Space Rules: Techno-Nomad
Theatre
Petra Kuppers
(Performance Studies, Bryant College)
Moving metal holds a fascination for contemporary performance art (i) .
In the traditional theatre, moving metal appears as gears and levers,
sustaining a machinery of make-believe, shifting props around, opening
trap doors, holding lights to illuminate. In today's large West End or
Broadway spectacles, we find this mechanical, connecting, sustaining
metal in a machinery of technological excess close to the rollercoaster
ride (ii), thrilling spectators' senses. In this essay, I will investigate what
can happen when theatre technologies themselves heave into view.
The theatre machinery of diverse human and non-human agents and
materials can lay open its functions. It can deterritorialise itself, building
upon performance art's deconstructive methodology. In this
deconstruction, a new machine emerges. The machine I am talking about
here is Deleuze's conception of the machine - a coming together and
becoming of divergent elements, a productive conjunction, an
assemblage. In this essay, I do not intend to apply a reading of a
Deleuzian machine to a theatre production. Instead, I intend to engage in
a Deleuzian becoming-machine: I wish to see what happens when I try to
take seriously the flows of disconnected elements, moments, and
happenings set into touching and aligning action by, and perceived by,
my visceral being at the site of theatre. In this way, I look for a
phenomenology of being-in-theatre-space.
In this conception of a theatre exploring itself as a field of relations, the
affective register doesn't need to be structured by the play of absence
and presence. Instead, I will focus on the affects of fullness, coextensiveness, location, vibration, energy flows, and non-divisionary
relations between human, metal and space, human and machine,
human/machine.
With this, the focus on the body entering the theatre is not on the
question of what is or isn't the body, how and why is it repeated, doubled
or haunted, but it is:
'What can a body do?', of what affects is it capable? [...] Spinoza never
ceases to be amazed by the body. He is not amazed at having a body,
but by what the body can do. Bodies are not defined by their genus or
species, by their organs and functions, but by what they can do, by the
affects of which they are capable (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 60).
Affects become the location of embodiment and subjectivity effects.
Within the paradigm of affect, concepts such as energy, mass, dispersal
and rhythm supplant concepts such as differentiation and alienation.
Moira Gatens sees the potential of these affectual states shortcircuiting
definitions of the body:
The collapse of [the] distinctions [between artifice and nature, human
and non-human] raises interesting questions concerning contemporary
and future possibilities of hybrid life forms and body prosthesis presented
by technology. These new technologies present possibilities for making
novel connections by producing assemblages capable of forging different
extensive relations and new intensive capacities (Gatens, 1996: 167).
How, then, can these extensive relations and intensive capacities become
visible and tactile in the theatre?
Within the realm of nomadism, everything can provisionally be functioned
into material towards a future whose shape and location isn't fixed yet material towards something new. When Deleuze calls Nietzsche's
aphorism nomad thoughts, he characterizes them as being 'in immediate
relation with the outside, the exterior' (Deleuze, 1977: 144).
One of the problems of thinking nomadic thoughts in the theatre is the
very bounded, boxed nature of conventional theatre. Nomadism is a
playful mode of being in thought, and it is this quality that precludes a
minimalist, formalist conception of an original theatre - the nomadic lies
in extension rather than boundary. At the same time, the connection to
the exterior, the embeddedness of nomad thought invites a re-visit of the
theatre. In this re-visit, the theatre emerges as a space in which different
times, conceptions of reality, and of the public and its spaces, of the
human and the becoming-other meet and touch. Nomadic theatre:
theatre in process, lacking direction (iii) . Nomadic theatre: a theatre of
chance, of material, of wandering without aim (iv) .
As a laboratory of the nomadic, then, my reading here shall erect the
theatre as a hall of mirrors. It becomes a ruin of technologised halfforgotten relations. It emerges as a curiosity cabinet, curiously inhabited,
as fingers trail over dusty exhibits. Thus, instead of consigning theatre
and its modes of address to the teleology of the history museum, I want
to let a theatre of nomadism emerge as a wunderkammer, a curiosity
cabinet, a form preceding the order of the museum and the archive. In
this wunderkammer, theatre lives as an extended field of collection and of
unknown assemblages.
