Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Germany is an immigrant country; twenty-three per cent of the population has a migration background. In addition to the immigration history, with the recent refugee influx, managing diversity has become one of the primary objectives of social and economic policies of national, state, and local governments and (cultural) integration is seen as a cross-policy task that needs to be also tackled by educational and cultural policies. After a prolonged political process, today culture is recognised as a vital pillar that contributes to social cohesion. Recently, many cultural policies address the issue of underrepresentation of immigrants in the cultural institutions and advocate for the intercultural opening of them. The exclusion is severe, especially in the theatre landscape. Thus, many public funding institutions introduce new funding schemes to promote the inclusion of immigrants and refugees into the nexus of theatre as artists, cultural professionals, and audiences. The focal point of the research is to investigate the ways that cultural policies, public funding actors and theatres react to the demographic changes in Germany. It explores what intercultural orientation means for the theatres and how this intercultural reorganisation can contribute to a fairer representation of the population in the theatres so that they can be relevant in a migrant society. In this respect, the study examines the publicly funded intercultural theatre programmes and some subsided theatre ensembles working with/for immigrants and refugees. The research proposes necessary policy measures for the creation of strategies to foster intercultural development in the theatre landscape.