Viral performance : contagious theaters from modernism to the digital age / Miriam Felton-Dansky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Felton-Dansky, Miriam, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Experimental theater--20th century.

Experimental theater.

Experimental theater--21st century.

Theater and society.

Theater and social media.

Physical Description:

ix, 246 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Digital culture has occasioned a seismic shift in the discourse around contagion, transmission, and viral circulation. Yet theater, in the cultural imagination, has always been contagious. Viral Performance proposes the concept of the viral as an essential means of understanding socially engaged and transmedial performance practices since the mid-twentieth century. Its chapters rethink the Living Theatre's Artaudian revolution through the lens of affect theory, bring fresh attention to General Idea's media-savvy performances of the 1970s, explore the digital-age provocations of Eva and Franco Mattes and Critical Art Ensemble, and survey the dramaturgies and political stakes of global theatrical networks. Viral performance practices testify to the age-old-and ever renewed-instinct that when people gather, something spreads. Performance, an art form requiring and relying on live contact, renders such spreading visible, raises its stakes, and encodes it in theatrical form. The artists explored here rarely disseminate their ideas or gestures as directly as a viral marketer or a political movement would; rather, they undermine simplified forms of contagion while holding dialogue with the philosophical and popular discourses, old and new, that have surrounded viral culture. Viral Performance argues that the concept of the viral is historically deeper than immediate associations with the contemporary digital landscape might suggest, and far more intimately linked to live performance. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: A history of contagion

Performing plague : the Living Theatre and Antonin Artaud

Towards an audience vocabulary : Marc Estrin, Augusto Boal, and General Idea

Germ theater : Critical Art Ensemble, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Christoph Schlingensief

"Everything is everywhere": viral performance networks

Conclusion: Virus in the theater.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780810137165

081013716X

9780810137158

0810137151

0810137178

9780810137172

OCLC:

1007070347