Viral Performance

Front matter

Viral Performance

Viral Performance

Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age

Chapter 4 “Everything Is Everywhere”: Viral Performance Networks Conclusion Virus in the Theater

Notes Bibliography vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not be—and I would not be where I am—without the generosity and guidance of Tom Sellar. He championed the idea of this book from its earliest stages and provided trenchant, challenging editorial suggestions as it grew. In “Crit” classes at the Yale School of Drama, he taught clarity of thought and expression, and in the offices at Theater magazine, he taught editing as well as editorial vision. It was because of him that I attended my first scholarly conference, published my first scholarly essay, began reviewing theater professionally, and gained exposure to more pathbreaking contemporary performances than I can name. I will always be grateful.

Having Elinor Fuchs as a mentor, professor, and role model has likewise been nothing short of transformative. She taught me to search for the deep structures underpinning drama and performance—to always look, and look again—and provided critical feedback as I researched and wrote this book. Her influence is on every page, as well as in every critical review I write and in every classroom where I teach. I am also deeply grateful to the entire faculty of Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism at Yale—James Leverett, Gordon Rogoff, Catherine Sheehy, and James Magruder—who have shaped my writing and teaching since my first year of graduate school, and particularly to Marc Robinson, who taught me (again) how to read plays.

Much of this book was written while I was teaching at Bard College under the inspiring leadership of Gideon Lester, who created the ideal setting for thinking—and rethinking—contemporary performance. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Theater & Performance Program—Jorge Cortifias, Jack Ferver, Chiori Miyagawa, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Jean Wagner—and to Jennifer Lown, our program administrator, without whom nothing could happen.

Upon arriving at Bard, I was lucky to join a cohort of welcoming, highly collaborative junior faculty. I am grateful to Marisa Libbon, Christian Crouch, Erika Switzer, Lauren Curtis, Maria Cecire, Ben Coonley, and everyone involved with the Experimental Humanities concentration, which has supported my research in numerous ways. I am also grateful to my students at Bard, whose intelligence and inquisitiveness has inspired me to think harder about my own work, and who have proven among the best companions for viewing contemporary performance.

My critical prose has benefited from the work of many rigorous editors during my years at the Village Voice. Pm particularly grateful to Brian Parks, vii viii Acknowledgments my first editor there; as well as to Jane Kim, Angela Ashman, Zoe Beery, and Danny King.

This book has benefited from the work of excellent editors at Northwestern University Press. Thanks to Mike Levine for encouraging the project, and for perceptive edits; and to Gianna Mosser for her sensitive and insightful guidance, as well as to Maggie Grossman, Anne Gendler, and the entire production team. My peer reviewers—whose insights and suggestions challenged me to push my ideas, research, and writing in new directions—also deserve deep thanks.

Many archivists, librarians, and artists have provided invaluable support to me as I researched this book. I’m particularly grateful to the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale, which provided a summer research fellowship in 2010, so that I could begin my research on the Living Theatre. Susan Brady of the Beinecke, and Tom Walker, the Living Theatre’s archivist, provided knowledgeable assistance as I continued this research. Nancy Goldman and Mona Nagai of the Pacific Film Archive arranged for the reproduction of an image of the Dilexi Broadcast, and Jim Newman granted permission to publish it. I am grateful to Philip Dombowski at Canada’s National Gallery, who provided assistance as I researched General Idea, and to AA Bronson of General Idea for generous permission to quote and to publish images. Library staff at the New York Library for the Performing Arts and at New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections were immensely helpful, as was Bronwen Bitetti at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies library. I am grateful to Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble, Marc Estrin, Franco Mattes, Kathryn Blume, Joanna Warsza, Joanne Pottlitzer, Sheila Cohen Tissot, Robert Neblett, and Iman Aoun for their generosity in speaking with me about their work and for allowing me to publish images of it. Pm grateful to Matthew Cornish, Ryan Davis, and Lauren Dubowski for assistance with translation.

Early research for this book developed with the support and insight of numerous editors. Pm grateful to Tom Sellar at Theater magazine, which published an early version of portions of chapter 3; Nadine George-Graves, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, which published my previous research about the Living Theatre; T. Nikki Cesare-Schotzko and Mariellen Sanford at TDR, which published an early version of my discussion of Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children; Bonnie Marranca and Joseph Cermatori at PAJ, which published a book review of Gregg Bordowitz’s Imagevirus; and Anna Gallagher-Ross at aCCeSsions, who commissioned a short essay about General Idea’s Going Thru the Motions, and who provided insightful copy-edits to many sections of this manuscript.

