater where an individual person or a group of people watch someone or some people act within a limited space, where they can be seen and where they know they're being watched. If theater takes place in the here and now, then how can it be global? Well, it depends on how you define globalization. We will look into this in the next section.