A HOUSE OF THOUGHT
The performance Untitled by Catarina Campino and Ricardo Jacinto
performs theatre space as plans, rhythms and rule givers. It presents a
site for bounded wanderings in the no-man's land of spatialised theatre
history. The performance took place in July 2003 as part of CAPITALS in
the Sala Polivalente, a theatre deep within Gulbenkian's Centro de Arte
Moderna in Lisbon (v). This location already marks a history, a split
scene: gallery, museum and theatre are spaces with divergent histories.
They are interestingly marked at a time when performance art as a metagenre of art behaviour becomes history. Performance art eschewed the
theatre and positioned itself in the gallery - only to become part of the
museum. As I hope to show, Untitled's strange theme park theatre can
function as a layering of historic moments made tangible, made into skin-
sense. Untitled traverses and rehearses the museal in the form of a
dis/ordered Kammer. It opens up theatre as a curiosity cabinet, unmaking the connections the museum forged, forgetting the order of the
archive.
In Untitled, different moments of theatre's history come into presence,
present themselves, not along a teleological line, but in a mélange of
positions, allusions, openings and images. In navigating the space of
Untitled, walking along the changing stage/auditorium landscape, I am
forced to make connections. I have to jump from a seating area onto a
level floor, to get up onto the stage, and to connect up the metaphors,
images, and fragments of intellectual history the event assembles for me.
In Untitled, audience members inhabit an empty theatre, full of the
machinery enabling Western stage productions. At the opening of the
house, spectators enter an auditorium fronting onto a stage. This stage is
empty apart from a black curtain draped over its length, and a lowhanging lighting rig. The auditorium, in turn, is unusual, since a
significant section of its tiers have been cut out, leaving a scar of open
space surrounded by seats on the side and behind. The audience
members entering soon find themselves out of space, and, after a brave
decision by one, enter and laughingly colonize the gaping hole to sit on its
floor, expectedly oriented towards the empty stage.
Following this initial game with the rules of theatrical space, and with
group dynamics, the lights go down. An assaultive metallic sound booms,
not from the stage, but from behind and above, from the technician's
box. Decisions have to be made by audience members: where shall I
orient myself towards, where is the scene/skene of this theatre? Is this
location of the sound's origin a «technical» issue, should I suspend my
attention to it in a theatrical make-believe, reading the noise as a
naturalized part of whatever fantastic scene will open up before me?
The location of the action in the technician's box makes complex the
origins of voice and authorship, and their relative positions. One of the
conventional rules of the theatre space is that the place of action is the
stage, even if other cues and impulses emerge from elsewhere.
Immediately, the lights flicker on again. This constellation of booming
space, sharp noise and visual revelation of space continues, changing
rhythm and playing with expectation and reaction. At times, the expected
sound doesn't come, or comes late, the intervals of light changing
duration and disallowing a discovery of transparent rules. At last, the
curtain that had lain tame and deflated on the stage floor comes to life as
it is slowly, mechanically, pulled upwards. The bar the curtain is attached
to rises, dividing the visual field of the stage anew. Simultaneously, two
other curtains drift in from the sides, closing the stage, ending the act,
creating a desire in the moment that vision becomes obscured. The
curtains frame the wave of material rearing up on the stage floor.
At the end of the first act, our senses exercised, the audience face the
mystery of the closed curtain that has re-established its magical spatial
division - it has recreated the space of mystery on its other side.
At this moment of reestablishment of historical theatre in a disembodied,
mechanical world of industrial sound and action, the authorial point of
origin fractures and shrouds itself, but is not erased. Jon McKenzie writes
about «minor performances»:
It's not that minor performances are totally out of control; rather, they
are guided in another way: they're remote-controlled by patterns of
recursive mutation. In a minor performance, seemingly unrelated
components and widely dispersed processes are expropriated and become
caught up in a machine of becoming (McKenzie, 2001: 225).
Between the metal, the sounds, the kinaesthesia of moving bodies and
moving curtains, a minor performance, a becoming might be taking place.
As the place is established, the becoming solidifies, shapes a border with
which I can translate the event.
The collage of elements bodies forth histories of constellations that reflect
on the theatre and the public, the mirror, the body and the mind. The
citational and the referential are running amok and mutate into a series
that spells out a new image.
