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THE SENSES IN PERFORMANCE. Edited by Sally Banes and André Lepecki. Worlds of Performance Series. New York: Routledge, 2007; pp. xi + 216. $110.00 cloth, $33.95 paper.
This book marks an intervention by theatre and performance scholars into the burgeoning, interdisciplinary field of "sensory studies," which evaluates the role and function of the senses in cultures, societies, and histories. The "sensory turn," if one may call it that, recognizes that sensory perception is not simply physiological or given, but is, rather, constructed and acquired and therefore a historically and sociologically contingent phenomenon. The senses inflect, and are inflected by, culture and society; they are the means by which we come to know and derive meaning from the world around us, other people, our bodies, and ourselves. The senses, moreover, are political, and we ignore them at our peril.
In their introduction, Sally Banes and André Lepecki make the case for the historicity of perception and of the sensorium, and for what they call the "performative power of the senses": the way in which the senses operate in concert with social and cultural factors to constitute systems of power via "sensory disciplining" or "sensory dissent" (3). They argue that despite the fact that a whole plethora of sensorial information in performance has been "discarded, unnoticed, and poorly documented," the senses in performance are a site of "critical and performative power," and that performative practices are "privileged means by which to investigate processes where history and body create unsuspected sensorial-perceptual realms, alternative modes for life to be lived" (3, 2, 1). Performances of the senses reveal histories: "they...