Feeling, Sensation, and Being Moved: Case Studies in Affective Performance

This article examines three recent adaptations of canonical works of modern drama – Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and Botho Strauss's Gross und Klein – that resituate their historically troubled female characters within the temporality of the contemporary spectator. It argues that Katharina Schüttler's cool and detached Hedda for the Schaubühne Berlin production, Isabelle Huppert's karaoke-singing Blanche Du-Bois in Odéon – Théâtre de l'Europe's Un tramway, and Cate Blanchett's emotionally vulnerable Lotte in the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Gross und Klein bring gestural extra-literary qualities to the characters and unexpected affective registers that call for a new interpretation of gendered experience. The analysis focuses therefore on the feeling, somatic, non-cognitive, and pre-rational sides of lived experience in the west today. It is interested in how gender and emotion, sociality, and historicity produce gestic affects that move audiences along the pathways of reactive feeling and sensation.