Theatre and the Virtual : Genesis, Touch, Gesture.

AcknowledgementsIntroduction. The Virtual as a Theatrical ForceChapter 1. Potentiality and the VirtualThe Depletion of Potentiality: Motion and ActionMotion and Growth in the Poetics and NāṭyaśāstraOther FormsActual and VirtualPotentiality as an Ontological HorizonChapter 2. Genesis and the VirtualStrandbeestsInterfusingTheatre as a Technical ObjectGestural PotentialityThe TransducerChapter 3. Violence and TouchLand of PalmsThe Technicity of TouchViolent ConditionsTouch and EventRepotentialising MatterEngendering Practice: On EnvironmentalityChapter 4. Organism and Gesture Organism and the Field of PotentialityDiaphanous OrganismicityOrganism and MachineOmniaResponse: Against CommunicationConclusionGlossaryIndex

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 toward 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.