Understanding spaces of potentiality in applied theatre

Abstract

This article moves on from the ‘turn to affect’ in applied theatre to explore further how concepts related to affect theory might offer ways in which practice might respond to the contemporary context of a ‘post-normal’ and ‘post-truth’ world. Acknowledging the influence of transdisciplinary discourses on gender, race, disability, space, place, performance philosophy and neuro-psycho-biology, it explores how applied theatre-making might be conceptualised as a ‘space of potentiality’. The terms ‘space’ and ‘potentiality’ are surveyed as relational, contingent, and indeterminate, allowing for an understanding of practice that embraces fluidity, and difference, and resists pre-defined assumptions. Specifically, it draws on my practice of collaborative theatre-making with people in recovery from addiction to re-frame the issue of change within a more fluid appreciation of affect as a process of bodily inter-relation. It, therefore, discusses theatre-making as an affective ecology that generates an ‘aliveness’ that might support growth beyond the entropic life-cycle of addiction.

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