Abstract
Current practice has proven that performance continues to reinvent itself in this highly technological age. This is not only true of live art, contemporary dance and devised practice but it is also the case for playwriting. Since the 1990s, an approach to writing for performance has emerged which fuses the visceral and the technological in the very fibres of the text.1 Such playwriting has caused a paradigm shift in the process, forms and content of textual practice. It has served to reformulate live performance in the ‘traditional’ theatre-writing arena, crossfertilizing the poetic and the political, the esoteric and the accessible. Most importantly, it continues to demand new strategies for performance and makes innovative interdisciplinary practice a prerequisite for production.
The transfinite in language, as what is ‘beyond the sentence’, is probably foremost a going through and beyond the naming. This means that it is going through and beyond the sign, the phrase, and linguistic finitude.
(Kristeva, 1992: 190)
We have to discover a language which does not replace the bodily encounter … but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak the corporeal.
(Irigaray, 1985: 43)
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© 2009 Josephine Machon
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Machon, J. (2009). (Syn)aesthetic Writings: Caryl Churchill’s Sensual Textualities and the Rebirth of Text. In: Broadhurst, S., Machon, J. (eds) Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248533_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248533_16
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