| FEL-288906-23 | Research Programs: Fellowships | Dassia N. Posner | The Kamerny Theatre: An Artistic History in Political Times (1914-1950) | 1/1/2024 - 12/31/2024 | $60,000.00 | Dassia | N. | Posner | | | | Northwestern University | Evanston | IL | 60208-0001 | USA | 2022 | Theater History and Criticism | Fellowships | Research Programs | 60000 | 0 | 60000 | 0 | Research and writing leading to a book on the history of Moscow's Kamerny Theatre, an avant-garde theater founded by Ukrainian-Jewish director Alexander Tairov and dissolved during Stalin’s purges (1914-1950).
With the support of this National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, I will complete the first monograph in English on the Moscow Kamerny Theatre (1914-1950), founded by Ukrainian-Jewish director Alexander Tairov and lead actress Alisa Koonen. Drawing from the massive but little-known Kamerny archives, my book will illuminate and analyze this theatre’s complex intersections of experimentation, international artistic dialogue, and Stalin-era persecution over its thirty-five-year existence. My aim is to restore the full significance of the Kamerny and its artists to the historical record by revealing the richness of their brilliantly innovative work and the broad impact of their creative revolutions in the context of the cultures they bridged, the tumultuous political times in which they lived and worked, and the disinformation campaign that forced the theatre’s liquidation and erasure. |
| FT-61652-14 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Dassia N. Posner | Soviet Productions of American Plays at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre in the 1920s and 1930s | 8/1/2014 - 9/30/2014 | $6,000.00 | Dassia | N. | Posner | | | | Northwestern University | Evanston | IL | 60208-0001 | USA | 2014 | Theater History and Criticism | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 6000 | 0 | 6000 | 0 |
This grant will allow me to launch research on a book-length study of the Moscow Kamerny Theatre. My research will begin with a journal article that analyzes director Alexander Tairov's productions at the Kamerny of American Expressionist plays by Eugene O'Neill and Sophie Treadwell in the 1920s and 30s. I will investigate how and why Tairov emphasized these plays' anti-capitalist themes in an attempt to satisfy the ideological demands of the Soviet state, while also fostering a vital cross-cultural dialogue about societal oppression as it relates more broadly to class, race, gender, and artistic agency. My aim is to reverse historical erasures of the Kamerny's significance and to restore the innovations of its artists to the historical record by investigating their prolonged collaboration in the context of the plays they staged, the cultures they bridged, and the tumultuous period in which they lived and worked. |