In order to write, and to create a field of tension surrounding agency and
space, let me call from becoming into being a historical performance
space. The material conditions of the suspenseful tension gripping us in
Untitled's theatre evoke it metonymically. I feel it in the presence of the
obscure, dark curtain. Around the theatre machine of Untitled, hidden
spaces and blanks multiply, as different parts of the black drapings
proceed to move away from walls, create new exteriors and interiors. This
shifting house, devoid (at first) of the presence of the human body, with
magical materials dancing as metal moves, plants a different spatial
image in my mind: Deleuze's rendition of the baroque house. Witnessing
Untitled, I receive a visual echo of Leibnitz's theatre house of the soul.
The curtain of division and connection, of presence and disavowal, echoes
Leibnitz's spatial image for the veiled relationship between senses and
consciousness. Leibnitz conceives of the «monad», the soul, in the
allegory of a double-storied house. This house, he writes, has a lower
portion full of windows and an upper story that is dark and only receives
reverberations, waves or impressions, transmitted through curtains (vi).
Leibnitz's upper and lower story are linked by material, making the
relationship between the different parts of the body/soul one of touch and
extension that matter:
To increase the resemblance we should have to postulate that there is a
screen/canvas/curtain/membrane [toile] in the darkened room [la
chambre obscure] to receive the species [les espèces, or beings, sensible
species] and that it is not uniform but is diversified by folds [diversifiée
par des plis] representing items of innate knowledge; and what is more,
that this screen/canvas/curtain/membrane, being under tension, has a
kind of elasticity or active force, and indeed that it acts (or reacts) in
ways that are adapted both to past folds and to new ones coming from
impressions of the species. This action would consist in certain vibrations
and oscillations, like those we see when a cord under tension is plucked
and gives off something of a musical sound. For not only do we receive
images and traces in the brain, but also we form new ones from them
when we bring 'complex ideas' to mind; and so the screen which
represents our brain must be active and elastic. This analogy would
explain reasonably well what goes on in the brain (Leibnitz, 1981:
144/5).
The membrane tensed between the upper and lower story is not raw
matter, passive receptacle, but dynamic, shifting, lived consciousness. It
responds with the (un)clarity of 'something of a musical sound' - not an
answer that stands in clear, unambiguous relation to a question, but an
approach of matter, a vibrational excitement.
The brain here becomes a memorizing action, a muscle, a flux.
Representation isn't disembodied, leaving no traces of the materiality of
its action, but instead the translatory, substituting, passing and
exchanging energies of an economy enacted in time and space become
tangible. History emerges in the material tensing, touching, in a writing
that isn't sign but act. 'Reasonably well' does reason pass from a
disembodied image to a scene, a stage of partial presences (species). The
point of emergence is a field, not a text.
A sense of the theatrical scene of knowledge as a three-dimensional field
of extension and touchings, rather than a two-dimensional screen,
becomes alive for me in the Untitled theatre space. The act itself and the
identity of the spectators as spectators is emerging - our attentions and
orientations react to the intermix of cues and our shared presences. The
'musical sounds' of Untitled vibrate in space, at the beginning, just at the
point in time when theatre audiences attempt to orientate themselves
toward the stage spectacle. The theatre space becomes elastic. To extend
my analogy, within this house, the spectators take the position of the
changing curtain. This theatre's rules are playfully engraved in this
theatre's house in a complex interplay between historical knowledges and
the sensory input of the current/extended scene. Deleuze asks about the
different, multiple orientations towards travelling in the smooth and the
striated: 'Tree travel of rhizome travel?' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:
482). Is this theatre a space of a tree's hierarchical, grounded, historical
presence, connecting in fine-grained wood the earth and the sky, moving
us upwards towards a new clarity? Or is this a rhizomatic history, with
intensities encountering intensities, extensions covering dialectics, a
dispersed multiplicity of sensation? Minor and major performance mutate
into one another, as citational practice and playful assemblage interact.
Together, they create a continuity of field-relations between my thinking
mind, body, shifting metal, audience body.
Leibnitz's text historically emerged out of a public dialogue, it was written
in response to Locke's «tabula rasa», to a conception of a mind as a
camera taking in images from the outside. Particularly interesting for a
performance perspective is the membrane curtain at the heart of this
public act of feuding theorists. The curtain is a resonant image and, in its
absence or presence, a defining feature of the historical Western theatre
space.
