Ana Gospić Županović and Una Bauer will discuss and present Bauer’s book Emotions and the Performing Arts: Fear, Grief, Anger (Durieux, 2025), dedicated to a reflective engagement with emotions in the context of contemporary performing arts.
“Una Bauer’s Emotions and the Performing Arts — Fear, Grief, Anger takes as its point of departure the critical position that both purely cognitive (traditionally dominant) and purely emotional, sensualist approaches to art are methodologically and epistemologically inadequate for a systematic engagement with the phenomena of postdramatic theatre. As postdramatic theatre has become a dominant aesthetic practice on the European continent, it has generated considerable disagreement within traditional theatre studies, whose established analytical frameworks have struggled to address this new phenomenon. In order to respond to these challenges and overcome the theoretical inadequacies of certain strands of traditional theatre studies, the author turns to the complex interdisciplinary field of affect studies.”
— from a review by Goran Pavlić, PhD, Associate Professor
Ana Gospić Županović is an Associate Professor at the University of Zadar, where she teaches courses in Performing Arts, Contemporary Croatian Drama, and Comedy and Comic Types. She is the author of the scholarly monograph Around Performance: Analytical Readings of Contemporary Croatian Drama and Theatre (2023), the editor of a collection of essays, and the author of numerous articles, reviews, and critical pieces on theatre and contemporary performance published on various online platforms, including kulturpunkt.hr, kazalište.hr, plesnascena.hr, among others. She is an active member of the Zadar Dance Ensemble’s adult dance studio and also pursues photography in her spare time.
Una Bauer is an Associate Professor at the Department of Dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb. Her interests focus on the tensions between art and life, particularly the ways in which they manifest themselves through experimental performance forms that simultaneously interrogate structures of power, relationships, and sensibility. She has published a collection of essays on theatre and everything else (including bicycles and teapot cosies), Come Closer: On Theatre and Other Joys (2015); a series of in-depth interviews with members of the performance collective BADco., entitled BADco.: Practicing the Impossible (2021); and the interdisciplinary scholarly monograph Emotions and the Performing Arts: Fear, Grief, and Anger (2025). She teaches courses including Theatre and Politics; Performance, the Internet and Social Media; Dance and Theory 1 and 2; Introduction to Literary Theory 2; Tragedy and Popular Culture; and Emotions and Affects in the Performing Arts. She leads the four-year artistic research project on inclusion, epistemologies of resistance, and justice in the performing arts, What is Going on? (WIGO) (2025–2029), at the Academy of Dramatic Art. In her parallel professional life, she is also a group therapist, trained at the Institute of Group Analysis in Zagreb. She has been conducting therapy groups since 2020 and is a member of the Croatian Chamber of Psychotherapists.
