Theatre as FOMO: metonymic spaces of William Forsythe’s KAMMER/KAMMER

TY - CHAP

T1 - Theatre as FOMO: metonymic spaces of William Forsythe’s KAMMER/KAMMER

AU - Tomic-Vajagic, Tamara

N1 - Book chapter, in print (with publisher)

PY - 2020/11/8

Y1 - 2020/11/8

N2 - Through a spectatorial account of the most recent live performances, during the April 2015 finale of The Forsythe Company in Frankfurt’s Bockenheimer Depot, this essay explores Kammer/Kammer as a case of blurred boundaries between the experiences of the spectator and the characters in the work. This effect, it is argued below, is achieved partly through Forsythe’s aim to play around with the spectators’ “assumptions", and partly through a stimulation of the spectator’s FoMO, or the present-day cultural phenomenon of the “fear of missing out”. I propose that Forsythe’s cultivation of the viewer’s engagement, including FoMO, reaffirms the work as a discursive field which, similarly to Manet’s intervention, implicates the spectator as an agent of the work and the constituent of the social systems of the post-digital era. Ultimately, a retrospective view of Kammer/Kammer reveals it as a paradigmatic example of a hybrid theatre choreography at the turn of the 21st century, one which imagines a digital-native spectator who has a facility to absorb a multitude of stimuli, and to navigate the elusive ambivalence of physical and digital intimacies and detachments, not as binaries in antagonism but as a dynamic field of “mixed realities”.

AB - Through a spectatorial account of the most recent live performances, during the April 2015 finale of The Forsythe Company in Frankfurt’s Bockenheimer Depot, this essay explores Kammer/Kammer as a case of blurred boundaries between the experiences of the spectator and the characters in the work. This effect, it is argued below, is achieved partly through Forsythe’s aim to play around with the spectators’ “assumptions", and partly through a stimulation of the spectator’s FoMO, or the present-day cultural phenomenon of the “fear of missing out”. I propose that Forsythe’s cultivation of the viewer’s engagement, including FoMO, reaffirms the work as a discursive field which, similarly to Manet’s intervention, implicates the spectator as an agent of the work and the constituent of the social systems of the post-digital era. Ultimately, a retrospective view of Kammer/Kammer reveals it as a paradigmatic example of a hybrid theatre choreography at the turn of the 21st century, one which imagines a digital-native spectator who has a facility to absorb a multitude of stimuli, and to navigate the elusive ambivalence of physical and digital intimacies and detachments, not as binaries in antagonism but as a dynamic field of “mixed realities”.

KW - Kammer/Kammer

KW - Spectatorship of dance

KW - Theatre Dance

KW - Postdramatic theatre

KW - William Forsythe

KW - FoMO

KW - Mixed Reality

M3 - Chapter

SN - 978-3-030-44084-8

SP - 197

EP - 223

BT - Art and Dance in Dialogue

A2 - Whatley, Sarah

A2 - Racz, Imogen

A2 - Paramana, K.

A2 - Crawley, M.-L.

PB - Palgrave Macmillan

ER -