talk

Asja Lācis and Children’s Theater
Andris Brinkmanis

20 April 2019, SALT Beyoğlu Walk-in Cinema 14:00

On the 20th of April at 2 pm, SALT Walk-in Cinema will host a presentation by researcher and curator Andris Brinkmanis who will talk on the practice of Latvian theater director, actress, pedagogue, and experimenter Anna “Asja” Lācis (1891–1979). She was a crucial “link” between Latvian, German and Soviet avant-garde traditions in the first half of the 20th century. She was a pioneer of aesthetic education and extensively experimented within the framework of children’s theater.

Andris Brinkmanis will unpack the key concepts on Walter Benjamin’s text, Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater together with Lācis’s emancipatory pedagogical methods and strategies that influenced numerous western movements of alternative and anti-authoritarian education. He will also attempt to provide a historical, but also a theoretical framework to Lācis practice from a contemporary perspective. For the occasion of the exhibition Signals from Another World: Asja Lācis and Children’s Theater currently on display at AVTO, Brinkmanis will set out to contextualize her legacy with respect to the current cultural, social, and political situation.