Research Council Back-up mandate Mathias Meert: Gestural Constellations - Genre, Narrativity and Performance of Gestures in Post-1945 and Contemporary German-language Drama and Theatre

This project investigates textual and theatrical constellations of
gestures in post-1945 and contemporary German-language drama
and theatre. It creates a research methodology that focuses
specifically on the critical, performative and narrative aspects of
gestural texts and genres in an intermedial context. Understood as
corporeal expression of movement and posture, theatrical act and
symbolic mode of (mute) communication, gestures draw attention to
their complex relationship with language, narration, subjective
agency and the inherent tension between different modes of
performance. This project analyzes the development and critical
adaptations of gestural poetics since the heyday of German-speaking
modernism. As such, it addresses uncharted aspects of gestural
constellations along three main lines of inquiry: (1) Firstly, the project
will analyze critical re-appropriations and adaptations of mute,
gestural and pantomimic traditions in experimental and neo-avantgarde
plays with regards to their performative text-theatricality. (2)
Secondly,
it traces the development of post-brechtian, gestic theatre
through
a narratological reinterpretation of the ‘Gestus’
and
the
theatrical
politicization of gestures. (3) Thirdly, the project
investigates
gesturality in performances of nonverbal mime, physical
comedy
and gestural ‘Regietheater’
that
experiment with different
forms
of embodiment, gestic clichés, masks and kinetic levels of
gestural
narrativity.