This project has benefited from the insights of colleagues in many working conference working sessions and panels. These included many American Society for Theatre Research groups—those dedicated to Theater & Transmedia; Sustainable Tools for Precarious Subjects; Afterlives of the Sixties;

Acknowledgments 1x

Contaminating Bodies, Infectious Displays; and Massed Subjects, Massed Power—as well as the Theatre History Focus Group at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Mapping Theaters of Exile seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association, the writing workshop at the Mellon Summer School for Theater and Performance Research at Harvard, and Yale’s Performance Studies Working Group.

This project, and my development as a scholar, have been strengthened by the examples and the generous mentorship of many senior colleagues, including Cindy Rosenthal, whose work on the Living Theatre has deeply influenced my own, and Paige McGinley. I also count myself lucky to be part of a cohort of young scholars—classmates, then colleagues—whose adventurousness, insight, and dedication to mutual support have been invaluable to me: John Muse, Julia Fawcett, Christopher Grobe, Matthew Cornish, Joseph Cermatori, Ryan Hatch, Julia Jarcho, Alex Ripp, and Jennifer Buckley.

Shonni Enelow provided moral and editorial encouragement when I needed it most. And Kate Bredeson has been the most stalwart of supporters, in challenges professional and beyond, from our earliest conversations at Harvard’s Mellon School. She offered editorial insight about several sections of this book, particularly its Living Theatre chapter.

More than ten years ago, Jacob Gallagher-Ross edited a class assignment about Strindberg’s To Damascus. He has read—and offered intelligent, insightful, and necessary editorial suggestions about—nearly everything I have written since. That includes every section of this book, many times over; I could not have completed this work without him. A person could not ask for a better strategic ally, editor, collaborator, or friend.

This book is dedicated to my family. To my parents, Nancy Felton and Joel Dansky. Their constant belief that the world can be better is undoubtedly one of the reasons I write about artists who believe that, too. To my chosen family—Katya Schapiro, Catherine Wallach, Stacey McMath, Avi Glickstein, and Simon Glickstein—for making a home. And to Pete: the newest and best arrival, who entered the world just as I was finishing this book.

Viral Performance

In February 2009, Caryl Churchill premiered a short play called Seven Jewish Children at London’s Royal Court Theatre. This pointed, poetic meditation on contentious Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian histories is both compact— its printed text running a scant six pages—and oblique, containing neither named characters nor specified settings. Each of the brief, elliptical scenes features adult voices arguing over how to explain fraught historical events to an unseen, voiceless child. They debate how to talk about the Holocaust, and later the Israeli war of independence and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. By the time Seven Jewish Children had its American premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop, the text had sparked local, and then international controversy. Viewers were outraged by what they perceived as biased depictions of Jewish and Israeli actions and rhetoric. But not only viewers. Equally angry responses came from those who had not seen or read the play but had instead heard of its subject matter secondhand.

As the debate surrounding Seven Jewish Children circulated through international media, the play began to proliferate too. Activists performed it at political rallies and community gatherings, from Israel to Washington, D.C., and videos of productions began circulating on YouTube. Churchill’s text soon inspired a wave of copycat playlets, with titles like Seven Palestinian Children, Seven Other Children, and The Eighth Child—some of these curated into joint stagings with the original, others appearing only online. The authors of these new texts mimicked Churchill’s form but replaced her dialogue with language reflecting their own perspectives. Within months, many versions of Churchill’s play were in circulation around the world: geographically dispersed, but thematically connected. In other words, Seven Jewish Children is a play that, in the parlance of the digital age, “went viral.”

Not only did Seven Jewish Children go viral. It was, I believe, designed to do so. The play’s eloquent brevity, its sparse staging requirements, and its deliberate political provocations suggest that it belongs to a new species of performance, self-consciously created for rapid international circulation: viral performance for the twenty-first century. If Churchill could not have predicted how artists, audiences, and reading and listening publics would respond to her text, the play’s form still suggested openness to rapid dissemination and radical reimagining. So did the terms under which Churchill offered other artists the production rights, which were openly available at no cost, as long as audiences were not charged admission and the producing artists collected funds for the organization Medical Aid for Palestinians.!

