Conversation with Ulla Kallenbach

Routes of Exchange: Digital Mapping of Artists' Movements and Cultural Transfer at the Royal Danish Theatre

Friday 7 March 2025, 10.30am - 12pm GMT

Online and in person: Colin Matthews Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building

If you prefer to join us online, please sign up for the Zoom link and our mailing list by contacting us at scandinavianstudies@torch.ox.ac.uk 

The TORCH Scandinavian Studies Network is pleased to present the third lecture in its Hilary Term Lecture Series. 

This talk takes its point of departure in the ongoing research project ‘Artistic Exchanges: The Royal Danish Theatre and Europe’, which develops digital mapping tools to investigate transnational artistic exchange and studies performative representations of Europe through the unique archive of the Royal Danish Theatre. 

The long nineteenth century was a period of intense cultural exchange where artists were privileged travellers and where the theatre acted as a “window to the world”; an essential agent for offering the public experiences of foreign cultures and for negotiating cultural identities in a period where Denmark’s geographical boundaries were changing. While located in the periphery of Europe, the theatre was, from its foundation in 1748, an artistic hub attracting international artists from e.g. France, Germany and Italy. Likewise, Danish performing artists had an international outlook and travelled Europe extensively.

Digital mappings reveal the routes and patterns of the artists’ itineraries; travelogues and letters offer meticulous details of the lived experience of travelling; and visual archival sources show the theatrical reimaginings of the abroad. This offers new insight into a transnational history which has thus far largely been described as a national institutional history.

This talk will explore a selection of case studies that illustrate how the Royal Danish Theatre responded to a changing European landscape at a time when social, economic and technological transformations gradually were shrinking the globe, heralding the budding globalisation of our age. It will trace the trajectory from the early French foundations of Danish theatre through the shift toward German aesthetics, the fascination with Italian culture in the nineteenth century, and finally the global voyages of the early twentieth century.

Ulla Kallenbach, PhD, is Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is the President of Nordic Theatre Scholars, and steering committee member of the Centre for Historical Performance Practice (CHiPP), Aarhus University, Denmark, where she heads the research project Artistic Exchanges: The Royal Danish Theatre and Europe (Independent Research Fund Denmark). Her research has focused on the cultural history of imagination, dramaturgy and Nordic theatre history. Her monograph, The Theatre of Imagining – A Cultural History of Imagination in the Mind and on the Stage (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), was the first comprehensive study of the cultural history of imagination in the context of theatre and drama. Since 2020, she has been piloting the development of digital tools for analysing theatre and drama (‘Levels of presence in the drama text: between close and distant reading’, Orbis Litterarum. Vol. 78, issue 5, 2023, w. Anna Lawaetz).