Trisomic Stages: Theater Hora and Jerome Bel’s Genetically Modified Theater
Keywords:
Disabled Theater, seduction, Bel, spectatorAbstract
Disabled Theater (2012) is choreographer Jérôme Bel’s performance-based investigation into “how theater is modified when it is done by actors with a learning disability and what theater does to actors with a learning disability” (Bel) By proliferating the codes of theatricality Disabled Theater succeeds in intertwining critical reflection and intensive affect. Audiences become uncomfortably aware of how the seemingly mimetic failure of the performers and their child-like vulnerability produce the quality of “presence” that is currently fetishized in live performance. Alongside Bel and Theater Hora, this paper asks whether Disabled Theater’s production of a trisomic stage and its capacity as a critical affect mechanism might expand theater’s disciplinary and disciplining genetic composition in order to homeopathically relieve the art form of its complicity in the project of social normalization.
References
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1993. Print.
BARTHES, Roland. The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France (1977-1978). Columbia University Press, 2005. Print.
CHOW, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Duke University Press, 2012. Print.
GARLAND-THOMSON, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford University Press USA, 2009. Print.
Hilton, Leon. “Presence, Rhetoric, Difference: Jérôme Bel and Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater.” TDR: The Drama Review 58.3 (2014): 156–162. Print. “Jérôme Bel Talks about Disabled Theater.” Time Out New York. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.
Jowitt, Deborah. Time and the Dancing Image. University of California Press, 1989. Print. Kuppers, Petra. “Outsider Histories, Insider Artists, Cross-Cultural Ensembles: Visiting with Disability Presences in Contemporary Art Environments.” TDR: The Drama Review 58.2 (2014): 33–50. Print.
MITCHELL, David T., and SNYDER, Sharon L. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print.
ORTEGA, Francisco. “The Cerebral Subject and the Challenge of Neurodiversity.” BioSocieties (2009), 4, 425–445.
RUBIN, Gayle. "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Pandora Press, 1993.
SCHMITT, Natalie Crohn. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature. Northwestern University Press, 1990. Print.
SIMON, John Ivan. John Simon on Theater: Criticism, 1974-2003. Applause Theater & Cinema Books, 2005. Print.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2015 Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Dramatica
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
