Abstract

The common association between theater and community is here inverted to explore the relationship between theatrical practice and immunity, or “affects of adjustment” between spectator and event. Drawing upon Roberto Esposito’s figuring of relations between community and immunity, on Jacques Ranciere’s propositions of the “emancipated spectator” and the part of those who have no part,” and Gerald Raunig’s conception of “Division” from his work on the Dividuum (2016), this essay examines a sequence of case studies central to the author’s own practiced experiences: Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop in the 1980s, Transhumance in the 1990s, and the Performance Biennial Athens in 2016. The dynamic here is to track an increasing scepticism about the social claims made for theater and ways of discussing performance that do not surrender to pseudo action in the absence of political commitment and change. The essay concludes amongst the Greek Attic Kraters of the 5th century BCE, curated from the Liverpool Museums at Tate Liverpool, contesting that the “ceramic state” continues at the interface between the continual promise of immersion and material histories of exclusion from the scene.


Keywords

affects of adjustment, community, ceramic state, curation, division, emancipation, immersion, immunity, participation, partition, performance, precarity, shame, spectator, theater

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Kritika Kultura
Department of English
School of Humanities
Ateneo de Manila University

The Philippine Commission on Higher Education (CHED) declares Kritika Kultura as a CHED-recognized journal under the Journal Challenge Category of its Journal Incentive Program.

International Board of Editors

Jan Baetens
Professor
Faculty of Arts
Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (Belgium)

Joel David
Professor of Cultural Studies
Inha University (South Korea)

Michael Denning
Professor of American Studies and English
Department of English
Yale University (US)

Faruk
Faculty of Cultural Sciences
Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)

Regenia Gagnier
Professor of English
University of Exeter (UK)

Leela Gandhi
John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English
Brown University (US)

Inderpal Grewal
Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
Professor of South Asian Studies, Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies
Yale University (US)

Peter Horn
Professor Emeritus and Honorary Lifetime Fellow
University of Cape Town (South Africa)
Honorary Professor and Research Associate in German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

Anette Horn
Professor of German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

David Lloyd
Distinguished Professor of English
University of California, Riverside (US)

Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
Professor Emeritus
University of the Philippines

Rajeev S. Patke
Director of the Division of Humanities
Professor of Humanities
Yale NUS College (Singapore)

Vicente L. Rafael
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History
University of Washington (US)

Vaidehi Ramanathan
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Davis (US)

Temario Rivera
Professorial Lecturer
Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines

E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippines Studies Center (US)

Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College (US)
Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University (US)

Antony Tatlow
Honorary Professor of Drama
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)