Abstract
Exploring audience responses to Samuel Beckett's Quad (1981) reveals the play's tendency to evoke intense but contradictory embodied affects for its spectator. Audience members recurrently testify to experiencing a heightened kinesthetic empathy that catalyzes their sense of identification with the onstage figures. However, they also repeatedly record a simultaneous impulse to recoil from the performers, a sense of revulsion or the refusal of immersive engagement with their moving bodies. A hybrid methodological framework of kinesthetic empathy and disability theory offers a means of better exploring both the generation and the consequence of Quad's conflicting embodied affects. This framework emphasizes Quad's foregrounding of its performers' embodiment, and permits a consequently clearer recognition of Quad's value as a performance that demands that its spectator confront the physical fact of others' bodily existenceâwhile acknowledging the difficulty of such engagement.
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