Combining phenomenological analysis with dance and performance analysis and affect theory A
Theatre of Affect: The Corporeal Turn in Samuel Beckett's Drama takes stock of the various ways
in which the body in Samuel Beckett's drama participates in the affective ecology of
performance. Affect is here located in the materiality of the body and discussed in relation to
the symbolic significance of for instance the effort direction speed or duration of a
posture movement or gesture. Although the meaning of the body in Beckett's stage-images
cannot be mapped onto conventional discursive 'meanings' the significance of the body's formal
modulations is affective in the sense that the import of such changes is immediately recognised
and felt as 'significant' by spectators. Beckett's theatre of affect therefore predicates on
the infinitesimal stirrings of subliminal meaning-making that continuously shape and create the
world in experience.
