Abstrakt
The draft chapter of my PhD thesis deals with the notion of theatricality as juxtaposed with violence on stage. To avoid the confusion of theatricality and the theatrical, Graver suggests to refer to theatricality as to "complex combinations of representation (signification, metaphor) and presentation (performance, metonymy)." Herein "theatricality is a form of aesthetic expression that might flower in a variety of material social realities unconnected with the conventional cultural concept of theatre."13 This take on theatricality, first and foremost, becomes the justification for the interdisciplinary continuum when it is along the body that Francis Bacon's portraits proceed from photographs to utmost deformities of his models; it is the body as its own object that appears in Paul Thek's Meat Pieces, and it is the body as an auto-affective language that Sarah Kane's Psychosis 4.48 reflects on.
However, even in such a theorization, theatricality seems to be confined to the limits of conventional theatre. This is particularly evident when Graver claims that "violence generally destroys theatricality" because the presence of violence generally "threatens both to escape the meaning assigned to it and to disrupt the delicate balance theatricality establishes between the ontological priorities of display and enactment." What such a direction of thought foregrounds is, therefore, that the notion of theatricality as 'a form of aesthetic expression' should not merely accommodate all the elements of the continuum of the body-violence-affect, but should necessarily and inherently embrace the power of violence to infinitely disrupt and rework both the body and the affect catering to disruptive rather than to cumulative affective economy.
Hence, the intermedial position of theatre on the continuum between visual arts and performance is a point worthy of a special emphasis.