Section Two

Section Two explores the ways in which affect in performance can be distinguished from emotional feeling and in relation to spectator responses and empathy. Theories of affect have proliferated in the twenty-first century, in part because they offer a way of thinking about how the human is intricately connected with the nonhuman world and coupled with technology. Affect theories thereby expand the analysis of live performance to include its use of multimedia and screen technology, and point to an impersonal dimension to feeling.

Case studies in this section illustrate emotional feeling alongside affect; these include Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House (1879), about the break-up of a marriage. The play continues to be produced globally in productions that range from conventional psychological realism to nonrealist spectacle that evokes affect. Of particular interest is Mabou Mines’s nonrealist production Dollhouse, which evoked affect through its use of popular performance forms ranging from melodrama and pantomime to acrobatic action. The consideration of affect continues with the examples of Stelarc’s contemporary live performance and the acrobatic technological spectacle of Cirque du Soleil: both illustrate how performance evokes bodily affect in the absence of psychologies of emotional feeling. The affect theories of Teresa Brennan, Brian Massumi and Patricia Clough are introduced. The distinction made here between affect and emotional feeling is intended to broaden our understanding of how performance and its multiple visual and aural effects are artistically created and received by spectators. The discussion then considers affects in political performance about real lives in, for example, Anna Deavere Smith’s verbatim work.

In recent decades, the evocation of empathy has become a major intention of performance about disadvantage, disability, and racial, ethnic and sexual identity difference. But empathy is widely associated with subjective emotional feeling. In particular, the case study of Jane Harrison’s Stolen, which depicts First Nation Aboriginal people and stories of emotional suffering, illustrates the ways in which theatre invites the empathetic responses of spectators. The final case study explores the evocation of affect, emotional feeling and empathy in Robert Lepage’s productions Needles and Opium (1991/2013) and 887 (2015), performances which combine arresting visual imagery with personal biographical narratives about performative identity and transgressive love.