After Live

Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance

Subjects: Theater and Performance, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies
Paperback : 9780472052868, 272 pages, 12 illustrations, 6 x 9, August 2015
Hardcover : 9780472072866, 272 pages, 12 illustrations, 6 x 9, August 2015
Ebook : 9780472121427, 272 pages, 12 B&W halftones, August 2015
Audiobook : 9780472003921, 272 pages, 6 x 9, May 2021
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An exploration of how live events—theater, dance, and installation art—stage encounters between the present and a radically ambivalent future

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Description

In the dark of the blackout before the curtain rises, the theater holds its many worlds suspended on the verge of appearance. How can a performance sustain this sense of potentiality that grounds all live production? Or if a stage-world does begin, what kinds of future might appear within its frame? Conceiving of the theater as a cultural institution devoted to experimenting with the future, this book begins and ends on the dramatic stage; in between it traverses literature, dance, sculpture, and performance art to explore the various futures we make in a live event.
After Live conceives of traditional dramatic theater as a place for taming the future and then conceptualizes how performance beyond this paradigm might stage the unruly nature of futurity. Chapters offer insights into the plays of Beckett, Churchill, Eno, and Gombrowicz, devised theater practices, and include an extended exploration of the Italian director Romeo Castellucci. Through the lens of potentiality, other chapters present novel approaches to minimalist sculpture and dance, then reflect on how the beholder him or herself is called upon to perform when confronted by such work.

Daniel Sack is Assistant Professor in English and the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.