Theatre And Performance In Digital Culture (from Simulation To Embeddedness)

Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture examines the recent history of advanced technologies, including new media, virtual environments, weapons systems and medical innovation, and considers how theatre, performance and culture at large have evolved within those systems.

The book examines the two Iraq wars, 9/11 and the War on Terror through the lens of performance studies, and, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger, alongside the dramas of Beckett, Genet and Shakespeare, and the theatre of the Kantor, Foreman, Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the Wooster Group, the book positions theatre and performance in technoculture and articulates the processes of aesthetics, metaphysics and politics.

This wide-ranging study reflects on how the theatre and performance have been challenged and extended within these new cultural phenomena.

Introduction: ''A Willing Suspension of Disbelief for the Moment'' Part 1: Simulation (Before) 1. The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology 2. Televisual Performance: Openness to the Mystery 3. Posthuman and Postorganic Performance: The (Dis)Appearance of Theatre in Virtual Spaces 4. Perspectiva Artificialis: The Duplicitous Geographies of Stage Illusion, or, The not so Splendid Isolation of the Actor on the Early Modern Perspective Stage and in the Historical Avant-Garde 5. The Ruins of Illusion: Theatre in the Rise of the Virtual and the Fall of Illusion 6. The Aesthetics of Disappearance and the Politics of Visibility Part 2: Embeddedness (After) 7. Stealing From God: The Crisis of Creation in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Genesi and Eduardo Kac’s Genesis 8. From Simulation to Embeddedness: Aestheticizing Politics and the Performance of Bare Life in the Bio-Politics of Digital Culture 9. The Theatre and Its Negative: Event, Truth, Void