Theatres Of Immanence

Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Drawing from Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud and Kaprow, as well from Deleuze, Bergson and Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking immanence.

Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment is a unique probe into the multi-faceted nature of the works of the British experimental theatre Forced Entertainment via the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Jan Suk explores the transformation-potentiality of the territory between the actors and the spectators, namely via Forced Entertainment’s structural patterns, sympathy provoking aesthetics, audience integration and accentuated emphasis of the now. Besides writings of Tim Etchells, the company’s director, the foci of the analyses are devised as well as durational projects of Forced Entertainment. The examination includes a wider spectrum of state-of the-art live artists, e.g. Tehching Hsieh, Franko B or Goat Island, discussed within the contemporary performance discourse. Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment investigates how the immanent reading of Forced Entertainment’s performances brings the potentiality of creative transformative experience via the thought of Gilles Deleuze. The interconnections of Deleuze’s thought and the contemporary devised performance theatre results in the symbiotic relationship that proves that such readings are not mere academic exercises, but truly life-illuminating realizations.

Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment is a unique probe into the multi-faceted nature of the works of the British experimental theatre Forced Entertainment via the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Jan Suk explores the transformation-potentiality of the territory between the actors and the spectators, namely via Forced Entertainment’s structural patterns, sympathy provoking aesthetics, audience integration and accentuated emphasis of the now. Besides writings of Tim Etchells, the company’s director, the foci of the analyses are devised as well as durational projects of Forced Entertainment. The examination includes a wider spectrum of state-of the-art live artists, e.g. Tehching Hsieh, Franko B or Goat Island, discussed within the contemporary performance discourse. Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment investigates how the immanent reading of Forced Entertainment’s performances brings the potentiality of creative transformative experience via the thought of Gilles Deleuze. The interconnections of Deleuze’s thought and the contemporary devised performance theatre results in the symbiotic relationship that proves that such readings are not mere academic exercises, but truly life-illuminating realizations.

Jean Rotrou is France's neglected classic. Generations of critics have recognized his merits but have done so in a tangential manner. He has been called the "mentor of Corneille" and has been celebrated as the precursor of Racine in classical tragedy and of Moliere in classical comedy. That Routrou can be linked to all three of France's great classical dramatists has been responsible in part for the respectful neglect of the thirty-five of his plays that have survived from a production assumed to be many times as great. Mr. Nelson turns to Rotrou in the dramatist's own setting: the perfervid philosophical and religious atmosphere of the first half of the seventeenth century, a period presumed by some scholars to have prepared the age of Racine, that dramatist of transcendence, in the specifically religious sense, who sees the things of this world as signs of man's dissociation from the Divine Ground of Being. Yet this current of "Le Dieu Cache" was not dominant in the century; a strong belief in "Le Dieu Visible"-an "immanentist current," so to speak-made itself felt in both formal religious writing and in imaginative literature of the period. Indeed, if Racine was by tendency the dramatist of transcendence, so his great rival, Corneille, might be thought of as the dramatist of immanence. An elaborate expression of both tendencies is to be found in Rotrou, to whose dramatic example both Corneille and Racine turned at various moments of their careers. Profoundly preoccupied with the relation between the human and the divine, Rotrou's theater of sacrament and sacrilege demonstrates the continuity of, as well as the disparity between, Christianity and the classical heritage. Robert J. Nelson is professor of French at the University of Illinois, Urbana."

Collective creation - the practice of collaboratively devising works of performance - rose to prominence not simply as a performance making method, but as an institutional model. By examining theatre practices in Europe and North America, this book explores collective creation's roots in the theatrical experiments of the early twentieth century.

MEDIATED ARCHITECTURE: Vivid, Effervescent and Nervous, the second issue of the SAC JOURNAL, presents three projects de- signed at SAC during the last eight years. The three projects are: The Theatre of Immanence (2007), an installation and exhibition project in Städelschule's Portikus gallery; Digital Bodies (2013-14), an experimental research project; and Orkhēstra (2014), which was an installation on a large, public square in Frankfurt and part of Luminale, 'Biennale of Lighting Culture'. The projects vary in scale and nature from gallery installation via laboratory-style modelling experiment to an urban intervention. They span a period in which architecture's contribution to the production of space has become increasingly me- diated by technology. Each in their own way, the three projects probe this condition and explore new design opportunities given to archi- tecture. The results are vivid, effervescent and nervous – and always a mediated architecture. Accompanying extensive portfolios of drawi- ngs and pictures that document the respective design processes and their results, are texts that expound on the theoretical and practical implications of each project