While comparatively harder to explain than the emotions, aesthetic mood incites an individual spectator’s emotional mood and potentially reflects a social mood about events in the world. Mood is a concept discussed in music theory about the emotions and music is used in all types of performance. An exploration of mood in theatrical performance additionally reveals connections to ideological belief and economic values. The case studies explored in this section illuminate the ways in which performance creates an immersive mood – from the ‘feel-good’ and uplifting effects of large-scale musicals such as The Lion King and Dear Evan Hansen, to the ominous moods of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, whose performance reflects the emotional intensity of Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’. Mood creates meaning. The experience of live art such as The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramović involves an intimate exchange that similarly confronts and intimidates.
Theoretical debates about the function of music coincide with how theatrical mood straddles the physiology of feeling and the cultural evocation of the emotions and emotional feelings. I examine the intersection of physiology and mood music in Rimini Protokoll’s Brain Project, the depiction of workers taught intonation and expression for emotional feelings under neoliberalist politics and globalization in Alladeen, and the way mood disorders and anger reflect the prevailing economic order. By removing emotional intonation from speech, The Wooster Group’s To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre) devolved theatrical responsibility for emotional feeling and mood. While theatre’s fearful eco-moods point to a dystopian near-future, at the same time the utopian promise of performance economies of the senses and collaborative processes anticipates happier shared moods.
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