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This book analyses how artists work through and reflect upon processes that together form a posthumanist condition . It critically revises the figure of the "cyborg", central to posthumanist thinking and performance, and proposes an alternative figure through which to think about and create with technology: the "apparatus". It draws on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway and other contemporary thinkers of ecology and technology; recent philosophical theories, such as speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, dark ecology and new materialism; as well as the work of leading contemporary performance makers, such as Kris Verdonck, Mette Ingvartsen, Guemhyung Jeong, Romeo Castellucci and Okada Toshiki. Through doing so, the book captures an important shift away from anthropocentrism and the consequences for the dramaturgies that subsequently unfold.>
About the author
Kristof van Baarle is post-doctoral researcher at Antwerp University’s Research Centre for Visual Poetics, BE. As a dramaturg, he works with Kris Verdonck and Michiel Vandevelde among others. Together with Verdonck, he conducts an artistic research project on Beckett and Noh at KASK – School of Arts. He is an associate editor of Performance Research and his work has been published in various journals and book chapters. He teaches regularly in various universities and art schools, such as P.A.R.T.S., KASK and the universities of Antwerp and Ghent.Professor Adrian Kear is Programme Development Director, Performance Arts, at Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK. His books include: Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century (2013); International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice (with Jenny Edkins) (2013); On Appearance (with Richard Gough) (2008); Psychoanalysis and Performance (with Patrick Campbell)(2001).Heike Roms is Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Her books include: Silent Explosion (2015) and Contesting Performance – Global Sites of Research (co-edited with Jon McKenzie and C.J.W.-L. Wee, 2010). Her research into the history and historiography of early performance art won the David Bradby TaPRA Award for Outstanding Research in International Theatre and Performance 2011.JOE KELLEHER is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University, UK.Maaike Bleeker is a Professor and the Chair of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is President of Performance Studies international, a Member of the International Advisory Board of Maska (Ljubljana) and of Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation (Montreal). Her publications include: Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (2008); Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008); BodyCheck: Relocating the Body in Contemporary Performing Arts (with Stephen DeBelder, et al).
