If theatre is a way of seeing, an event onstage but also a fleeting series of moments; not a copy or double but more vitally metamorphosis, transformation, and change, how might we speak to – and of – it? How do we envision and frame a fluid reality that moves faster than we can write?
Arranged over two parts, 'Figurations' and 'Translations', Essays on Theatre and Change reflects on the animal, history, doubling, translation, and the performative potential of writing itself. Each fictocritical essay weaves between voices, genres and contexts to consider what theatre might be, offering a 'partial object' rather than a complete theory. Leaving the page radically open to its reader, Essays on Theatre and Change is a dazzling, multi-lensed account of what it is to think and write on theatre.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
By Way of a Prelude: upon reading Rosi Braidotti
Part 1 Figurations
1. Icarus Falling, and Rising (and Falling, and Rising again)
2. The Memory of Prehistory
3. Not Dolly!
4. Silent and Listening it Hangs over the Sea
5. Freud’s Brains: Drawings from the Eel to the Id
6. Number 174517 (Gesture towards a Grammar of the Human)
7. Feindre (Feinte de Feinte Feinte)
8. The Fissure of Absence
Part 2 Translations
9. Entre Chien et Loup / Between Dog and Wolf
10. Venus in Furs: Painting to Page, a Passage (on the Essay)
11. Metáphoric Thought: Stage Plays, Bacon, Beans / God is a Lobster
12. Reading Rosset: Doubles, Reals, Echoes, and Impressions – a False Ending
13. Corpus- [corpus]: hand, handiwork, Habitat, gifts, feet, footnotes, and the ‘ob-scene’
14. The Residue, the Remainder: Thoughts on Language and Speech between both and and
Bibliography
Biography
Kélina Gotman is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at King’s College London, UK.