Understanding Seven Jewish Children not only as a play written for digitally dispersed publics, but more particularly as an instance of what I am calling “viral performance,” places Churchill’s drama in the company of a diverse collection of modern and contemporary projects that draw on theater’s contagious possibilities to engage with audiences and to spread ideas, gestures, and images in live and mediated form. This book traces the contours of such a constellation of artistic works, charting a series of viral dramaturgies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They range from the Living Theatre’s revolutionary performances of the 1960s to the media-savvy ventures of the self-described viral artists General Idea, and from digital-age provocations by Eva and Franco Mattes to theatrical networks like the 2003 Lysistrata Project. The works I place in this category are almost always deeply political, seeking to mobilize spectators toward radical action or to engage them in considering the contagious properties of ideology in the culture at large. They also almost always harness the properties of emerging media forms in order to depict, but also create, fundamental shifts in the transmission of action, and especially actions meant to further social change and political critique.

The viral, a concept that has not yet been substantively applied to theater or performance, illuminates these artists’ responses to some of the oldest questions in theatrical theory, and to a rapidly changing world of new media, new audiences, and new modes of public participation. Viruses, in their many forms—digital, biological, artistic—nearly always function as disruptions in the fabric of daily life, making them natural allies for generations of avant-garde artists who elevated rupture into the primary dramaturgy of radical change. Meanwhile, viral dissemination, with its implications of speed, simultaneity, and multidirectional spread, draws new technologies into service, and pushes to the fore assumptions about how and why we pass ideas, affects, and gestures to one another: out of revolutionary fervor or allegiance to ideologies, motivated by social critique or inchoate affective response. In creating viral works, these artists provoke profound questions about the politics of dissemination itself, asking whether media-fueled transmission can ever be democratic, or whether it always ultimately shores up systems of control. They engage with the politics of spectatorship, dismantling easy equations between participation and political efficacy, and between contagious dissemination and the loss of individual identity and choice.

Viral dramaturgies also challenge fundamental ideas about theater. They stretch performance time, rejecting compact dramatic structures in favor of the open-ended series, the expansive network, or the evolving process.

A History of Contagion J

They upend relationships between actors and spectators, turning audience members into performers or placing the actions of viewers center stage. They unravel distinctions between live and mediated art, and between performance and its documentation. They draw attention to the invisible circulation and dissemination of emotion and affect. This book, by examining a series of works that are productively described in viral terms, argues for the necessary inclusion of the viral in dialogues about radical, political, and transmedial performance.

My exploration of viral performance begins by drawing together the many strands of theatrical and cultural theory necessary to come to terms with the stakes and dimensions of the viral. No singular theoretical framework can account for the artistic and cultural power that concepts of virality and contagion have held; for the ways they have evolved; or for their changing relationships to performance, media, and spectatorship. Instead, I invoke a diverse range of historical precedents, from Plato’s foundational assertion of theater’s contagious power, to Artaud, whose essay “The Theater and the Plague” set the terms for modern artists experimenting with viral modes. I draw on the history of new media forms, which have frequently been understood to wield contagious power, and I examine contagion’s changing significance in affect theory and in postmodern philosophy.

Through such a wide-ranging introduction, I aim to offer the panoramic view of viral theory—and the performance histories it calls upon—that is necessary for the artistic close-readings that follow. My case studies are arranged chronologically, beginning in the 1960s with the Living Theatre’s Mysteries and Smaller Pieces and Paradise Now and viewing the company’s use of Artaudian principles as a point of origin for modern viral performance. Moving to the early 1970s in my second chapter, I juxtapose three dramaturgies of invisibility, all of which relied on spectators to perform in the near-absence of actors: General Idea’s transmedial spectacles, Augusto Boal’s invisible theater, and Marc Estrin’s radical infiltrative theater. My story then proceeds into the 1990s, investigating artists who created work alongside the evolving internet, and who use large-scale public fictions to test the contagious properties of new media and performance: the collective Critical Art Ensemble; the duo Eva and Franco Mattes; and the German film and theater director Christoph Schlingensief. Finally, I explore the twenty-first-century advent of viral performance networks, examining both the dramaturgy and the artistic philosophies fueling the 2003 Lysistrata Project, Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays Festival, and Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children. I conclude with a meditation on “Virus in the Theater,” a 2006 performance project that simultaneously returned to the origins of viral dramaturgy and suggested new directions in which the viral might venture.

