Vortrag | »Gonna Make You Sweat. Towards Thermoceptive Theatre Studies«

Englischsprachiger Vortrag beim Symposium »Climate Sensitivities: Aesthetics and Politics of Heat« an der Leuphana Universität in Lüneburg

von Katharina Alsen und Dr. Benjamin Sprick (HfMT Hamburg)

[Uhrzeit folgt]

Abstract

»Ich bin in der Hitze, die ich selbst erzeuge, wie praktisch!«
Elfriede Jelinek: Sonne / Luft / Asche (2022)

Unlike other media forms, heat has not yet fully entered contemporary theatre. With a few exceptions, theatre productions take place in thermally controlled environments. Sweating is usually confined to the stage, while audiences remain in comfortably cooled spaces. This reproduces longstanding scenarios of bourgeois affect control (Kohpeiß 2023), forcing the senses into a regulated aesthetic order.
Drawing on concepts from Critical Temperature Studies, this paper envisions a theatre (studies) of thermoception. Decoding thermoceptive affect economies can uncover clichéd and power-laden meanings in theatrical contexts, opening up new readings and dimensions of bodily experience.
This approach proposes a theatrology of sweating as a particular mode of politico-aesthetic intra-subjectivity (Beregow 2024). It draws on aspects of a »methexis of the senses« (Nancy 2010) – that is, their »participation, contagion (contact), contamination, metonymic contiguity rather than metaphorical transfer«. Such sensory participation resonates with immersive theatre practices, in which spectators can become co-actors, dissolving the classical separation between stage and auditorium. One may be made to sweat or encounter sweat (and its odour) as a purported »marker of authenticity« (Schütz 2022). This suggests that temperature is not a pre-social or pre-discursive phenomenon, but must be understood in terms of its socio-material structures.