Kinesthetic Empathy, Physical Recoil: The Conflicting Embodied Affects of Samuel Beckett's Quad

Exploring audience responses to Samuel Beckett's Quad (1981) reveals the play's tendency to evoke intense but contradictory embodied affects for its spectator. Audience members recurrently testify to experiencing a heightened kinesthetic empathy that catalyzes their sense of identification with the onstage figures. However, they also repeatedly record a simultaneous impulse to recoil from the performers, a sense of revulsion or the refusal of immersive engagement with their moving bodies. A hybrid methodological framework of kinesthetic empathy and disability theory offers a means of better exploring both the generation and the consequence of Quad's conflicting embodied affects. This framework emphasizes Quad's foregrounding of its performers' embodiment, and permits a consequently clearer recognition of Quad's value as a performance that demands that its spectator confront the physical fact of others' bodily existence—while acknowledging the difficulty of such engagement.