On June 30th at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, starting at 8:00 PM, the renowned and award-winning playwright and theatrologist, Professor Alisa Zhulina, will hold a lecture titled “Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life”.
We invite you to the last, extremely important and rare in its interdisciplinary and specific field, lecture from the June series of the CRIC – Festival of Critical Culture, which is one of the important program units of Kontrapunkt.
Modern society is often presented as a world governed by numbers, market and economic laws. However, behind the abstract language of capital, stories, conflicts, desires, fears and human destinies have always been hidden. That is why theater and literature are not only a mirror of economic life, but also a place where its contradictions, its promises and its violence become visible.
In her lecture, Alisa Zhulina will present the research developed in the book “Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life”, opening up space for reflection on the relationship between aesthetics and political economy, between dramatic form and the historical transformations of capitalist society.
Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje
Date: June 30, 2026
Time: 8:00 PM
About the lecture
Emerging amidst the turbulent rise of market finance and broader socio-economic changes, modern drama brought a vital critical perspective to art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw and Gerhart Hauptmann examined the meaning of this newly created economic concept.
Conscious of their complicity in the system they seek to challenge, these playwrights pose economic questions as moral and political problems, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the confines of bourgeois theater. “Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life” reveals the predictable and disturbing visions of life in the new financial and social reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as in lesser-known and long-neglected works.
This wide-ranging study challenges us to reexamine modern drama and its legacy as a basis for the urgent economic and political questions that haunt our present moment. The lecture will offer an opportunity for a broader discussion about the role of art in understanding the contemporary world, about the capacity of drama to articulate social contradictions, and about the potential of critical culture to open new horizons of political imagination.
At a time when capitalism is presented as an inevitable fate, rather than a historically created system, “Theater of Capital” reminds us that every social order is also a discourse – and every discourse can and should be reexamined, reshaped, and imagined differently.
The lecture will be followed by a conversation with the author, introduced and led by Petar Milat.
Biography:
Alisa Zhulina is an artist-scholar, Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts Department of Drama, and affiliated faculty member in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies. She holds a B.A. in History and Literature and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Her research interests include the intersections between theatre studies and economic theory, political theatre, modern drama, European theatre history, Eastern European performance, and new media. Her writings have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and several edited volumes. Her current book project, Theatre of Capital, focuses on how theatre from the nineteenth century onward is invested in staging and challenging economic ideas. In addition to her scholarly work, Zhulina is a playwright and theatre director. She is the founder of Cacolet Collective, a performance group dedicated to exploring alternative economies through performance and public art. Her plays have been produced by Exquisite Corpse Company, at Dixon Place, New Perspectives Theatre, the Downtown Urban Arts Festival, Festival de Teatro Alternativo in Bogotà, Colombia, and elsewhere.
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The motto of CRIC remains rooted in the thinking of Alain Badiou:
“A community based on a political culture of critical action and confrontation, is a community of freedom, of mutuality, of courageous sailing towards new horizons of society with sails set by the winds of creative artistic confrontation and political imagination.”
Program editor and organizer of CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture:
Iskra Geshoska
Program consultants and organizers:
Tijana Ana Spasovska and Artan Sadiku
Collaborative team:
Petar Milat, Zorica Zafirovska, Aleksandra Bubevska, Koma design studio.
For more information follow us on:
https://www.facebook.com/KRIKfestival/
https://www.instagram.com/critical.culture/
https://youtube.com/@ngokontrapunkt3837?si=iUuGWynjhBAVMZJ5
Partnerships and support:
CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture is supported within the framework of the project “Culture for Development” of the Swiss Government, which is implemented by the Hartefact Foundation. The content/opinions expressed can never be interpreted as the views of the Swiss Government and the Hartefact Foundation.
CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture is supported by ProPeace North Macedonia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Skopje, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Future Bright Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut Skopje and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia.
Funded by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the European Executive Agency for Education and Culture (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Споделено на: June 19, 2026 во 2:09 pm