This dissertation will examine the constitutive roles that disgust and boredom play in contemporary theater, and

it will ask why it is that a substantial range of disturbational performance would seek to elicit these radically unpleasant emotions in particular. The affects of disgust, one of the chief mechanisms of acculturation, and boredom, a consequence of civilized modernityrespective responses to extremes of overstimulation and understimulation

The avant-garde call for a merging of life and theater derives from a Nietzschean imperative to overcome the existential disgust and weariness by life for life, implied by the fractious idealist structure of mimesis upheld by a tasteful theatrical tradition that separates representation and reality, and elevates drama over and above the messy contingencies of theatrical performance. To encourage this vitalistic overcoming of profound revulsion and tedium that shape and characterize western modernity, a protheatricalist avant-garde cultivates the disgusting and the boring as primary aesthetic properties of its theater to contest the bourgeois mandates of taste (orderly beauty and functionality) and to stage a provocative affirmation of

Taking up this practice, many contemporary theater and performance artists have adopted the arousal of disgust and the boredom (sometimes alternately, sometimes in tandem) to confront their audiences with critical view of the censorious workings of this emotion to repress and make abject certain immanent orders of experience and to legitimate certain acts of ideological exclusion and marginalizing practices. Similarly, to animate

Theater is the perfect site for this kind of emotional agitation. As a public event, it encourages a more active resistance to or submissive endurance (as the case may be) of these inherently repellant sensations. The private acts of reading a boring novel or watching a revolting scene on television easily permit the avoidance of such disagreeable experiences, whereas the social conventions and the physical arrangements of spectatorship typically faced in the attendance of modern theater tend, to a degree greater than in other arts, to inhibit the aversive actions of an audience and promote its sustained confrontation with affective discomfort.

What a review of the existing literature reveals immediately is that the academic studies which address the question of the place of disgust and boredom in modern theater are scarce and slight. The tendency to surround the theaters affective influence in insubstantial, imprecise, and mystifying terms, together with the difficulties of doing justice to the fleeting and diverse phenomena of an audiences experience and the relatively unappealing nature of such emotions, may explain this dearth of critical attention. This is surprising, however, given the theaters storied intimacy with audience emotions and receptive modalities; serious scholarship has only lately warmed again to the discussion of emotions as useful

critical gauges in the theater as the humanities in general have given more credence to the cognitive and intellectual potential of the emotions. The so-called affective turn in critical approach owes much to classicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum and her influential work Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Subsequent work by Nussbaum has focused on the under-scrutinized ways such emotions as shame and disgust quietly but decisively shape and legitimate the ideological contours of modern legal systems.