ABSTRACT
Postmodern, postdramatic theatre challenges the inclination to explain the present by attending to the paradox of experiencing the present. In the manner of religious ritual, postmodern theatre fixates on the body and discovers what ritual has always known about how porous and malleable the body is. Joel Parsons’s 2015 Any Hole Can Be a Vase performed the instability of the body and showed the way in which art creates a virtuality – not a mimicry of reality, but a reduction of reality’s excess to a graspable moment in time and space. A similar end is achieved by the paschal ritual of Orthodox Christianity, which labors in its tradition to bring salient features of reality into immediate experience. Such performances reveal the impossible possibility of particular being in nonbeing.
