Izdots Leksikons par avangarda teātri

A Lexicon of the Central-Eastern European Interwar Theatre Avant-garde has been published. The sections on Latvia were written by Edīte Tišheizere, leading researcher at UL ILFA. Her contributions include: “The Latvian Theatre Avant-garde: From the Celebration of the 1st of May to The Song of Rebirth,” “Migrations to and from Latvia,” “Latvian Magazine: Laikmets,” “Anna Lācis: A Latvian Transit from Russia to Western Europe,” and “Form in Latvian Avant-garde Theatre.”

Edīte Tišheizere on the publication:

“Exactly ten years ago, encouraged by our Polish colleagues, researchers from the former socialist countries began a joint project called ‘Reclaimed Avant-garde’. Our goal was to remind both ourselves and our Western colleagues how significant a contribution our artists made to avant-garde culture — artists whose names are little known or completely forgotten. It turned into a fascinating scholarly journey, revealing the early 20th-century art world as a vast, boiling melting pot — so many fleeting impulses and ideas in the air, so many shared features and unique sparks. Our seemingly ‘peripheral’ artists were in fact fully equal participants in generating and developing those ideas.

We have sought to demonstrate this in a series of publications. The first — an Anthology of Central and Eastern European Avant-garde Theatre (2017) — unfortunately appeared only in Polish, but the next step, Reclaimed Avant-garde: Spaces and Stages of Avant-garde Theatre in Central-Eastern Europe (2018), was published in English and widely presented internationally. The newly released Lexicon is our collective attempt not only to understand what avant-garde culture meant in each of the countries that gained independence in 1918, but also to trace the migration of ideas, map international artistic networks, and highlight key figures and theories.

Editors Dariusz Kosiński (Poland) and Zoltán Imre (Hungary) have done invaluable work, bringing together and inspiring more than ten researchers for ever deeper exploration. My greatest satisfaction, of course, is seeing on the cover of the Lexicon the fantastic sketch by Latvian artist Jānis Munčs for the Dailes Theatre production Ligatūra.”

More information: https://english.instytut-teatralny.pl/activities/publications/lexicon-of-the-central-eastern-european-interwar-theatre-avant-garde/