My research period in Innsbruck is now over and I arrived back in Berlin yesterday. It was an intense time with many exciting encounters in my search for the Tyrolean theatre-maker Anna Pritzi. Very little has survived about her, even though she is said to have written over 20 plays that were successfully performed on Tyrolean peasant stages for over 30 years. On the one hand, folk theatre is an underestimated form of theatre, and on the other, Anna Pritzi is a woman of the 19th century - two factors that make it difficult to enter the history books.
I am pleased that by searching for Anna Pritzi and telling her story in many different places and to many different people in Innsbruck and beyond, I have been able to contribute to making her a topic of conversation again almost two centuries after her work. And if it is true, as I suspect and am about to prove, that in addition to all the many spectators, the Austrian Emperor Franz I and Empress Karoline Auguste also visited her theatre, then she more than deserves it.
Now I am curious how my Berlin colleagues will react to Anna Pritzi and her plays about knights and saints. With them I would like to discuss: How and why did only women play in the stagings of her plays? And what does that do to the plays and their reception?
The picture I have put up for this blog entry is a wall from Büchsenhausen Castle. According to my research, this is about where the theatre of Anna Pritzi's "Mädchengesellschaft" must have taken place. How nice that this graffiti on the current gender debate can be found on this wall.