In Untitled, the curtain articulates the dramatic scene, marked by the
gazes, bodies and desires of the audience. The always already material
history of theatre is played out in the instinctual knowledges of
appropriate behaviour patterns. The expectant audience's desires work
with the materiality of the theatre apparatus - the folds of the curtain, the
self-effacing blackness of the scaffold, the theatre lights screening their
beams into tightly focused sites of visibility. Vibrated into reaction and
patterns, the material nature of spectator consciousness responds, sets
up counter-vibratory rhythms that run along the taunt fabric. Out of these
oscillatory, chaotic, reactive and transformational waves, the material
touching of theatre space and body/mind space transforms this theatre
spectacle into an exhibit in the curiosity cabinet of historical conceptions
of the mind. In this material displacement of the I in the theatre, the
boundaries of self playfully flicked, a form of perfumance might emerge.
McKenzie uses Derrida's term to approximate performance functions, and
he writes:
In a perfumance, one does not simply perform as an actor, engineer,
manager, etc. One perfumes, disintegrates, becomes other via a machinic
process of invention, intervention, in(ter)vention (McKenzie, 2001: 228).
In the theatre of perfumance, different constellations of knowledge,
machines, flesh and metal emerge in an intimate and playful arena.
Nonsense, non-sensical mappings, can intimate themselves onto fields of
thought.
For the theatre to emerge, the space barred by the curtain is the only
necessity, not the presence of the actor, whose position as desiring
screen is already successfully and conventionally pre-empted by the
spectator's orientation towards the spectacle. And indeed, the spectacle
engenders the history of theatre: after the curtain locked into place in
Untitled, taking up its position and setting the scene, the barely touching
lips of its gap emitted their inaudible sound of seduction, and eagerly, we
entered its dark tent of promise. As one audience member gets up,
explores, and vanishes in the gap, others follow or find other positions apropos the invitation of the opening of the curtain. Ritually, some of us
pass through the curtain onto the other side. But who are we as we take
up or reject the curtain's invitation? Are we participants in a ritual,
engaged in a sacer ludus, a holy game, are we tourists, or are we
nomads?
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
The space some audience members enter between the curtain veils holds
two objects. In a first room, an antechamber, a mirror is laid on the floor.
Suspended above the mirror, a spotlight lets its beam fall on the
reflective surface, illuminating nothing in the chamber itself. The mirror is
fixed at an angle so that its reflected light shines upward. It lights up the
ceiling of an audience gallery next to the stage. The light of the stage
illuminating the audience: a familiar metaphor out of theatre history's
canons. A humanist theatre of education emerges in this interplay of
space and light. We, the audience, are the object of the shadow-play
played out on the stage, our own actions, magnified, held up to our social
education and moral betterment.
Audience members soon begin to intervene in the light's path, holding
their limbs up to a shadow-play, fragmenting the theatre-as-mirror into a
theatre-as-sideshow. Spectator bodies, magnified, transformed, arrive in
this sideshow of the auditorium. They don't promise the obscured
site/sight of reason's light, of the ideal forms throwing shadows in Plato's
cave. The origin of these shadows is all too clearly visible: theatre
mechanics, lights, electrics, techne, naturalized and yet painfully present,
disallowing a full identification with the theatrical scene.
Instead (or in another comment on a theatrical heritage), this theatrical
play with bodies, densities and light evokes a childhood scene, a child's
display of body parts not (directly) in the mirror, but in the light
emanating from it. Uncontrolled play disturbs reason's purview of the
world in the theatrical panorama. The mirror does not offer a confusing
simulacrum, no double haunts this economy of the stage and the
auditorium. Instead, production is banal, excessive, performed in the
registers of the giggling transgressor who has moved behind the curtain.
But Untitled's spatial scene does not only posit play behind the curtain.
The antechamber of the sideshow opens into a different sanctum.
