ABSTRACT
Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres explores intermedial, multidisciplinary, and cross-platform performance in the 21st century, encompassing theatrical performance, live art, time-based art, postmodern dance, and experimental music, animal acts, expanded cinema, mediated ceremonies, and alternative reality games, transgender rituals, queer brigades, inter-ethnic identity events, installation and interactive sculpture, site-specific, ecology-centered relational actions, pop-cultural activism, and posthuman technological art. We subsume these simultaneously multiplying, crisscrossing, and hybridizing genres of performance artworks under the common term of theatricality, so as to track these diverse expressions in a spectrum of imaginative possibilities. For us, theatricality is not a quality specifically produced by a proscenium-framed theatre work; instead, it is a floating affect occasioned by the interplay among the five constitutive elements in any performance artwork: the time-space-action-performer-audience matrix of theatricality (see Cheng 2002). As a perceptual and interactive sensory output, theatricality may emanate from a performance produced on the literal stage, but it may also erupt from various performative acts happening on the stage of the body, the street, the open field, the gallery, the petri dish, the canvas, the screen, and the sound—even from the shimmering surface of a meteorite, or the interior of a mouth.
