 | Theatre and the Virtual: Genesis, Touch, Gesture Subjects: Arts; Humanities; Art & Visual Culture; Theatre & Performance Studies; Performance Theory - Practice and Practitioners; Philosophy; Cultural Studies; Media & Film Studies; History of Art; Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics; Visual Culture; Dance; History of Performance; Practice & Practitioners; Theatre History; 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. 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. |