Beyond the space of the mirror is another curtain, which, once
transgressed, allows the spectator to stand in the presence of her fellow
audience members and of a large, black, rectangular slab. It stands,
mute, like a sarcophagus, like a remnant left behind after the dead king's
body has transmutated (to cite yet another moment of theatre's official
history). Slowly, action manifests itself: dried ice begins to flow over the
slab, covering the painted wood with a white cloud, flowing down, flowing
over the edge, dissolving into swirls on the stage's floor. There is a
delight in the beautiful chemistry of this display. The desire to see
becomes the desire to touch - and soon the audience is carefully dabbing
at the flowing ice curtain. Someone puts his mouth to the slab - feeling
the ice on his face, but also kissing the strange box. Standing high above
the spectacle on the audience walkway, I see pilgrims, ritualists, engaged
in a strange, meaningless act. A different slice of theatre's history is
opening up in this theme park of stage memories. Pre-enlightenment,
pre-moral institution, the intermeshing of stage machinery and audience
bodies creates a scene of both reverence and playfulness. The diverse
affective mechanisms of vision and touch, of exploration and surveillance,
together create a new theatricality: a diorama of ritual theatre.
Nomadically, we are taking up discarded remnants hidden in the sand of
history: we try out the pose of supplication in front of an altar unknown
to us, feel the gold of ice with our lips, or stand to watch the strange
spectacle unfold. In all of these poses, the outside is carried within: there
is no full immersion, just a touching of ancient strings that sound old
notes of behaviour, activated in moments, discarded into the flow of
audience desire. The theatre of mechanics has emptied out the stories,
narratives, the shaman has sketched into the sand. It leaves us with a
new machine: bending our bodies, activating momentary nomad
impressions, as it pulls us into its whirls (...patchwork, differentials of
speed, delays and accelerations, changes in direction, continuous
variations... (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 482). As a traveller of the
smooth, the striations of history become momentary affects on the body's
surface. In this theatre as rollercoaster, amnesiac surfings crest on the
waves of barely glimpsed possibilities of past engagements.
Within these waves of historical spectatorial possibilities, estrangement,
performance and alienation become complex terms. We are forced to
wander - not only in the mindscape of theatre history's roles, but also
physically, moved out by movement.
Later on in the show of Untitled, the seating area itself moves.
Stagehands enter the stage area, and manipulate buttons which in turn
make the seats move in and out. Opposing this mechanical ballet of
horizontal lines is a video-screen.
The screen answers back by mirroring the view of the geometrical gliding
of seats, and by allowing glimpses of the hidden mechanics, magnified
into magnificence. The seat rows can see themselves. The stagehands
wander amongst these mechanical giants. The audience stands perched
above the roving seats, in the gallery, outside the action. Where is the
fullness of presence, where the melancholy pleasure of not-quite-selfrecognition? We hover over a theatre clearly not in need of us. The robots
(and their human master/slaves, whether present as stage-hands or
invisibilised as inhabitants of the technicians' box) work without the
audience, and our bodies are pressed, secreted out of the theatrical
space, and into the sidelines.
But something binds us, doesn't allow the contract of the audience and
the theatre to fall apart. Like Leibnitz's brain home, our attentive veils are
trailed out in the pit of the theatre. Pleated, moulded and tensed, an
affect binds me to the rhythmically modulated seats on their slow path
into a vertical line, cutting me off from any place I could rest and sit. I
can see robots immolate each other on TV, their human creators laughing
and crying about their extensions, and be bored. But the hour spent in
the presence of the theatre machinery moving itself has set up another
appreciation, a shared field.
In a discussion of aesthetics, Deleuze and Guattari point towards nomadic
art. They investigate the abstract line - the non-dividing line, the inbetween line:
Whereas the rectilinear (or 'regularly' rounded) Egyptian line is negatively
motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, and
erects the constancy and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is
abstract in an entirely different sense, precisely because it has a multiple
orientation and passes between points, figures, and contours: it is
positively motivated by the smooth space it draws, not by any striation it
might perform to ward off anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The
abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that
calls forth striation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 496-7).
What is this affectual relation between moving seat-rows, activated by
hidden gears, and an audience member? My co-presence in this field of
movement makes me think a fold extending itself, think a transference in
style, in the abstraction of movement itself, a pulsatory smooth field of
extension rather than demarcation.
The curtain is playing with the segregational history of its historical
antecedent - dividing the educators from the to-be-educated, the adored
from the to-be-adored. Here, the curtain emerges as a different theatrical
symbol. It becomes a field of tension, a shared extensiveness, a drum
cover transmitting in a field of becoming (vii) , where the divisions
between machine, wood, steel, buttons and flesh are less important than
the affect of movement, there, for a short time, in the excessive
excitement of the rollercoaster.
