From populism to pop-archeology

There has been a proliferation of studies on popular culture (or vacillating terms such as mass culture, culture for the masses, culture industry, media culture) that interpret/investigate the popular as cultural construction – something ‘staged’ rather than ‘natural’ or ‘given’. According to Nestor Garcia Canclini, three currents play the major role in this ‘theatricalization’ of the popular: folklore (as invented traditions), the culture industry, and political populism. Performance can play an important part in all three spheres; however, the main question is how it deals with the popular – by reconstructing and multiplying its images, narratives and identities, by appropriating or by challenging and deconstructing them. If we understand various forms of popular culture as “imaginary stagings of the social,” theatre which forms a tense, interrogative relationship with the popular can become the platform for investigation of the means by which our perception of reality is constructed and new models of identification are produced. Furthermore, there are quite a number of examples in contemporary Lithuanian theatre where combining and contrasting the elements of popular culture / dramatic discourse / personal narratives produce a multiple network of representations that accurately reveal the hidden power struggles of contemporary society as well as various mechanisms of manipulation. On the other hand, contemporary theatre can very easily become part of the popular culture by choosing to mirror its language and to comply with the rules of popularity. In this paper, the author examines the ways in which the popular culture has been represented (re-contextualization, ironic interpretation, critical deconstruction, or mimetic mirroring) on the stage of post-Soviet Lithuanian theatre, at the same time addressing the larger issues about the political and social implications of these particular stagings of the popular

Aesthetics · Art · Folklore · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Popularity · Populism · Sociology · The Imaginary · Vernacular culture · European Cultural and National Identity · Law · Psychology · Theatre and Performance Studies

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