ABSTRACT
The burgeoning elds of affect theory and food studies provide an understanding and articulation of corporeal encounters with, and emotional responses to, other people and the world around us. Both elds examine the physical and psychological ways we consume and are consumed by our environment. Such analysis is also at the very core of theatre and performance studies and live performance events themselves: these are cerebral and corporeal, and artistic attempts to make sense of our existence in a particular moment and as part of a larger chain of cultural and historical events. Sarah Ahmed explains that when examining the sociocultural connection between emotion and performance, “emotions can be theorized as performative: they both repeat past associations as well as generating their object” (Ahmed, “Collective Feelings” 32). Ahmed identies how emotion and the performative often engage a muscle memory of accepted behavior. Practiced responses and rehearsed performances of the interstices of behavior and emotion are indicative of how, as Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg explain, “affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon” (1).
