Music and Mirrored Hybridities.
Cultural Communities Converging in French, German, and Turkish Stage Productions (17th–20th Century)
Friday, 28.05.2021, 13:30–17:30, 19:00–20:30 GMT+3
Saturday, 29.05.2021, 10:00–12:30 GMT+3
IMPORTANT NOTICE – To attend this online lecture, prior registration is necessary.
You will receive a confirmation e-mail with the login link one day prior to the event. For technical reasons, the number of participants is limited. You will be informed about the organizational and technical procedure before the lecture starts.
Representations of Turks or Ottomans have been popular with European audiences for centuries, and for good reason. In early modern France, musico-theatrical patterns of portraying the foreign Other (later called ‘Turquerie’, ‘exoticism’ or ‘orientalism’) helped to classify the current condition of the bilateral relations with the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, hybridity has to be understood as a processual and dynamic practice playing with cultural mixtures and borrowings, albeit possibly (re-)producing inequalities, misunderstandings and clichés. There is no claim of cultural – or musical – authenticity in these works; rather, they appear as musical features emerging out of vague inspirations derived from Ottoman/Turkish music, creating a particular sound that could easily be decoded as ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Turkish’ by French listeners.
In this workshop, we want to address the convergence of cultural communities on stage, and the conditions and contexts of this convergence, using as a point of departure the example of the iconic ‘Turkish scene’ from Lully/Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). International scholars of various disciplines will explore its musical, theatrical, and choreographic reception, focusing on two principal axes: (I) 17th– and 18th-century adaptions in France and the German lands, and (II) 20th-century translations and (musical) revisions in Turkey and Germany. The workshop will bring together researchers including those whose cultures were considered as ‘Other’, along with researchers whose own cultures portrayed foreign cultures as ‘Other’, in order to facilitate critical engagement with these historical and cultural representations.
Keynote Speaker:
Thomas Betzwieser (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Organizers:
Judith I. Haug (Orient-Institut Istanbul, Turkey)
Hanna Walsdorf (HMT Leipzig, Germany)
Leipzig)
in collaboration with the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi.