“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

SHAGI/STEPS 5(4)

Keywords: Clifford Geertz, “thick description”, theatre project “The Apartment”, social theatre, Leningrad School of Theatre Studies

Abstract: The author reflects on the potential and strategies of using anthropological optics (namely, the concept of “thick description” by Clifford Geertz) to analyze the independent theatre project “The Apartment”, which was founded in St. Petersburg in 2017 and continued to work into 2019. The project combines immersive and site-specific components. In addition to the artistic tasks, this long-term project is also a theatre laboratory which also has habilitation tasks: it includes neuro-diverse participants with special needs (Autism Spectrum Disorders and Down Syndrome). The article proposes to view the processes taking place in “The Apartment” as a system of rituals peculiar to the discourse of the group.
It is assumed that Geertz’s anthropological approach may also be applied while analyzing a classical performance. This makes it difficult to use the opposition of “performance” and “process”, the traditional approach adopted by the St. Petersburg Theatre School, to which the author of the article belongs.
The annex to the main text includes an attempt at a letter about “The Apartment”, which gives some insight into this case: names of participants, workflow dynamics of the group during a period of two years, the structure of the trainings, etc.

Acknowledgements. The article was prepared as part of work on the issue “Verbal communication production in the performance as an object being analyzed within the performance”. The research is supported by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation (Karamzine scholarships — 2019).

To cite this article: Dunaeva, A. O. (2019). Mysteries of the “Apartment” (On the question of methodology of theatrical study). Shagi/Steps, 5(4), 172–185. (In Russian). DOI: 10.22394/2412-9410-2019-5-4-172-185.