Dr. Dirk Gindt, PhD

Dirk Gindt holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Stockholm University (2007). His research attends to post-war and contemporary queer theatre and performance from an international perspective. His project 'Lest We Forget', supported by a four-year SSHRC Insight Grant, critically analyzes the history of queer theatre and performance as it intersects with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada. Dr. Gindt's second research project, 'Tennessee Williams in Europe', unpacks the sexual anxieties and racial fantasies that the American playwright's works provoked in post-war Sweden and France. Dr. Gindt has also studied the myriad intersections between fashion and performance. He has published twelve refereed articles, including essays in Journal of Canadian Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, Theatre Survey and Nordic Theatre Studies, in addition to several book chapters. He is co-editor of the volume Fashion: An Interdisciplinary Reflection (Stockholm 2009) and as former editor-in-chief of lambda nordica: Journal for LGBT-Studies he edited special issues on masculinities and queer fashion. He currently serves as associate editor and book review editor of alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage.

Dr. Gindt has taught numerous courses in theatre history, performativity and performance theory, theatre activism, cultural representations, fashion theory, intercultural theatre as well as gender and queer studies, in addition to supervising student theses at all academic levels.
Please see attached CV for detailed information.

LEST WE FORGET

Lest We Forget: A Critical History of HIV/AIDS Theatre and Performance in Canada

Since the introduction of new anti-retroviral treatments in the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS has gradually disappeared from political and cultural agendas in Canada and other western countries. Attempting to rectify this cultural amnesia, the research project Lest We Forget will be the first study to analyze the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on queer theatre and performance in a Canadian context from the early 1980s to the present. Its core objective is to critically analyze the political complexity and aesthetic variety of HIV/AIDS theatre and performance, which cannot be characterized by a single, homogenous activist agenda or an overarching aesthetic cohesion. The number of plays and performances conceived and produced in Canada over the last thirty years is remarkable and this research project will serve as a necessary reaffirmation of the productive power of queer theatre and performance, as both a social process and creative practice, to respond to a public health crisis and act as modes of resistance against cultural amnesia, stigmatization and homophobia. Seven distinct modules identify and trace the defining strategies chosen by theatre artists and theatre activists to address the epidemic: pedagogical realisms; embodied absences; centre vs. periphery; feminist interventions; blood/disease/religion/metaphor; new silences; and cultural performances. Collectively, these seven modules do justice to the linguistic, regional and aesthetic diversity of the material, balance historical investigations with contemporary concerns and underscore the intellectual timeliness and social relevance of the project.

The research project will contribute to the vibrant study and enhance our knowledge of queer theatre and performance in Canada. It will appeal not only to theatre and performance scholars in Canada and beyond, but also to researchers, students and activists interested and invested in the cultural responses and reactions to HIV/AIDS in a large range of disciplines, including gender and sexuality studies, history, cultural studies, literature, visual arts and Canadian studies. Granting a voice and presence to theatre artists that have engaged with the challenges posed, the research will also prove relevant for practitioners. It firmly articulates the political necessity and social value of theatre and performance, namely its contributions to a democratic society, its ability to bring burning questions about politics and health to the forefront and its unique position to playfully and critically explore sexual identities.

‘PARIS SEX-APPEAL AMÉRICAIN'

‘Paris Sex-Appeal Américain': Cultural Translations of Tennessee Williams in Post-War France 

‘Paris Sex-Appeal Américain’ is a research project whose objective is to study the processes of cultural translation, production and reception of American playwright Tennessee Williams’s works on Parisian stages between 1945 and 1965.The immediate post-WWII period marks a pivotal moment in the internationalization of American theatre, when Williams’s plays became some of its most critically acclaimed and financially lucrative exports. This project explores the patterns of migration and the many cultural agents involved in the cultural translation of Williams’s plays in Paris in order to produce a complex and nuanced understanding of the transnational impact of one of the twentieth century’s most influential playwrights. Williams’s plays were translated and adapted by authors like Jean Cocteau and Françoise Sagan, staged by inter/national directors including Raymond Rouleau and Peter Brook, with sets and costumes created by Linda de Nobili and Coco Chanel, and starring actors such as Arletty (Léonie Bathiat) and Jeanne Moreau. How did the loose translations and creative adaptations of Williams’s plays affect the French interpretation and reception of his works? How were his plays staged in an era characterized by a creative tension between realism and anti-realistic modes of representation? Why did the initially hostile critical reception eventually turn into a more welcoming attitude? This research will enhance current knowledge and our understanding of the impact of post-war American drama and Broadway culture in Europe and contribute valuable new insights by focusing on heretofore-neglected aspects in Williams scholarship.