In grouping these artists together—in many cases, artists who have not been considered side by side before—and in calling them viral, my goal is to recognize their shared participation in a set of theatrical strategies, and to build a case for the viral as a thematic and formal concept that has held profound meaning for many modern and contemporary theater-makers. I do not suggest that these theater-makers constitute an artistic movement, or that they represent a direct line of artistic influence (in fact, resistance to such linear modes of evolution is, for many of these artists, a motivating factor driving them to work in viral modes). I also do not presume to account for every artist who has created viral performance; my case studies are limited in number and in geographical and historical scope, representing a few of the many artists laboring in the aftermath of the European and American avant-gardes, and engaging, overtly or obliquely, with the legacies of Plato and Aristotle. Nor can I claim that every artist analyzed here has self-identified as a maker of viral or contagious work. Rather, I view the philosophical and artistic ideas explored in this book as multiple dimensions of a complex history: a series of linked schools of thought, adjacent lines of influence, and complementary modes of art-making that continue to permeate conceptions of contagious art, and of contagion itself. The artists described here challenge wider cultural assumptions about the meaning of “the viral,” about the nature of a “virus,” and about the ways ideas, feelings, and gestures spread.

I also deliberately avoid proposing a singular definition of the term “viral,” or its close cousins: “virus,” “contagious,” and “infectious,” among others. In biological terms, the virus is a modern discovery, emerging with the twentieth century. The word describes an agent that spreads infectiously, and that can only survive through the life of its host body. “Viral,” whose emergence in the Oxford English Dictionary postdates “virus” by nearly fifty years, describes the mode in which such pathogenic agents spread. “Contagion” is much older, referring more broadly to the communication of disease from one body to another. Such meanings have offered profound metaphors and, in some cases, structural principles for the artists in this book. Yet holding too closely to biological analogies would limit analysis of the artistic works under discussion. This book is not about the relationship between performance and medical disease (indeed, many wonderful studies already take up that topic).? Rather, I seek out the changing cultural, artistic, and philosophical power that the concepts “viral” and “contagious” wield: their influence on radical theater’s form, and on its terms of engagement with spectators and with media. I use the term “viral” flexibly, exploring the vocabulary of infection’s evolving significance for ideas about cultural transmission, spectatorship, artistic power, and politics.

Such terminology—viruses and virality, contagion and transmission—is especially charged in the current era: our historical moment is a viral one. The advent of digital culture (as well as the evolving culture of technology that preceded it) has occasioned a seismic shift in the discourse surrounding contagiousness and the viral. “The virus,” wrote artist and scholar Zach Blas in a 2012 essay, “is perhaps the major trope of the postmodern condition.”?

In so saying, Blas joined a growing number of philosophers and scholars in fields ranging from media studies to affect theory who have identified the figure of the virus, and viral modes of transmission, as primary metaphors in the contemporary imagination. Viruses and virality make legible many of the political, social, artistic, and economic relationships in twenty-first-century culture. They describe the workings of digital-age capitalism, the strategies fueling new modes of political action, and the affective properties of emerging media forms.

Viral and contagious models of thought emerged in philosophy both before and alongside the development of digital technologies. As early as 1987, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proposed the concept of contagion as an alternative model for cultural and social transmission and development, one not tied to heredity or bound by capitalist-controlled channels of power. “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production,” they wrote.* While contagion here represented an escape hatch from constricted social systems and historical paradigms, in the decades that followed, the concept was increasingly linked to global capital and to digital technology. In 1996 Jean Baudrillard commented on the epidemiological power of the computer virus, writing, “The tiniest computer bacillus will soon create as much mayhem in our societies as the influenza or smallpox bacilli did among the Amerindians of the sixteenth century.” * And in 2000 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri declared, “The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion.”°®

