Deleuze and Performance

Was performance important to Deleuze? Is Deleuze important to performance; to its practical, as well as theoretical, research? What are the implications of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, process and becoming, for Performance Studies, a field in which many continue to privilege the notion of performance as representation, as anchored by its imitation of an identity: 'the world', 'the play', 'the self'? Deleuze and Performance is a collection of new essays dedicated to Deleuze's writing on theatre and to the productivity of his philosophy for (re)thinking performance. This book provides rigorous analyses of Deleuze's writings on theatre practitioners such as Artaud, Beckett and Carmelo Bene, as well as offering innovative readings of historical and contemporary performance including performance art, dance, new media performance, theatre and opera, which use Deleuze's concepts in exciting new ways. Can philosophy follow Deleuze in overcoming the antitheatrical tradition embedded in its history, perhaps even reconsidering what it means to think in the light of the embodied insights of performance's practitioners? Experts from the fields of Performance Studies and Deleuze Studies come together in this volume and strive to examine these and other issues in a manner that will be challenging, yet accessible to students and established scholars alike.

Laura Cull is a Lecturer in the Visual and Performing Arts Division at Northumbria University and Chair of the PSi Performance and Philosophy working group.

Introduction by Laura Cull; 1. Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts, Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze by Herbert Blau; 2. I Artaud BwO: The Uses of Artaud's To have Done with the Judgment of God by Edward Scheer; 3. Expression and Affect in Kleist, Beckett, and Deleuze by Anthony Uhlmann; 4. A Theatre of Subtractive Extinction: Bene without Deleuze by Lorenzo Chiesa; 5. Performing, Strolling, Thinking: From Minor Literature to Theatre of the Future by Daniel Watt and Off the beaten path or, notes towards a Heideggerian deterritorialization: a response to Daniel Watt by Julian Wolfreys; 6. Becoming a Citizen of the World: Deleuze between Allan Kaprow and Adrian Piper by Stephen Zepke; 7. sub specie durationis by Matthew Goulish and Laura Cull; 8. Thinking through Theatre by Maaike Bleeker; 9. Becoming-Dinosaur: Collective Process and Movement Aesthetics by Anna Hickey-Moody; 10. ...of butterflies, bodies and biograms... Affective spaces in performativities in the performance of Madama Butterfly by Barbara Kennedy; 11. Like a Prosthesis: Critical Performance à Digital Deleuze by Timothy Murray; 12. Performance as the Distribution of Life: From Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari by Andrew Murphie; 13. The 'minor' arithmetic of rhythm: imagining digital technologies for dance by Stamatia Portanova; Epilogue; Notes on Contributors; Works Cited; Index.