Understanding spaces of potentiality in applied theatre

ABSTRACT

This article moves on from the ‘turn to affect’ in applied theatre to explore further how concepts related to affect theory might offer ways in which practice might respond to the contemporary context of a ‘post-normal’ and ‘post-truth’ world. Acknowledging the influence of transdisciplinary discourses on gender, race, disability, space, place, performance philosophy and neuro-psycho-biology, it explores how applied theatre-making might be conceptualised as a ‘space of potentiality’. The terms ‘space’ and ‘potentiality’ are surveyed as relational, contingent, and indeterminate, allowing for an understanding of practice that embraces fluidity, and difference, and resists pre-defined assumptions. Specifically, it draws on my practice of collaborative theatre-making with people in recovery from addiction to re-frame the issue of change within a more fluid appreciation of affect as a process of bodily inter-relation. It, therefore, discusses theatre-making as an affective ecology that generates an ‘aliveness’ that might support growth beyond the entropic life-cycle of addiction.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• addiction
• space
• theatre-making
• change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Cathy Sloan is a currently a PhD candidate at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, whose research focuses on socially-engaged performance practices that support practices of recovery. She was Associate, then Artistic, Director of Outside Edge Theatre Company (2012–15), specialising in performance with and by people in recovery from addiction. Previously she has worked in education and a range of community-based drama contexts.

Notes

1. Cited from an on-line translation of a lecture originally presented in 1977. (http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/on-spinoza.html accessed 10/04/2017)

2. SensLab is ‘an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.’ (http://senselab.ca/wp2/about/ accessed 05/05/2017)

3. Wetherell critiques Massumi’s citation of neurobiological experiments to indicate that affect is independent from cognition. She references more recent neurological research indicating that typically affective responses are triggered by conscious cognitions and non-conscious ‘subjective appraisals’. Usually cognition and brain/body activity are seamlessly intertwined.

4. Performing Local Places project took place in Camden and Oldham (2016–17) using arts practices to develop ‘place attachment’ to promote community wellbeing with two particular communities, those affected my homelessness (Camden) and new migrants (Oldham). http://www.performingplaces.org/docs/ppbrochure.pdf accessed 18/04/2017.

5. When travelling with members of Outside Edge Theatre to perform a show, one performer pointed out local streets and shared memories of ‘grafting’ for money and scoring heroin.

6. I note that Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical work demonstrated an approach to making the familiar feel strange. His concepts of epic theatre, verfreudungseffekt (alienation effect) and gestus, to name perhaps the most familiar characteristics of his work, had the intension of startling, or at least awakening the audience from what he considered to be ‘the stupefied inertia induced by the escapist fantasies of bourgeois theatre’ (cited in Gordon 2006, 22).

7. Baruch Spinoza is perhaps the first philosopher to write about affect in Ethics (1677). Gilles Deleuze and Guattari rediscovered his work and used his concepts in their philosophical work in 1960s/70s, such as Anti-Oedipal Complex.