ABSTRACT
A poetics of the prelude seems to require a topology that is spatially desegregating, questioning the obligatory relation of inside/outside that sets up the imaginary distance between theatre and its presumed reality out there – the social space where the spectator is supposed to return after the temporal and spatial suspension of theatre. A slightly different fiction about theatre is entertained in this chapter: the theatre as a point of passage, not just spatially but temporally, too – neither a mere suspension of time within the alienated economy of work time nor an extraordinary acceleration of time that can be propelled out of the theatre in order to hasten an indefinite evental change. Spectatorship is transformed as a consequence of that open door, an aperture reconfiguring the optical machine of theatre by performing another triangulation, in which theatre’s endless rehearsal is a median point, in time and space.
