Dramatic Arts

Using the deleuzo-guattarian notion of the ‘refrain’ this paper suggests that the emergence of the ‘field body’ and attendant performances are taking place in the current early phases of a post-disciplinary, post-identarian societies of control. This latter arrangement has emerged hand in hand with the proliferation of affective capital and supporting technological networks, and is characterized by the control of field bodies via the means of performative entrainment assured via modes of ‘infraveillance.’ The paper will conclude by engaging with the implications of this reontologized perspective for the Butlerian notion of performativity.

This paper traces the genealogies of discourses of dramatization and performativity in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition by mapping how Deleuze engages with Kant and Husserl to provide sources for what I describe as a post-Butlerian immanent performativity. This onto-genetic performativity provides an articulated set of mutually generative pathways between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ that do not restrict – in the way that existing articulations of performativity drawing on the dogmatic image of thought Deleuze so vigorously worked to supersede tend to do – the various as yet un-actualized potentials and performances the world’s minds and bodies have yet to affirm.

This chapter examines the potential that mindfulness meditation and related embodied awareness practices can bring to bear on pedagogy in the Humanities. We begin to articulate the possibilities of how the integration of mindfulness-oriented awareness practices in the Humanities classroom can further enhance the ability of students and professors to more profoundly experience and explore the intensities, subtleties, and multifarious realities emanating from of the types of crises that litter the terrain of the current late-capitalist, neo-imperial geopolitical climate. Furthermore, we will argue that the quality and efficacy of these involvements are heightened in the context of the kind of intersubjective pedagogical relationships marked by ever-increasing qualities of transversal sharing of power that mindfulness awareness practices often encourage.

This chapter explores Deleuze & Guattari's notion of 'becoming-imperceptible' as it relates to 'character' in playwriting, specifically with regard to the ways in which dramatic characters can be written in such as fashion as to destratify the traditional dramatic character with a few to accessing the pre-individual (a subjective) and pre-representational (signifying) forces that constitute it. I look at three of my own plays — Khalida, That Woman, and CUT — to explain how brechtian techniques at an ontological level allow for an 'immanent epic theatre' that draw attention to the constructedness of traditional notions of identity at their most primary level.

This paper investigates how a variety of issues raised during the course of a Canadian university-based theatre production of Caryl Churchill's The Skirker (1994) can contribute to the discussion of the role of creative practice in environmental education. Immanentist perspectives on embodied performance practice and on the environment, informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, are foregrounded in a discussion of the play, its rehearsal, and some potential implications of its staging.

The work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes, although phenomenally successful in continental Europe, has been staged less frequently in Anglo-American theatres; and a major feature on his work in NTQ49 in February 1997, and the publication by Methuen later in the same year of a collection of three of his plays in English translation, brought him only belated recognition in print. In this paper, first presented at a recent gathering in France to mark the tenth anniversary of Koltes's death, Maria Delgado and David Fancy trace the trajectory of a number of his plays through the space of translation, including Roberto Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cottonfields), Quai Ouest (Quay West), and Combat de negre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs). Koltes asserted in 1986 that 'I have always somewhat disliked the theatre because theatre is the opposite of life; but I always come back to it and love it because it is the one place where you can say: this is not life'; and the poetic specificity of his work has posed significant challenges for an Anglo-American theatre culture imbued with actors' identification with character. Relying on testimonials from a variety of directors, translators, and actors, as well as evidence from productions in the UK, Ireland, and the US, the authors, who are both Koltes translators, trace the challenges that have faced English-speaking artists wishing to stage this demanding writer.

In this chapter I investigate the ways in which trans experiences can be mapped onto immanentist ontology, specifically the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I make a case that trans woman performer Nina Arsenault's deterritorializing move to reconfigure her body and identity away from certain biological and social givens can be seen as both an embrace of the construction of construction that characterizes the generatively of immanentist ontology, as well as a pursuit of a decidedly non-mimetic submersion of herself into the full bloom of the transformative, surgical and performance processes at hand.

This paper employs the immanentist ontology proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to seek to reveal the limited ecological utility and ontological consistency of terms such as ‘environment’ and ‘nature’, but also notions of ‘harm’ and the universalizing ‘we’. Immanentist thought will be shown to provide a means of understanding how contemporary modes of environmental conceptualization and regulation are fueled by systems of representation that do violence to the production of difference, whilst simultaneously perpetuating these systems’ lethal results. Accordingly, a corollary notion of bodies that divests itself of binarist structurations of the ‘human’ and the ‘non- human’ can more readily apprehend potentials for interaction and participation both within and between the various bodies (human and otherwise) that comprise what is commonly called the ‘biosphere’.

This paper engages a long-term collaborative theatrical creation entitled 'Working Together: A Celebration of Migrant Workers' with Simone Bignall's Deleuzian-inspired notion of 'affective assemblages'. I explore how by privileging ‘a certain idea of careful sociability’, Deleuze’s thought can provide a means for thinking through how affective encounters between bodies on a micro- political level, such as occurred throughout the creation and delivery of Growing Together, can entertain mutually constitutive relationships with broader political and juridical formations anchored in state structures. I combine this axis of inquiry with additional considerations from Deleuze’s work around the role that artistic production and creativity also play in the constitution and mobilization of bodies – in particular, Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari’s assertions about the unique ways in which artists mobilize affect – with a view to generating some focused insights around affect and politics in theatre & performance.

Describing creative activity undertaken by researchers and co-researcher survivors in the context of the Recounting Huronia project, this paper extends existing literature on Deleuze & Guattari and disability arts by exploring how artistic activity provides opportunities for escape from the constraints of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as the three central strategies by which restrictive systems capture bodies, namely the stratifications of “the organism, signifiance, and subjectification.” Examined in this paper are the specific ways in which one survivor’s involvement in storybook making, poetry, and performance lead to the bundle “percepts” and “affects” in such a way as to generate what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) describe as artistic “monuments.” Far from being constituted by fixities, such monuments provide key pathways for potentially liberatory disarticulations of the restrictive organism, for experimentation in the face of limiting signifiance, and new individuations beyond institutionally coded subjectifications.

In their late work, Deleuze & Guattari posit the need for ‘geophilosophy’, a form of thinking that acknowledges the non-human becomings and forces integral to thought: everything that contributes to thought’s capacities.  In this paper I propose matching this concept with the notion of geoartistry, one that traces the non-human becomings in human artistic practice, but that also seeks to map these potentialities as the manifest themselves not only from a human perspective, but from the perspective of the other-than-human entities experiencing them. I argue that it behooves those humans attempting to move beyond the anthropocentric histories of reductive materialization to articulate the ways in which other-than-human entities might ‘experience’ creative and artistic phenomena given that these can be central to each entity’s expansion or contraction of abilities and potential, of their capacity for joy. In other words, understanding with nuance the experiences of beauty generated and taken up by other-than-human entities can help humans understand these entities’ ‘value’ on their own terms.