Research project Turning Points and Continuity: The Changing Roles of Performance in Society 1880-1925

Using extensive archival work and historiographical and socio-economic analyses, the researchers will investigate the performance practices in Sweden that have become marginalized in the historical narratives, for example operetta, variety dancing, and comedies written by women playwrights.

This approach looks appreciatively at the many aesthetic layers that worked in tandem with the emergence of the early avant-garde. The seven research topics address the agency of individual artists in relation to structural conditions of performance. Studies will focus how artists navigated in the changing theatre system, and how their cultural capital was used in furthering their careers, for example in negotiations about careers and contracts, and in relation to shifts in the labour market. The projects will interpret unused source material; such as private correspondence, contracts, audio visual material, scripts, drawings and fashion magazines. The research thus aims to put an emphasis on the historiography of a period. With the inclusion of all the completed contributions, it will be possible to re-conceptualize the picture of a performance culture and its functions in the Swedish public sphere. Consequently, from behind the image of innovations and aesthetic turning points there appears a long tradition of popular performance styles existing side-by-side with the avant-garde.