The primary theoretical principle guiding my analysis is the concept of cultural translation, which refers to the processes of interpretation that happen when audiences in one social, aesthetic and historical environment negotiate the meaning of a particular text that originated in another context. This concept will offer the methodological tool necessary to analyse four historical productions, all of which happened between 1945 and 1965, in the two decades following WWII, but just prior to the student riots in Paris and before the effects of the sexual revolution had made their full impact. The project will mine and analyze original, heretofore-unavailable sources (including reviews, articles in newspapers and magazines, photographs, sketches, audio recordings, memoirs and features in lifestyle magazines) and make them available to an English-speaking audience.

Books

Mode - en introduktion: En tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse / Fashion - an introduction: an interdisciplinary reflection. Co-edited with Louise Wallenberg. Stockholm: Raster, 2009 (ISBN 978-91-87215-902).

Playing Activists and Dancing Anarchists: Men and Masculinities in Cultural Performances in Contemporary Sweden. Stockholm: Theatron, diss., 2007 (ISBN 978-91-86434-33-5). Republished: Saarbrücken: VDM, 2008 (ISBN 978-38-36464-80-2).

Edited journal volumes

lambda nordica: Tidskrift för homo/lesbisk/bi/transforskning / lambda nordica: Journal for GLBT-Studies, special issue 'Fashion', vol. 14, no. 3-4 (2009).

lambda nordica: Tidskrift för homo/lesbisk/bi/transforskning / lambda nordica: Journal for GLBT-Studies, special issue 'Queera maskuliniteter' / 'Queer masculinities', vol. 13, no. 4 (2008).

Refereed journal articles

‘Medico-Artistic Complicities on Swedish Stages: The Boys in the Band and the Regulation of Gay Male Representation in the Welfare State’, Journal of Homosexuality (accepted and forthcoming, 2015).

‘Queer Embodied Absence: HIV/AIDS and the Creation of Memory in Gordon Armstrong’s Blue Dragons and Daniel MacIvor’s The Soldier Dreams’, Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes vol. 48, no. 2 (2014): 122-145.

'Sky Gilbert, Daniel MacIvor, and the Man in the Vancouver Hotel Room: Queer Gossip, Community Narrative, and Theatre History', Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada vol. 34, no. 2 (2013): 187-215.

'Transatlantic Translations and Transactions: Lars Schmidt and the Implementation of Post-War American Theatre in Europe', Theatre Journal vol. 65, no. 1 (2013): 19-37.

'Creativity, Corporeality and Collaboration: Staging Fashion with Giorgio Armani and Robert Wilson', with John Potvin, Studies in Theatre and Performance, vol. 33, no. 1 (2013): 3-28.

'When Broadway Came to Sweden: The European Premiere of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', Theatre Survey vol. 53, no. 1 (2012): 59-83.

'The Diva and the Demon: Ingmar Bergman Directs The Rose Tattoo', New Theatre Quarterly vol. 28, no. 1 (2012): 56-66.

'Performative Processes: Björk's Creative Collaborations with the World of Fashion', Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture vol. 15, no. 4 (2011): 425-450 (republished in translation in Fashion Theory Russia no. 24 (2012)).

'Coming Out of the Cabinet: Fashioning the Closet with Sweden's Most Famous Diplomat', Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty vol. 1, no. 2 (2010): 223-244 (republished in Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty: Volume One, eds. Efrat Tseëlon, Ana Marta González and Susan Kaiser. Bristol, UK & Chicago: Intellect, 2012, pp. 233-54).

'Torn between the "Swedish Sin" and "homosexual freemasonry": Tennessee Williams, sexual morals and the closet in 1950's Sweden', The Tennessee Williams Annual Review no. 11 (2010): 19-39.

'Anxious Nation and White Fashion: Suddenly Last Summer in the Swedish folkhem', Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 21 (2009): 98-112.

'Heroes and Villains: Contesting Hegemonic Masculinity in a Peace Demonstration', Nordic Theatre Studies vol. 19 (2007): 56-67.

Chapters in books

"Your asshole is hanging outside of your body?": Excess, AIDS, and shame in the theatre of Sky Gilbert', in The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1700-2010, ed. Julia Skelly. Burlington & Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 249-276.

'Williams and Bergman, Lust and Death: Culturally Translating A Streetcar Named Desire in Post-War Sweden', in Tennessee Williams and Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges, ed. John S. Bak. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi Press, 2014, pp. 135-165.

'Tennessee Williams and the Swedish Academy: Why he never won the Nobel Prize', in Tenn at One Hundred, ed. David Kaplan. East Brunswick, NJ: Hansen, 2011, pp. 152-167, 302-304.

'"En gorillaliknande högpotent hanne som stank av kön": Anders Ek och gestaltningen av sexualitet i Spårvagn till Lustgården' / '"A gorillalike highly potent he-male reeking of sex": Anders Ek and the portrayal of sexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire', in Mode - en introduktion: En tvärvetenskaplig betraktelse / Fashion - an introduction: an interdisciplinary reflection, eds. Dirk Gindt & Louise Wallenberg. Stockholm: Raster, 2009, pp. 273-298, 358-361, 378-379.

Other scientific articles

Introductions

Review articles

Papers presented, invited lectures and panels chaired