Performance as contagion

This text analyzes the significance of the theatrical performance, whose aspects are compared to an epidemic. The author quotes a work by Susan Leigh Foster (The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies), explaining the latter’s concept of a sensory effect on an audience being like an infection, in this case tied to the communication of physical energy. Turning her attention to the significance of the collective, Małgorzata Sugiera opposes Foster’s conclusions, which stress the necessity of considering individual bodies and their historically fluctuating concepts and materializations. Sugiera recalls a definition by Antonin Artaud, assuming the actor’s incarnation of the communicated disease, imposing the experience of a temporal community upon the audience. In Sugiera’s view, people’s lack of readiness to have an aesthetic experience and to focus on their own aims is the basis of a potential epidemic, which is why we never know how an event will conclude