Gail Bulman's Feeling the Gaze captures a crucial moment in which ‘we are all, increasingly, marked by the visual’ (p. 19). The exploration of diverse visual elements has driven some of the most innovative work in Latin American theatre and performance in the twenty-first century. Spanning from 2014 to 2020 and the arrival of Covid-19, the eight performances from Argentina and Chile examined in this book reveal a rich oeuvre of performances whose bodies, props and spaces are traversed by intermediality, embedded technologies and a postdigital awareness that pose new challenges to spectators. Bulman examines these challenges and their affective resonances, drawing on her own experience as spectator of the works, and the development of a nuanced, critical approach to image and affect in dialogue with cinema studies, intermediality studies, installation art, visual arts, performance and affect studies.
Bulman engages multiple genealogies here to think critically about the relationship between images and affect in Argentine and Chilean performance. She expertly traces lineages of the visual from Roland Barthes’ punctum and studium to contemporary theorizations of the visual such as Maaike Bleeker's ‘vision machines’ and Matthew Causey's notion of the ‘postdigital lens’, along with many others. She similarly establishes past and present connections between theories of presence and affect, linking Walter Benjamin's concept of aura to contemporary theories of spectatorship (Jorge Dubatti's ‘convivio’, Jacques Rancière's ‘dissensus’, Susan Bennett's ‘affective transactions’ and Hans-Thies Lehmann's postdramatic theatre) and affect (Teresa Brennan, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and others). One of the most important theoretical contributions of the book is her elaboration of the concept of the ‘sensichive’, a term Bulman coins to describe ‘a record of an affective response to a real event that also includes documentation of that event but now from a different, non-official, more personal perspective’ (p. 307). In dialogue with Diana Taylor's concepts of the archive, the repertoire and the scenario, Bulman's sensichive proves crucial in expanding definitions of the archive to highlight the personal, digital and affective in contemporary performance in both local and global contexts.
Theoretically expansive, Bulman's book never loses sight of the works at hand. The detailed, vivid descriptions of the performances reveal keen mastery of both performance and textual analysis and attest to the work of a scholar who is committed to and intimately connected to the theatre communities featured in the book. Reading the book is a pleasure, as Bulman guides us through each performance, giving us detailed accounts of the performance spaces, surrounding neighbourhoods, and nuanced accounts of the visual elements of staging. Each chapter begins with a brief preface outlining production history, artists’ biographical information collaborations and critical reception of the works. Divided into two parts (‘Embodied Images’ and ‘Seeing through Screens’) and four chapters, Bulman analyses visual elements ranging ‘from simple props and bodies to spatial constructions, and digital images’ that pull spectators affectively in different directions and ‘show how the visual both captivates spectators and moves them toward other levels of consciousness regarding the performance, the ideology behind it, and their own lives’ (p. 33).
In addition to her focus on visual modalities and their intersections with theories of affect and the archive, in each chapter Bulman attends to historical and political context and critically examines major themes across works such as the legacies of colonialism and oppression of Indigenous communities in Chile (Tryo Teatro Banda's O'Higgins, un hombre en pedazos; Teatro la Maria's Los millonarios); immigration and marginalization (Teatro Niño Proletario's Fulgor); boundaries between the human and the animal (Mario, Luiggi y sus fantasmas's Manual de carroña); site-specificity and memory archives (Agustín León Pruzzo's En la sombra de la cúpula; Lola Arias's Doble de riesgo); intertexuality (Agustín León Pruzzo's En la sombra de la cúpula; Sergio Blanco's Tebas Land); belonging and technology (Claudio Tolcachir's Próximo); and the blending of documentary and the real, across all works.
Feeling the Gaze makes a significant and much needed contribution to contemporary theatre and performance studies. Bulman excels in articulating the complex braid generated between theories and practices of performance, visuality, affect and archives that continues to shape new trends in contemporary Southern Cone and world theatre.