FORWARD
This nomadicism of the journey within the field of the curtain aims neither
at an exoticising of the non-Western, nor at a sense of the nomadic as a
non-location, a globalised, dispersed, non-participatory spatiality.
Instead, in my phenomenological witnessing, the nomadic theatre
emerges as a nonsense space of traversed images and stories. It makes
strange landfalls, and connects different points in different archives of
knowledge. Within the amalgamation of histories, gears, levers, curtains
and flesh, the body does feel - does engage in affective connections,
creating machines of meaning-making. As my attention teeters on the
edge of the theme park and the theatre, I am reminded that what I do
with these intensities and arrangements is my decision: the ethical
demand of a nomad space that allows for difference is to 'become the
child of one's own event' (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 65) - to exist
towards futurity. The nomadic is never a place to live: as minor and
major performance transmute into one another, the nomadic become
reterritorialized. But the intense capacities and the extensive relations
become visible on the horizon of the possible. They exist in virtuality,
infecting productively thought and action.
As Deleuze and Guattari remind their reader, smooth space as such is not
liberatory. The nomad is not a saviour, and not a revolutionary to build a
new state.
But the struggle is changed or displaced in [smooth spaces], and life
reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces,
switches adversaries (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 500).
Petra Kuppers is an Asst. Professor of Performance Studies at Bryant
University, Rhode Island, and Artistic Director of The Olimpias
Performance Research Projects. She is author of Disability and
Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003) and
Bodily Fantasies: Medical Visions/Medical Performances (University of
Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2006).
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Endnotes
[i] In March 1960, Jean Tinguely's sculpture Homage to New York destroyed itself in the
sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and Deleuze and Guattari can speak of
joyful, deterritorializing machines (Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 1995). Today, in
shows such as Robot War, robots fulfil the task of destruction on television, creating a
popular cultural activity out of acts that were once sub-cultural happenings. The
machines are commodified, and the lustre of revenge against capitalist exploitation and
for moments of infiltration has worn off, as reading for resistance experiences tiredness
in the face of overwhelming and all-devouring marketing machines.
[ii] Hans-Thies Lehmann reminds us that in the 17th century, the name given to techheavy productions was «machine» (Lehmann, 1999, 414). In general, the organic and
the inorganic often mixed and merged in theorizations of the perfect theatre, from
Kleist's Marionetten-Theatre to the Ubermarionette. Theatre without humans, purely
inorganic, has equally many historical precedents: from Servandoni to Moholy-Nagy.
[iii] It is this sense of the nomadic as a spatial metaphor, as something that talks about
location and dislocation, that appears in texts such as Schneider, 2000, and Sayre,
1989.
[iv] Note how easily the word choice «nomadic» becomes entangled in value judgments
mirroring Western/Other relations. This issue of anthropological markers re-invading the
post-humanist framework of Deleuze and Guattari are discussed in texts such as
Ghambou Mokhtar, 2001, or Christopher Miller, 1998.
These criticisms echo feminist critiques who discuss the implications of «becoming
women» - are these politics sustainable in the here-and-now, or do they affirm the
status quo, using the language relations of today to build potential alternatives in an
elsewhere?
For Sadie Plant (1997), the binary male/female mirrors the zero/one numbers and their
exclusivity, which become unstable as multiplicity spills forth. Within this conception, the
«female» as well as the «male» split their edges, a condition with which the «female»
with its traditional marks of de-centeredness, is better equipped to cope.
Looking for theatrical salvation in other locations: this is not the aim of this article.
[v] I gratefully acknowledge the invitation by Rebecca Schneider, Marten Spanberg and
Maria Assis to assist Rebecca in leading a CAPITALS workshop project. This article is also
published in CAPITALS, eds. Maria de Assis and Mårten Spångberg, Lisbon: Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian - Centro de Arte Moderna (Lisboa), 2004.
[vi] Anthony Vidler (2000: 223) picks up on the architectural fantasy of the monad, and
critiques Deleuze's reading, pointing to the «interior» position of Leibnitz's fold, not the
transgressing principle of Deleuze's generative play.
[vii] My play with Leibnitz's metaphor here echoes Elizabeth Probyn's (2000) description
of a desire towards belonging: a yearning to make skin stretch. This tissue-language of
folds and touch, of carnal appetites, are at play in the affective registers I want to
activate in my reading of the theatre scene.