Beautiful radiant things: performance and its affects in applied theatre

This essay considers what viewing performance as an affective encounter—an embodied experience of sensations and intensities—might mean for applied theatre. Using auto-theory, which joins personal narrative with theories of affect, new materialism and post-humanism, we write an affective encounter that catches up people and objects in relations of resonance. Specifically, we write how a caravan in visual artist Patricia Piccinini’s work The Couple resonates through our experiences of caravan as children. Here, performance is an event that activates new ways of perceiving the complex and multi-dimensional patterns of daily life and within them, the capacity to be moved.