Friday, October 1st 2021, at 17.00 pm Tbilisi time, the project: “Tbilisi as an Urban Assemblage” (Funded by the Rustaveli Foundation) and Doctoral School of Anthropology invite to a talk „Listening to Italian opera in the theatre-caravanserai of tsarist Tiflis. A historical ethnography of opera-going at an imperial periphery” by Dr. Luka Nakhutsrishvili.
Working language: English
Format: Online Zoom, on the permanent link of research seminars or contact ketevan_gurchiani@iliauni.edu.ge
Abstract:
In mid-19th century Tiflis, then the rapidly transforming administrative and economic center of Russian Transcaucasia, the Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov commissioned the construction of a “proper” theater on Yerevan Square. Funded by a local Armenian merchant, this project formed a compromise between the cultural aim of the tsarist government to introduce European performing arts to an “uncivilized” region and the economic profit of a sponsor who was no disinterested art lover. The result was a multi-storeyed caravanserai, the core of which was occupied not by an internal skylit courtyard typical of caravanserai architecture, but a lavish mauresque auditorium à l’italienne (Beridze 1963; Dolidze 2005) meant to host performances of Russian and (nascent) Georgian prose theatre as well as Italian opera.
From its opening in 1851 to 1874, when the building was destroyed by fire, the theatre-caravanserai was a focal place for the profound transformation of local public culture, behaviour as well as of the urban layout itself. However, as much as the forging of a “European” theatre-going public was a crucial part of the tsarist “civilizing mission” in the Caucasus (Jersild/Melkadze 2002), the many ambiguities inherent to the hybrid building, its functions, performances and publics made the theatre-caravanserai a contested and entangled projection field for a variety of interests and modes of listening. Be it local Armenian parvenus furthering the rise of merchant capitalism, a nascent Georgian nationalist intelligentsia, or the motley urban chorus variably identified according to their garb or the noises they emitted, their respective ways of engaging with the theater culture permanently unsettled the hegemony of local state-sponsored Russian journalism in shaping the Tiflis public sphere and its discourse.
Nowhere did these tensions appear more obviously than in the relation of these various actors to Italian opera, for which Tiflis allegedly developed a genuine “craze”. In the face of the elusiveness of theatrical performance and public response as an object of study and given that the archives of the theatre-caravanserai were lost to the fire of 1874, in my talk I will draw on a range of surviving administrative, journalistic, ethnographic and literary material to get a more or less oblique grasp of the many functions, meanings and discrepancies inherent to the theatre-caravanserai and to the auditive experience of Italian opera in tsarist Tiflis in the 1850-60s. In doing this, my paper will specify in what sense Vorontsov’s theatre project and the introduction of Italian opera in 1851 constituted both a “gift of empire” (Grant 2009) and a “dilemma of enlightenment” (Jersild/Melkadze 2002) as well as complicate the historical ethnography of opera-going that has already been undertaken with regard to the Russian imperial centre (Buckler 2000) by means of disclosing perspectives and experiences from a colonial and theatrical periphery.
Luka Nakhutsrishvili teaches critical theory at Ilia State University Tbilisi. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature (Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen/Université Via Domitia Perpignan) and an MA in Philosophy (Bergische Universität Wuppertal/Charles University Prague/Université Toulouse-le Mirail). Between 2015 and 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin. In 2019-2020, the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation of Georgia awarded him with the Ivane Javakhishvili Fellowship for the Best Young Scientist in the Humanities. As a Visiting Lecturer, he taught at the Goethe University Frankfurt in the winter semester of 2020. Currently, Luka is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Anthropology at NYU, where, combining insights from cultural studies, anthropology, ethnography, history, literary studies and political philosophy, he is pursuing a transdisciplinary research on forms of subalternity within the context of different projects of modernization in Georgia from the times of tsarist rule to post-Soviet independence.