This book is about watching theatre and how to utilise a corporeal semiotics to read genres of
contemporary theatre. It suggests that three key concepts interact: genre the formal term that
structures theatricality including the textual grammar of a dramatic work its performance
style theatrical frame and mode of rhetorical address corporeality an assemblage of the
troubling physical work of the actors the figurative forms in the text and the ambivalent
bodies of the spectators and performance the presenting of theatre as symbolic action in the
social world. In order to develop new models of embodied spectatorship these essays examine
canonical productions of Medea King Lear Miss Julie Genesi: The Museum of Sleep directed by
Deborah Warner Barrie Kosky Anne Bogart and Romeo Castellucci. With close attention to
bodies and texts in performance the book argues that to watch theatre is an intimate yet
political atunement to processes of human transfiguration. It concludes by offering a
reinvigorated perspective on tragedy and tragic experience in the theatre.
