@inproceedings{01KQWEFWP3VHVE6ECQW1ZM2EPA,
  abstract     = {{Ontroerend Goed’s Handle with Care prompts a rethinking of the very notion of the theatrical scene by allowing text and objects—rather than actors—to form a direct relationship with the audience. This work fundamentally overturns the structure of drama centred theatre, in which text is embodied and represented through the actor’s body and interpreted by the audience through the actor’s spoken performance. The scene begins not with the audience seeing letters on a small piece of paper placed on their seats, but with their reading them. Viewing the stage as a site of “enactment and utterance,” and foregrounding the reading of text over spectacle, aligns with Philippe Lacoue Labarthe’s concept of the “archi theatre.” Furthermore, the performance can also be interpreted through Jean Luc Nancy’s perspective on staging as the visual realisation of utterance, particularly his emphasis on the mouth.
When the stage is viewed through Nancy’s metaphor of the mouth, the staging of text emerges not as an act of human-centred speech but as something continually reformed through a network of relations involving both human and nonhuman entities. Such expanded thinking becomes possible precisely because the actor—traditionally responsible for the event of utterance on stage—is absent, allowing us to reconsider where and how utterance occurs. Drawing on Nancy’s concept of the stage as a starting point, this study examines how text and objects function as nonhuman agents in forming relationships with the audience. To do so, it engages Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (ANT), N. Katherine Hayles’s notion of the text and Martin Buber’s “I–Thou (Ich–Du)” relationship as applied to encounters with the nonhuman.}},
  author       = {{Shin, Eun Kyoung}},
  booktitle    = {{Posthumanism and theatre : new paradigms of posthuman imagination and performing arts}},
  keywords     = {{posthuman theatre,actorless theatre,ontroerend goed,handle with care,text actant}},
  language     = {{kor}},
  location     = {{KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea}},
  pages        = {{1}},
  publisher    = {{Korean Theatre Studies Assocition}},
  title        = {{The agency of the text operating on a stage without actors}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}