The dramaturgy of the post-visual is a wilful act of vandalism. It rejects the boundaries of space and time, and privileges the atemporal existence of 'the performance' in a digital drive. It dispenses with the need for actors - a prerecording will do fine - the necessity of a director and the public venue. The post-visual happens in the mind, although it is ready to command a theatrical space.
Since the collision is at the centre of the post-visual aesthetic, it is appropriate that its very name comes from an unfortunate juxtaposition. The post-dramatic, being mainly a form for academic appreciation and boring audiences in the name of intelligence, has been whipped by the culture of the DJ, of the sound artist. Visual theatre, which repeatedly failed the most basic tests of meaningful definition, is consigned to the dustbin of performance studies.
Post-visual theatre begins with a text. Not a script - who really has time to read Uncle Vanya? The text is stolen, of course... a series of recordings by amateurs, bad acting and all, downloaded and fed into a programme. Then cut and pasted and drowned in sound.
Post-visual theatre begins with Auslander. Like most academics, his knowledge of Marxist theory trumps his aesthetic taste (anyone who can talk about Eric Clapton as a signifier of the real (without noting that he is one of the most musicians who destroyed their 1960s' reputation (by making dad rock into his dotage)) needs to update their i-pod). He points out that the idea of liveness in art is a fiction, and that live performances often hark back to a (recorded) perfection... he knows that rock might talk of authenticity but this is all facade... he realises that the dominant cultural form (he wrote this when it was TV, just before the internet took over (making his book instantly out-of-date (although his Clapton chapter helped to do that))) dictates the form of the defeated cultural forms (in his era, that was theatre, which was going through another period of trying to dig the Gesamtkunstwerk by having loads of video projections).
Post-visual begins with the magic of the DJ, who hacks up and recombines sound and thereby has a visceral impact on the audience.
Post-visual theatre is the application of William Burroughs' cut-up technique to performance (and about time too (Burroughs adopted it in response to the timidity of literature (which was looking antique next to visual art (which had already taken on board the ideas of bricolage) and claimed that it could predict the future)).
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