The Ethics of Encounter in Contemporary Theater Performances

The Potential of Precarity? Imagining Vulnerable Connection in Chris Dunkley's <em>The Precariat</em> and Amy Liptrot's <em>The Outrun</em>

“…Instead of an example of status frustration, however, Sally becomes a source of enlightenment and political awakening for Fin. Significantly, Sally is not seen on stage-she appears "only as a disembodied voice through the speaker" (38). A link is asserted between the large-scale media analysis and the individuals on stage, and a connection is forged between Fin and Sally.…”

“…Every progressive movement has been built on the anger, needs and aspirations of the emerging class. Today that is the precariat" (38). The screens on which this excerpt from the news media appears reminds the audience of the extent to which daily reality in the twenty-first century is experienced on screen or through screens.…”

“…As Katharina Pewny has argued of theatre today more generally, "In performance, the relation between the performers and the spectators comes into focus, and, over the past decade (post 9/11), the question as to how spectators (can) respond to others' suffering has been frequently addressed." 38 Contemporary drama, Pewny continues, often performs plots "with the help of implicit and explicit audience involvement" (272). Dunkley involves the audience by using multimedia screens on which the audience's own mediatized everyday lives are reflected back to them, forging strong moments of identification and recognition between the world on stage and the world inhabited by theatre-goers.…”

Emerging Frameworks for Engaging Precarity and “Otherness” in Greek Contemporary Dance Performances

“…Questioning the means of staging encounters between spectators and Others through applying Levinas's phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity, Katharina Pewny suggests that “theatrical performances are an encounter with the other if possibilities are opened up to the spectators to respond to the vulnerability of the other. How these possibilities take shape, are both the ethics and aesthetics of the performance” (2012, 263; emphasis in original). Continuing to explore these questions about the ways the encounters take shape and the resulting aesthetics of the performances, I turn to the third example, which offers a different approach for staging an encounter between the Self and an Other in Levinasian terms.…”