#The theater and its double pdf series#

But now, whether we see it, whether we don't, what we may think of as a natural ‘function’ is not that at all, or so we're told in the Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari: wherever we do it, whatever it is, even the eating or shitting is everywhere machines, ‘real ones, not figurative ones’ (and nothing like ‘the id’, that egregious mistake of Freud), machines driving machines, however coupled, however connected, or spilling out of the sac, one producing a flow, menstrual, sperm, urine, that the other interrupts, ‘an organ-machine … plugged into an energy-source-machine’. Back in the theatre of ancient Rome, where unsuspecting actors were actually crucified, and sexual intercourse performed without faking it – in festive diversions from the comedies of Terence – it may have been right out there in the open, even elimination, the body or its waste. But shitting and fucking, well, except in way-out kinds of performance, or scandalous body art, it's more likely to be represented, and where shitting is concerned, even more so than fucking, it's going to be in the wings, and even muted there, that is, the farting and plopping. It shits and fucks.’ Sounds like the body, which in a conventional theatre may have no trouble breathing or eating, or in various ways heating up, under the weight of a period costume, or angrily, passionately, or more or less imperceptibly, as in a staged embrace. Let's begin with the basics: ‘It breathes, it heats, it eats.

After a brief evocation of Artaud’s writings in “theatre and cruelty” and on raw cinema, the essay builds on a historical understanding of Western theatre’s evolving and hardly settled relationship to cinematography and moving-image technologies, as well as the “choreographic unconscious,” as examined in contemporary dance and technology, before delving into an analysis of Mitchell’s dramaturgy of real-time film construction and her use of the “camera-actor.” A particular emphasis is placed on the question whether the live mediatization of realist drama, under Mitchell’s direction, deliberately weakens the theatricality of the physical body and spoken language while proffering an extenuated, if uncritical/unpolitical modulation of digital prosthetics in a superbly crafted, seamless intermedial performance.

#The theater and its double pdf series#

It provides a series of theoretical and critical angles from which to discuss contemporary intermedia performance and audiovisual scenography. This essay offers a close exploration of the live filming and sound production in the schaubühne berlin staging of strindberg’s Fräulein Julie (directed by Katie Mitchell, shown on tour at the barbican, london, in 2012).