Graduate Students' December Abroad

Graduate students travel to Kraków and Berlin in course taught by Prof. Michal Kobialka
TH 8102 Graduate Students Stand Outside a Restaurant During Their Trip Abroad
Photo provided by Vaishnavi Kollimarla

 

"One of my favorite parts of the trip was the trip to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The architecture of the building created 'voids' meant to convey the absence of Jewish life from centuries of displacement and genocide, which I found to be very powerful. I hadn't had a museum experience like that before."

-Briana Beeman-Prather, PhD Candidate

 

In December of 2023, a group of Graduate students traveled overseas with Professor Michal Kobialka to Berlin, Germany and Kraków, Poland. During their time abroad, the students visited museums, monuments and was subjected to different cultures as they explored the two locations.

Michal Kobialka, a professor for the University of Minnesota Theatre Arts & Dance department, shares this experience with the students in the course titled Theatre/Performance Historiography (TH 8102). In this course, Graduate students learn about the public's memory and how it has affected German and Polish societies, later coined as a 'memory boom' or 'memory crisis' by various scholars. These students focused on three key points for their research:

  1. How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators (in Berlin: Deutsches
    Historisches Museum, Jewish Museum, the Humboldt Forum; in Kraków: Cricoteka)
    staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? What is “difficult” is staging the past?
  2. What is the role of objects (material and discursive) in representing difficult pasts?
  3. What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast among these constructions of history
    and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism,
    and communism offer an expanded understanding of difficult pasts in these two contexts?

Graduate students were joined by other students from Freie Universität (Belin, Germany) and Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland) to conduct this research.

Juliusz Słowacki Theatre
Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków, Poland

The students were able to see a musical titled 1989 in the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre during their time in Kraków, Poland.

"It was a rap musical (in Polish with English supertitles) that took inspiration from Hamilton and was about the Polish Solidarity movement." -Briana Beeman-Prather, PhD Candidate

 

 

Photo provided by Briana Beeman-Prather

The Jewish Museum
The Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany

An impactful experience, students had the opportunity to visit The Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany that represented the absence of Jewish life during the Holocaust.

 

 

 

Photo provided by Briana Beeman-Prather

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