Dramaturgy of the Occult: Divulging the Mysteries in Contemporary Performance

Abstract

This thesis works to establish ‘witchcraft’ as a theoretical framework or lens through which to read certain instances of contemporary performance in the European field. This lens is constructed through tracing notions of the witchy, the mystical, and the occult across disparate theoretical bodies, including theology studies, performance studies, new materialism, and eco-feminism. Specifically, lines of flight are composed between a genealogy of mystic practice/philosophy - and the embodied and affective conditions defining these practices - in relation to analytical concepts such as ‘sorcery’ (as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari), ‘shapeshifting’, ‘speculation’ and ‘trans-corporeality’. In constructing this theoretical rhizome, I position witchcraft and the occult as a site of endless metamorphosis, somatic knowledge, affective exchange, and questioning, conditions which inform my subsequent analysis of two case studies, Stellar Fauna by Kat Válastur and Witches by Ursina Tossi. In these analyses, I use my lens to uncover the occultist logic governing the performances in question, examining the ecologies of atmospheric transformations, shapeshifting physicalities and performer-spectator relations, continuously indicating how the affective, startling, and sense-oriented dramaturgies of the respective performances invite an explicitly trans-corporeal mode of spectatorship. In doing so, I also indicate the eco-political potential of occultist aesthetics, examining its capacity to call habitual modes of being and seeing into question, and to illuminate and reorganize the relations and power structures of a given space.