SEMESTER: The labour of attention

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of Billy Mullaney’s performance SEMESTER, through the dual perspective of theatricality and attention. For SEMESTER, Mullaney is memorizing a semester’s worth of quantum mechanics lectures and then performing them. Although he does not know quantum mechanics, he has managed to memorize it in a very disciplined way, which he calls ‘a choreographic way of learning’. Questions about spectatorship, attendance and the value of theatre are generated in SEMESTER, this article argues. More specifically, it shows how theatricality, understood as the theatrics, exaggerations and basic mechanisms of theatre, is what keeps audiences on their seats watching and Mullaney delivering the lecture. Theatricality is considered here bound to how SEMESTER simultaneously and excessively demands as well as sabotages an absorptive mode of attention, which results in a process of noticing and displacing practices of attention that are habitual to lecture and theatre settings. Theatricality is thus examined through the perspectives of attention and absorption, finally proposed as a form of labour that signals a critical reconsideration of the value of theatre and of attendance as such.