Gerald is a professor of applied theatre studies at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen. He studied theatre, English and French literature at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he also obtained his PhD with a thesis on theatre as memory. His research focuses on forms of contemporary theatre, dance, performance, aesthetics, theories of memory and the intermediality of theatre in relation to the visual arts. Gerald has published more than 100 articles on contemporary dance and theatre performance. His most recent book bore the title Theater- und Tanzperformance zur Einführung.

Body, Landscape and Memory: Transcultural Theatrical Commemoration as an Ethical Process

Gerald’s research project explores the connection of body, landscape and memory. It takes up recent developments in memory and trauma studies that view processes of commemoration as dynamic, transformative and transmedial phenomena. It shifts the body into the centre of investigation and attempts to locate it in a commemorative happening that, in the theatre, is also always an event, a connex of performers and audience. With reference to the (traumatised) body, memory is not a foundational moment of identity, but functions as a moment of disruption and as work on absence.