Notes Towards a Sensible Stage

This essay explores the way in which twinning the words, ‘sensible’ and ‘stage’ mobilises both a recognition of the entanglement of bodies in and with the world through their common capacity for sensation, and the structure that acts to delimit movements, relations and becomings that is evoked through the image of the stage. This movement of simultaneous expansion and contraction suggests a doubling that is at the heart of theatre in which there is tension between the experience of commonality and estrangement, immersion and separation, affection and distance, action and passivity. Put very simply, this is the distinction between being immersed in sensing the world, and the representation of that experience set apart upon the stage. This sense of immersion can be connected to the affective and expansive capacities of the body that we find within Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming animal’, (Deleuze and Guattari 2001) and also to the dense networks of vibrant matter that Jane Bennett introduces us to in her work. (Bennett 2010) States of entanglement, inter connectivity and the affective nature of the body prevail in these philosophical scenarios. The figure of the stage suggests the opposite movement where – as well as providing an opening up to imaginary, fictional worlds – space and time are confined to a specific point (and I have elsewhere connected this to the philosopher, Alain Badiou’s work). And finally, in a very different way, the notion of the sensible as it is used here finds some connection with Jacques Ranciere’s commonality of the sensible in which we are conjoined through a common capacity for sensation but also divided in spheres of action. The ‘sensible stage’ therefore becomes a way of exploring some of these philosophical tendencies though contemporary art practice.