‘Ceremonious ape!’: creaturely poetics and anthropomorphic acts

Anderton, Joseph (2015) ‘Ceremonious ape!’: creaturely poetics and anthropomorphic acts. Performance Research, 20 (2). ISSN 1352-8165 (In Press)

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Creaturely life partly refers to the nostalgia for a former human status hinged on normative, established forms of signification. In response, creaturely poetics is concerned with ways of composing the accentuated material and categorical vulnerability that ensues. In "Ceremonious Ape!": Creaturely Poetics and Anthropomorphic Acts, Joseph Anderton expounds a creaturely poetics of the stage, describing an approach to the spectacle, concreteness and shared spaces of performance that emphasise the bodily conditions shared by human and nonhuman animals alike. With reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Catastrophe, Teevan’s adaptation Kafka’s Monkey and Vesturport’s Metamorphosis, I trace a double process of dehumanisation and re-humanisation as the plays variously enact the fall of human language, logic and freedom, evoking creaturely life only to convey anthropomorphic performances of the ruined human model. Vestiges of supposedly exclusive human characteristics lingering in this performance mode are, I contend, an anthropomorphic act. Through metatheatrical and antitheatrical strategies, as well as themes attentive to physical vulnerability, the plays dissolve human specificity and plunge the characters into an unsettled, liminal condition that gestures towards the presence and precariousness of all living beings.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/987654
Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article dues to ne published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Research.
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Arts > School of English
Depositing User: Anderton, Joseph
Date Deposited: 26 Feb 2015 23:55
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 20:10
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/28407

Actions (Archive Staff Only)

Edit View Edit View