Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet
Breath with the visual arts
Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth
century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not
include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions.
Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in
this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the
interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and
of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book
attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting,
new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's
Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby
contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.
Key Features
- Examines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a
theatrical performance and purely visual representation
- Juxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by
prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of
the representation of respiration by challenging modernist
essentialism
- The focus on this primary human physiological function and its
relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human
performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural
expression
- Facilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic
possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the
interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their
relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality
