Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance is both prescient and haunted. Written and conceived before the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume sought to enliven academic attention to the potentialities of infection, transmission and contraction for expanding theatre and performance studies scholarship. Published in the interminable shadow of the crisis, it is ghosted by our collective unknowing of what lay ahead and shot through with a queasy retrospective urgency. Walsh and his collaborators make a persuasive case for contagion as a fundamental technology of the theatre and of performance – both in practice and in theory. They also take aim at the plural ways in which contagion shapes some of the organizing discourses of everyday life, including gender, race and sexuality. It is a wide-ranging and ambitious book that, through its careful structure, offers many routes into the subject of contagion for a range of readers.
The book sets out to answer a number of questions:
(1) how has contagion been understood to happen and operate?; (2) what are its real and imagined effects?; (3) how have these effects been a source of distress and pleasure for theatre makers, audiences, and various authorities?; and finally (4) what does theatrical contagion suggest about the real and imagined work of our cultural borders and structures of social–political organization? (p. 5).
The answers are many and varied and encompass case studies from health apps in Liam Jarvis's critically reflective work on affective realism and dementia, to Traveller camps and communities in Lynne McCarthy's incisive reading of the Dale Farm evictions, to Walsh's own striking examination of kinship and Dickie Beau's Re-member Me. Structured around three main sections that can perhaps be broadly described as focusing on bodies, sites and atmospheres, Theatres of Contagion is at its best when it entangles social discourse, protest and artistic practice. Here the essays splice three things to striking effect: the ways in which sociopolitical discourses engage metaphors of contagion as a means of governance, the ways in which social groups have reframed infection as a site of belonging and resistance, and the ways in which artists have sought to intervene in the practices of transmission. In so doing the volume invites its readers to think of contagion not as a thing but as an encultured and politicized encounter.
The book captures the ambivalences that lie at the heart of contagion. That is to say that contagion, through the act of transmitting something, necessarily returns us to both our individuality and our collectivity. If the pandemic, as Benjamin Bratton and others have written, reminded us of our fundamental and biological sociality, then it did so via vectors of isolation and intimacy. In this sense, contagion is something that is to be both feared and desired. Walsh's book is animated by a deep understanding of the dread and longing for the uncontained. Indeed, he writes, ‘In theatres of contagion, we see how the thrill of contact is often chased by the fear of too much’ (p. 17). A reader is reminded, then, through the mechanism of contagion, that they are a porous subject, not a sovereign one. Herein lies the critical intervention of the book. In lingering in the moments of leaking, seepage, infection, proximity, dirtying and general out-of-placeness, Theatres of Contagion illuminates the prevailing discourses and structures that organize people's lives and keeps them ‘tidy’. Thereby the volume creates more room to better understand our fundamental interdependence. Readers who are engaged with such questions would do well to start with this book and keep their eyes peeled for Walsh's forthcoming (2023) book Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions, which develops many of the key ideas of this collection. Theatres of Contagion is both timely and date-stamped, and perhaps this peculiar time signature helps to further underscore the strange disturbances of order that always nest with contagion. In short, it is a book for anyone who is trying to work out the quivering thresholds of now and then.