By the first decades of the twenty-first century, scholars were looking back, tracing the advent of the viral, and looking forward to predict its evolution. Thierry Bardini’s 2006 essay “Hypervirus: A Clinical Report” argued that it was in the early 1980s that philosophical concepts of the virus began to merge with ideas about the computer virus and about biological epidemic. “At the dawn of capitalism’s fourth phase, the hypervirus awoke,” writes Bardini—“hypervirus” referring, here, to the contagious spread of the viral concept itself (as Bardini puts it, “the ‘virus’ virus”).? He continued, “From this point on, an explosive diffusion in ‘postmodern culture’ emerged, eventually it plateaued near saturation, redefining culture as a viral ecology.”* The following year, the media scholar Jussi Parikka, in his study Digital Contagions, proposed the concept of “viral capitalism.”? The year 2012 saw two significant works of scholarship dedicated to the concept of the viral: a volume of Women’s Studies Quarterly entitled “Viral” ® and Tony D. Sampson’s Virality, which synthesizes theories of social contagion, examining the claim that “the age of networks is indeed the age of contagion.”" Such assertions, made over the course of decades and across intellectual fields, aid in identifying the models of viral transmission practiced and questioned by the artists in this book, and testify to the recent proliferation of viral theories.

And yet: theater, in the cultural imagination, has always been contagious. Since Plato, philosophers have argued that stage actions can be infectiously transmitted to audience members—some viewing this as a source of theater’s danger to society, others following Aristotle in seeing it as the reason why performance can serve as a form of moral inoculation against social ills. These classical modes of understanding theatrical reception have persisted: they remain, occasionally submerged, beneath centuries of anti-theatrical rhetoric, and they fuel defenses of theater’s moral potential. They structure our understanding of how and why performance works in society—the contentious question of theatrical “efficacy”—and they inflect modern philosophies of audience reception and response, from the writings of Artaud to those of Ranciére. They add dimension and stakes to questions of theatrical contagion, recurring in renovated form in modern and contemporary viral performance.

These models of thought register, above all, a continued and widespread belief—one held by artists, philosophers, critics, political leaders, even corporate marketers—that when people come into contact with one another, something spreads. Whether we plan it or not, whether we like it or not, whether it spreads through imitation or through difference, through deliberate copying or subconscious somnambulism, something spreads. Performance, an art form requiring and relying on live contact, renders such spreading visible, raises its stakes, gums up its works with fiction, and encodes it in dramatic structure and theatrical form. The artists explored in this book rarely attempt to disseminate their ideas or gestures as directly as a viral marketer, a political leader, or a computer hacker would. These artists’ approaches to transmission, rather, tend to undermine such simplified concepts of contagion, to point out our susceptibilities to consumer capitalism and political slogans, to seek subversive forms of dissemination. Yet they also cannot help holding dialogue with the many strands of discourse, philosophical and popular, surrounding viral culture: all testifying to the viral’s persistent appearance and reappearance, all directing our attention to the age-old instinct that—in some form, through some mechanism—when people gather, something spreads.

Platonic Foundations: Theater Is Contagious

If “going viral” is a twenty-first-century concept, the idea that theater is contagious is as old as Plato, who laid the foundations for describing performance in the language of infection, contagion, and inoculation. His theories prompted Aristotle’s famous response in the Poetics, and structured antitheatrical discourse for centuries to come. The historical distance separating these classical philosophers from contemporary artists like Eva and Franco Mattes and Critical Art Ensemble only deepens the significance of contemporary artists’ choices (implicit or explicit) to create work that engages with spectators in Platonic and Aristotelian terms.

In the Republic, Plato, speaking through the figure of Socrates, famously banished poets from his ideal city, citing the dangerous effects mimesis might have on the unformed minds of the city’s young leaders. Unflattering tales of gods and heroes could inspire morally muddled thinking on the part of listeners, and susceptible audience members might be persuaded to imitate the weak or immoral behavior they witnessed onstage. Actors, meanwhile, might absorb characters’ bad qualities simply by playing them. Plato’s initial discussion of the perils of mimesis occurs in book 3, where Socrates sketches a course of study for the hypothetical leaders of the new city. These unformed minds, Socrates declares, must listen only to stories in which gods and heroes are portrayed in the flattering light of virtue:

For, my dear Adeimantus, if our young men listen to passages like these seriously and don’t laugh at them as unworthy, they are hardly likely to think this sort of conduct unworthy of them as men, or to resist the temptation to similar words and actions.”

