Description
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 Franco and Eva 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.
About the Author
Miriam Felton-Dansky is an assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard College.
Reviews
Felton-Dansky makes a compelling case for the term 'viral performance' . . . providing a clear historical lineage from Artaud to today that rethinks the ways in which experimental theaters have engaged their audiences and what this suggests about how contemporary theaters interact with spectators."" - Sarah Bay-Cheng, coeditor of Mapping Intermediality in Performance
Book Information
ISBN 9780810137158
Author Miriam Felton-Dansky
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 360g
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.
About the Author
Miriam Felton-Dansky is an assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard College.
Reviews
Felton-Dansky makes a compelling case for the term 'viral performance' . . . providing a clear historical lineage from Artaud to today that rethinks the ways in which experimental theaters have engaged their audiences and what this suggests about how contemporary theaters interact with spectators."" - Sarah Bay-Cheng, coeditor of Mapping Intermediality in Performance
Book Information
ISBN 9780810137158
Author Miriam Felton-Dansky
Format Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 360g
