Nomadic Theatre

Fluid stages, morphing theatre spaces, ambulant spectators, and occasionally disappearing performers: these are some of the key ingredients of nomadic theatre. They are also theatre's response to life in the 21st century, which is increasingly marked by the mobility of people, information, technologies and services. While examining how contemporary theatre exposes and queries this mobile turn in society, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink introduces the concept of nomadic theatre as a vital tool for analyzing how movement and mobility affect and implicate the theatre, how this makes way for local operations and lived spaces, and how physical movements are stepping stones for theorizing mobility at large.

This book focuses on ambulatory performances and performative installations, asking how they stage movement and in turn mobilize the stage. By analyzing the work of leading European artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed, and Signa, Nomadic Theatre demonstrates that mobile performances radically rethink the conditions of the stage and alter our understanding of spectatorship.

Nomadic Theatre instigates connections across disciplinary fields and feeds dramaturgical analysis with insights derived from media theory, urban philosophy, cartography, architecture, and game studies. It illustrates how theatre, as a material form of thought, creatively and critically engages with mobile existence both on the stage and in society.

Autorentext

Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink is a Lecturer and Researcher in Theatre Studies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Her work has been published in Performance Research and in Mapping Intermediality in Performance (ed. Bay-Cheng et al, 2010) and in Contemporary Theatre Review.

Inhalt

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Deterritorializing the Stage
Primary Coordinates
On the Move
Theatre, Technology, Mobility
A Note on Participation
Theatre, Performance, Movement
Deterritorialization
Pause
Deleuze's Nomads
Nomadic Theatre: A Concept, a Toolbox
Theory as Tool: How to Do Things with Deleuze?
Spatial Dramaturgy
Points Are Relays on a Trajectory: Chapter Overview
Playgrounding

2 Encounter: Meeting Multiplicity in Dries Verhoeven's No Man's Land
Of Horses and Wasps
The Rhythms of a Smooth Stage
Mind the Gap
Performance Installations
Staging the Spectator
Walking with Abderraghman
Triads and Constellations
A Problem of Referentiality
This Is Not My Voice: A Problem of Referentiality, Part 2
Fractured Reciprocity
Building Performance
Expanding Spectatorship

3 Displacement: The Situated Pathways of Rimini Protokoll
Urban Moves
The City as Stage
Theatre Goes Global
The Production of Space
Performing Locality
Navigating Representation
Outsourced Performance
Parallax

4 Cartographies: Trail Tracking and Map-Making as Staging Strategy
You Are Here
Cartography: Fifth Principle of the Rhizome
The Theatre of Cartography
Performing Cartography
Charting the Virtual
Navigational Spaces
Personal Velocity
Material Maps
Thinking Subjectivity Through Space: Politics of Location
Witnessed Presence
The Cartography of Theatre

5 Diagrams: Staging Proximity in Ontroerend Goed's The Smile Off Your Face
A Nomad Does Not Necessarily Move
A Wheelchair's Thresholds
Pleats of Proximity
Event/Situation
Into the Laboratory
Thinking Through the Diagram
The Grid of Capital
Distributions of the Sensible
A Spectator in the Dark
The Dramaturgy of Proximity
A Theatre of Folds

6 Architextures: The Rhizomatic Gameboards of Signa's The Ruby Town Oracle
Drifting /Dwelling
Borderzones
Narrative Architecture and Environmental Storytelling
Architectural Performances
Evocative Spaces
Procedural Passageways
Playing at the Limits
The Entirety of the Map
Tissue, Traces, Tracks

7 Distributed Performance: Epilogue
Pop-up Stores
Trajectories of the Stage
Folds of Spectating
Lived Space and Diffractive Reading
Staging Connections
Procedural Dramaturgy /When Attitude Becomes Form
Thinking Through Practice
Thresholds of the Imagination

Notes
Bibliography
Index