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Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual
Herbert Blau"Herbert Blau's long sustained inquiry into theater's most provocative questions—presence, liveness, and finitude—are, at their deepest level, queries into life. Reality Principles returns us to Blau's inspiring provocations and extends them to new subjects—9/11 and Ground Zero, the nature of charisma, Pirandello and Strindberg."
—Peggy Phelan, Stanford University
Reality Principles gathers recent essays by esteemed scholar and theater practitioner Herbert Blau covering a range of topics. The book's provocative essays—including "The Emotional Memory of Directing," "The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd," "Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness," "The Human Nature of the Bot"—were given as keynotes and/or memorial lectures and are collected here for the first time. The essays take up a remarkable array of topics—from body art and the self-inflicted punishments of Stelarc, Orlan, and the Viennese Actionists, to Ground Zero and 9/11—and allow Blau to address critical questions of theater and theory, performance and relevance, the absurd and the virtual, history and illusion, community and memory. Reality Principles offers a panoramic view of Herbert Blau's perspectives on life and the imitation of life on stage.
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Cover
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Title
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Copyright
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Dedication
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Contents
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Introduction
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ONE Relevance: The Shadow of a Magnitude
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TWO The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd
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THREE The Soul-Complex of Strindberg: Suffocation, Scopophilia, and the Seer
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FOUR From the Dreamwork of Secession to Orgies Mysteries Theater
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FIVE Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts, Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze
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SIX Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough
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SEVEN Who's There?—Community of the Question
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EIGHT The Emotional Memory of Directing
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NINE The Commodius Vicus of Beckett: Vicissitudes of the Arts in the Science of Affliction
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TEN Among the Deepening Shades: The Beckettian Moment(um) and the Brechtian Arrest
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ELEVEN Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett
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TWELVE Art and Crisis: Homeland Security and the Noble Savage
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THIRTEEN Ground Zero: The Original Vision (May 16, 2008)
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FOURTEEN Blessings to The Pope and the Witch
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FIFTEEN The Pathos of Dialogue: Unable to Speak a Word
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SIXTEEN Thinking History, History Thinking
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SEVENTEEN Why “WHAT History?”
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EIGHTEEN The Human Nature of the Bot
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NINETEEN Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness
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TWENTY Auto Archive
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Publication History
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Index
- 978-0-472-02790-3 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-05151-9 (paper)