Theatre and the Virtual

Genesis, Touch, Gesture
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-213767-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Buch, Englisch, 166 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 413 g

Reihe: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

Theatre and the Virtual lays out a set of conceptual instruments for the articulation and engendering of the forces of theatrical potentiality.

Creating a passage towards a reconstitution of the given, a theatre of the virtual opens bodies in motion to a region of an ongoing genesis of forces. The outcome: regimes of constraint are abandoned through a radical practice of ecological attunement. Violence is eschewed through an onto-ecology of touch. Closed systems are repotentialised to become co-constitutive of their environments. A logic of spectrality settles in—not so much entities as atmospheres, not so much a being as a style of being, not so much a body as multitudinous milieus of response. This is the task of a theatre of the virtual—to safeguard the possibility of the extra-epistemological and uphold one’s right to offer accounts of oneself from outside of being, all the while creating a fractured record of the wondrous mutations of a moving, gesturing body.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, philosophy, new materialisms, environmental humanities, gesture, and the ontology of response.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dimitrova, Zornitsa

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: Neuzeit
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theater: Technik, Bühnentechnik, Einrichtung
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Tanz Andere Darstellende Künste
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements



Introduction. The Virtual as a Theatrical Force



Chapter 1. Potentiality and the Virtual



The Depletion of Potentiality: Motion and Action

Motion and Growth in the Poetics and Natyasastra

Other Forms

Actual and Virtual

Potentiality as an Ontological Horizon



Chapter 2. Genesis and the Virtual



Strandbeests

Interfusing

Theatre as a Technical Object

Gestural Potentiality

The Transducer













Chapter 3. Violence and Touch



Land of Palms

The Technicity of Touch

Violent Conditions

Touch and Event

Repotentialising Matter

Engendering Practice: On Environmentality



Chapter 4. Organism and Gesture



Organism and the Field of Potentiality

Diaphanous Organismicity

Organism and Machine

Omnia

Response: Against Communication



Conclusion



Glossary

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Zornitsa Dimitrova is a theatre researcher focusing on the philosophy of technology, the ecological turn, vulnerability studies, and the aesthetics of the Anthropocene. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Münster. Research monographs include Literary Worlds and Deleuze: Expression as Mimesis and Event (2017) and the present book, Theatre and the Virtual: Genesis, Touch, Gesture (2022). Pieces on theatre have appeared in Deleuze Studies, The New Theatre Quarterly, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performance Philosophy, and Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies.