Violent Theatricality: Displayed Enactments of Aggression and Pain

Abstract

A naked woman is tied to a cross and drenched in the blood of a sacrificial goat. A man crawls on his stomach through broken glass. A woman climbs a ladder with razor-sharp rungs. A man hangs from hooks driven through his pectoral muscles. A crowd dodges flames and flying glass and endures ear-splitting explosions to watch robotic machines destroy one another. Such activities create an immediate atmosphere of crisis both in those undergoing the aggression or pain and in those witnessing it, but what ultimately becomes of this crisis? Does it completely destroy the protocols of spectator and performer around which theatre turns? Does it degenerate into a voyeuristic thrill akin to the Roman coliseum? Or are more complex relations negotiated between the immediate stress on human flesh and the ontological formalities of art, theatre, and performance? To what extent can theatricality embody aggression and pain without becoming something else or without the aggression and pain becoming (uneasily) their own simulacra?