Performing the Paradox of Affect and Interpretation

Abstract

In a 2005 article entitled “Navigating Turbulence: The Dramaturg in Physical Theatre” I utilized Eugenio Barba's “dramaturgy of changing states” as a framework for considering the tensions between the textual and physical aspects of devised performance creation—or, as reframed through Erika Fischer-Lichte's concept of “perceptional multistability,” between the elements of a performance that facilitate efficient semiotic interpretation and those that exceed or resist it. Today an increasingly popular frame for addressing this visceral excess can be found in the burgeoning field of affect theory. This broadly inclusive territory is energetically contested; yet what is shared by most of these initiatives is a conviction that affective experience is a fully embodied process of relating to, understanding, and acting within one's environment, expanding the concept of ‘understanding’ to assert the implicit and pre-semantic nature of perception.This essay focuses on two productions by the Toronto-based interdisciplinary hub Vertical City, of which I am Artistic Director. With All Good Things (2013) and Trace (2014) we attempt to not only foreground but also to perform the above noted tension between interpretation and affect. Our productions regularly employ such postdramatic elements as aerial movement, engineered installation environments, sensory immersion, interactive intermediality, and dense live/recorded soundscapes. However, we also incorporate core components of traditional theatrical performance, such as progressive narrative structures and distinct characterization, which are systematically relocated into overtly performative contexts through pronounced interdisciplinary negotiation and the transformation of audience perception via intermedial modification. Adopting an enactivist approach to these case study performances, I attempt to demonstrate how, in pushing past the “crisis” of perceptional multistability to the utility of perceptual turbulence in a dramaturgy of embrace, performing the paradox of affect and interpretation can become an potent performance strategy.