Atmosphere and Intra-action

Abstract

In this essay, I conceptualize the material nature of theatrical atmospheres as interobjective phenomena, emerging from and through objects as collaborative events. I apply Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action” to consider the ways in which the atmosphere is produced by and producing entangled agencies, and to consider the implications of this collaborative nature on notions of human agency and causality more generally. What does it mean for the audience’s materiality to be realized as an agential component that comes to matter in the diffractive model of causation? In order to explore these questions, I turn to Heiner Goebbels’s Everything that happened and would happen (2018), which stages a world in which agencies are shared to such a degree that cause and effect, linear time and understandings of power are reshaped in an alternative world order. The production stages continuously developing events, each of which emerge through co-creation between human and nonhuman objects. Notably the atmosphere emerging in space also depends upon the presence of humans, a presence that is active through its responsiveness rather than its attempts at mastery or control. In the context of growing eco-anxiety regarding climate change, an attention to theatrical atmosphere, and therefore to the integral nature of the audience’s material presence, suggests a potential toward grounding the audience and reminding that one’s own matter has real effects in the world. With this in mind, I go on to ask how an “intra-active” model of theatre and atmosphere might aid a more responsive model of the human in their environment.