Edīte Tišheizere participated in the ASEEES convention

Edīte Tišheizere, a leading researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, participated in November in the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) 57th Convention in Washington, D.C., USA, where she delivered the presentation "Body Language as an Archive of Culture and History: Adolf Shapiro’s Performances on Totalitarian Systems".

The researcher analyzed corporeal expressiveness and the organization of space in director Šapiro’s 1980s trilogy: Bertolt Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1985), which revealed direct parallels between the Nazi and Stalinist regimes; the dramatization of Boris Vasilyev’s novel Tomorrow Was the War (1986), dedicated to Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union; and Gunārs Priede’s Snowy Mountains (1986), which addressed Maoism in China. At the center of all three productions was the destruction of intellectual and ethical values and the “zombification” of the younger generation. Equating the three totalitarian regimes in the mid-1980s was still a courageous act of civic resistance and a harbinger of the coming changes.

Participation in the convention was part of the project “Latvia’s Cultural Ecosystem as a Resource for National Resilience and Sustainability” / CERS (No. VPP-MM-LKRVA-2023/1-0001) with financial support from the State Culture Capital Foundation.