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Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article proposes the Vibratorium as a model for thinking about the transmission of affect in the theater. This proposal arises from a consideration, by way of Marcel Proust's account of a performance by the great actress “Berma,” of the way in which an audience's applause seems to “make” an actor's performance. The familiar idea of a reciprocal “energy exchange” between performers and audience is developed by way of an Artaudian conception of theater, in which the vibrations of sound and light are manipulated, not for their signifying potential but for the ways in which they might work upon the body of the spectator. The intimacy of this work on the body also binds together the spectators in the sociality of an audience, as the vibratory transmission of affect between bodies requires, or perhaps even constitutes, their being together. The work of Romeo Castellucci with the Italian theater company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio furnishes a concluding example of how such a theater might work in practice. The Vibratorium is the theater auditorium in those moments when signification and representation have yet to establish their sway: it is where the vibrations get right into you, before you start making sense of them.