Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History

Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History considers the three categories of time that can be thought to occur specifically in theatre and performance: inceptions, births, or initiations of human history. Each of these temporalities works against what are often thought to be theatre’s prevailing temporal mechanisms.

Maurya Wickstrom grounds her analysis in the theories of three leading philosophers: Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri. She considers the ways in which theatre and performance responds to the questions of the new present, penultimate time, and our normative experience of time. Specific productions examined include: Hofesh Schechter’s Political Mother, Andrew Schneider’s You are Nowhere, Romeo Castellucci’s On the Concept of the Face, Dead Centre’s Lippy, Cassils’ Terisias, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan, C.L.R. James’ Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe: A Play, Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint: A Play, Brecht’s Drums in the Night, and Heiner Muller’s The Task. The book fits within what has been called ’the temporal turn’ in the arts and will be among the first books in theatre studies to wrestle with the phenomenological concept of time.