Even comedy is suspect, since Socrates links it directly to the expression of violent impulses, noting, “Indulgence in violent laughter commonly invites a violent reaction.”

Not only would it be dangerous for the Republic’s guardians to witness examples of gods, heroes, or leaders behaving immorally; performance would also, as Jonas Barish notes in The Antitheatrical Prejudice, allow for a vertiginous freedom of thought that could lead citizens to question their predetermined roles in a heavily regulated society. Socrates argues that each person possesses narrow aptitudes, “which makes it impossible to play many roles well, whether in real life or in representations of it on the stage.” For the guardians’ part, he says:

If they do take part in dramatic or other representations, they must from their earliest years act the part only of characters suitable to them—men of courage, self-control, piety, freedom of spirit and similar qualities. They should neither do a mean action, nor be clever at acting a mean or otherwise disgraceful part on the stage for fear of catching the infection in real life."

With the phrase “catching the infection,” Plato directly links the concept of contagion to mimesis, bequeathing to future generations of anti-theatricalists the idea that performance is contagious, both to those who watch stage representations and to those who perform them.

The major classical counterpoint to Plato’s idea—Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in the Poetics—envisions a different conduit from performance to morality. Rather than resisting the temptation to fall under imitative poetry’s spell, Aristotle writes, audiences can experience catharsis by watching a tragedy that follows particular dramaturgical principles, and through catharsis, can eliminate violent and antisocial impulses. In the Poetics, Aristotle describes the combined effects of the elements of a tragic plot, proposing that “through pity and fear it achieves the purgation (catharsis) of such emotions.” !

Aristotle wrote relatively little on the precise meaning of catharsis, and the concept has been the subject of intense debate among classical scholars." In addition to the Poetics, the concept appears in the Politics, a work that cannot be assumed to employ “catharsis” in the same way, but which nevertheless offers additional description of the term. In the Politics, Aristotle suggests that listening to music, even music that conveys strong and dangerous feelings, can be morally beneficial, provoking a form of purgation in its audiences:

An emotion which strongly affects some souls is present in all to a varying degree, for example pity and fear, and also ecstasy. To this last some people are particularly liable, and we see that under the influence of religious music and songs which drive the soul to frenzy, they calm down as if they had been medically treated and purged. People who are given to pity or fear, and emotional people generally, and others to the extent that they have similar emotions, must be affected in the same way; for all of them must experience a kind of purgation and pleasurable relief.’

Such concepts of purgation and relief represent one powerful strand of thought about how theater can be socially valuable, not in spite of its immoral or antisocial themes but because of them. Many of the artists I explore in this book see their work as a form of inoculation, presenting audiences with performances of social and political threat in order to, emotionally or ideologically, immunize them against the greater harms of ignorance and paranoia.

The Platonic attack on the theater, and the associated language of contagion, contamination, and inoculatory catharsis, reemerged repeatedly in the anti-theatrical debates that cropped up in times and places where performance played a vital role in Western culture. Such concepts recurred under the Roman republic and empire, in the writings of the early Christian philosophers Tertullian and Saint Augustine.” In the sixteenth century, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy echoed both Plato and Aristotle;*° in the seventeenth century, the Puritan William Prynne’s Histriomastix condemned the English stage in tones that recalled Tertullian’s,*! while Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage took a Platonic view of theater’s ability to influence the public.” In the nineteenth century, the language of contagion emerged in, for instance, the scandals surrounding such modern dramas as Ibsen’s Ghosts, which was famously condemned as “a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly.”

The Platonic fear of theater’s moral contagion, and the Aristotelian hope in performance as social inoculation, have endured. For my purposes, in describing the works of modern and contemporary artists who have drawn on these ideas, it matters less whether recent artists’ dramaturgies are precisely or consciously rooted in these philosophers’ texts, and much more that Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, reshaped and renegotiated, have proven inspiring to artists over two millennia, and function particularly as grounding assumptions for artists creating viral performance. Such concepts reemerged with particular force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when new types of media—which, in turn, demanded new types of spectatorship and public participation—inspired avant-garde artists to rethink the contagious properties of performance. During the same era, evolving alongside new media forms, a new school of philosophy, known as crowd theory and promoted by social theorists like Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon, began to explore the social transmission of ideas, actions, and emotions. Their thinking would have a profound effect on the emergence of viral and contagious concepts in the modern era.