Theatre and the Virtual

Theatre and the Virtual lays out a set of conceptual instruments for the articulation and engendering of the forces of theatrical potentiality. Creating a passage towards a reconstitution of the given, a theatre of the virtual opens bodies in motion to a region of an ongoing genesis of forces. The outcome: regimes of constraint are abandoned through a radical practice of ecological attunement. Violence is eschewed through an onto-ecology of touch. Closed systems are repotentialised to become co-constitutive of their environments. A logic of spectrality settles in-not so much entities as atmospheres, not so much a being as a style of being, not so much a body as multitudinous milieus of response. This is the task of a theatre of the virtual-to safeguard the possibility of the extra-epistemological and uphold one's right to offer accounts of oneself from outside of being, all the while creating a fractured record of the wondrous mutations of a moving, gesturing body. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, philosophy, new materialisms, environmental humanities, gesture, and the ontology of response.

Zornitsa Dimitrova is a theatre researcher focusing on the philosophy of technology, the ecological turn, vulnerability studies, and the aesthetics of the Anthropocene. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Münster. Research monographs include Literary Worlds and Deleuze: Expression as Mimesis and Event (2017) and the present book, Theatre and the Virtual: Genesis, Touch, Gesture (2022). Pieces on theatre have appeared in Deleuze Studies, The New Theatre Quarterly, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performance Philosophy, and Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies.

Acknowledgements Introduction. The Virtual as a Theatrical Force Chapter 1. Potentiality and the Virtual The Depletion of Potentiality: Motion and Action Motion and Growth in the Poetics and Näyasastra Other Forms Actual and Virtual Potentiality as an Ontological Horizon Chapter 2. Genesis and the Virtual Strandbeests Interfusing Theatre as a Technical Object Gestural Potentiality The Transducer Chapter 3. Violence and Touch Land of Palms The Technicity of Touch Violent Conditions Touch and Event Repotentialising Matter Engendering Practice: On Environmentality Chapter 4. Organism and Gesture Organism and the Field of Potentiality Diaphanous Organismicity Organism and Machine Omnia Response: Against Communication Conclusion Glossary Index