Intermedial Theater

This book explores relationships between intermedial theater, consciousness, memory, objects, subjectivity, and affect through productive engagement with the performance aesthetics, socio-cognitive theory, and critical methodology of transversal poetics alongside other leading philosophical approaches to performance. It offers the first sustained analysis of the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the contemporary European theater of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Thomas Ostermeier, Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, and the Transversal Theater Company. It connects contemporary uses of objects, simulacra, and technologies in both posthumanist discourse and postdramatic theater to the transhistorically and culturally mediating power of Shakespeare as a means by which to discuss the affective impact of intermedial theater on today’s audiences.

 “Intermedial Theater is a spirited excursion across the world of posthuman thought and action. Who or what performs beyond the epistemological flattening of humans and the non-human? Here Shakespearean theater meets extreme sports, theoretical concepts encounter the agency of objects, and disciplinary rigor mortis collides with transversal euphoria. Mixing a heady brew of performances of philosophy and philosophies of performance, Bryan Reynolds and his crew of transdisciplinary collaborators offer a spell-binding demonstration of the potential of the emerging field of performance philosophy.” (Jon McKenzie, Dean’s Fellow for Media & Design, Visiting Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, USA)

 “Infectious theoretical investigation drives this book across trans-historical and trans-contextual ideas vital to theatre. Its innovative modes of understanding intermediality, changing affective states, and ‘becomings’ posit ways for seeing ideasanew, for rethinking historical questions, and looking forward. Reynolds creates a prismatic focus around ideas so that we see them again and again, but through different lenses. In effect, theatre studies finds itself in new places.” (Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Head of Department and Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Roehampton, UK)

 “So much more than a theory book or a period book, Intermedial Theater: Performance Philosophy, Transversal Poetics, and the Future of Affect is a statement of vision, practice, and performance. Dramatist and theorist Bryan Reynolds and crew invite readers into the electric, kinetic, worlds generated by transversal theater and theory. The results are ‘fractalicious.’ You may never want to leave.” (Julian Yates, Professor of English and Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware, USA)

 “In this provocative book on contemporary European postdramatic theater, Bryan Reynolds’ unique writing voice givesthe reader an exciting, performative experience of the productions from critical perspectives that reflect current rhythms of filmic and digital media. Reynolds writes the way people’s brains work in this electronic age, and performs his intellectual persona on the page as it reads the stage. I love the book's performative style. It is the intellectual equivalent of a stage performance.” (Peter Lichtenfels, Professor of Theatre & Dance, University of California, Davis, USA)

 “In this important and impressive book the concept of transversality is used to describe and to understand the formation of subjectivity in everyday and artistic practices. For this, it is developed in the context of theories of the subject and elaborated by analyzing literary texts. The book convincingly shows how transversality can be performed and realized in theatre work. It is a must-read for everybody who is interested in the condition of subjectivity today.” (Rainer Winter, Chair Professor of Media and Cultural Theory, Klagenfurt University, Austria)

 “Equal parts essay, performance, and radical philosophy, Reynolds’s latest book extends his inimitable experiment in transversal poetics to the intersecting streams of media, art, and theater, with constant reference to Hamlet. A stunningly inventive, perceptive, and generous act of criticism that will shake loose your habits of perception, challenging you to re-discover that the true thrill of thinking is rooted in the pleasure of being alive.” (Henry S. Turner, Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA)

Bryan Reynolds is Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is also the Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company, a director of theater, a performer, and a playwright, whose plays have been produced in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.