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Sensualities/Textualities and Technology: Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance

This book, co-edited with Susan Broadhurst, reconsiders textual practices in contemporary performance specifically focusing on the exciting exchange between text, body and technology. The book offers an interrogation of 'textualities', that is, performance writing that is indebted to sensual 'writings of the body' and at the same time looks to new approaches offered by ongoing textual practices in physical and visual performance which incorporate new and existing technologies.

The collection is divided into sections which provide an overview of a particular area in relation to writings, the body and technology. It assembles an international collection of writers, performers and academics renowned in their field, who prioritise sensualities, textualities and technologies within their thinking and practice.

My own chapter was chosen to close the collection, intentionally drawing together ideas around sensual textualities/technologies through a critical consideration of Caryl Churchill’s recent writerly practice, highlighting how her work is exemplary of recent play-writing which fuses the sensual and visceral in the very fibres of the text; an approach to writing which has seen to the (re)birth of writerly technologies implicit in the textualities of current theatre practice. In Churchill’s textual practice it is the human body that is manipulated as the key sensual signifier in conveying lived personal, social, political and historical experience; the body of performer and audience member alike becomes the sensate conduit for communicating and receiving these ‘intellectual’ concepts.

A consequence of the unusual and visceral nature of Churchill’s writing style is that it places demands on those who translate this work in practice to return to the physical body. Churchill’s writing permits practitioners to harness the potential of digital technologies in realising the unusual form and content of her playtexts. Applying (syn)aesthetics as the defining style and strategy of appreciation of such work, this chapter examines the experiential quality of Churchill’s sensual textualities in a technological age.