More toward the notes in the video themselves (I'm more in media studies and far less conversant in theater studies): from my own zettelkasten on the live nature/immediacy of performance subject, I've seen how some older cultures (ancient Greeks and all sorts of Indigenous peoples, including modern Australian indigenous) use(d) their associative memories in ways we don't generally today, and as such would have been able to "re-live" performances which have occurred in the past without modern recording tools. Perhaps it's been explored previously, but if it's of interest to you and your current work or perhaps post-Ph.D., Lynne Kelly's Knowledge & Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture (Cambridge, 2015) may be helpful along with the supporting works of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and Walter J. Ong (esp. Orality and Literacy; Methuen, 1982). If you really want to spelunk this area, there are some additional explorations of these in the overlap of Frances Yates' (1966) discussion of memory theaters in Western culture.

Robert Kanigel's "Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry (Knopf, 2021), may provide a quick/fun (audiobook available) non-technical introduction into Milman's work on Homer for those who haven't come across it before and are interested in early performance techniques. It provides an intriguing and entertaining detective story on multiple fronts.

As ever, thanks for sharing your notes and the fascinating references within them... 🗃❤

https://www.britannica.com/topic/RUR

Paulson, Michael. “Aaron Sorkin Revamps ‘Camelot,’ With Challenges Classic and New.” The New York Times, March 22, 2023, sec. Theater. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/theater/aaron-sorkin-camelot-broadway.html.

Aaron Sorkin earned a B.F.A. in musical theater from Syracuse University, but didn't really put it to use until his work on Camelot which opened in 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_book

See also: https://hyp.is/1EzsxtvjEeySBFv-Y4NmJw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=awce_j2myQw

Is physics open or closed?

Could a play, made in a zettelkasten-like structure, be performed in a way so as to keep a consistent authorial voice?

What potential applications does the idea of opera aperta have for artificial intelligence? Can it be created in such a way as to give an artificial brain a consistent "authorial voice"?

Holden Thorp, H. (2021) ‘No Senator, It’s Not Theater | Editor’s Blog’. https//blogs.sciencemag.org/editors-blog/2021/03/22/no-senator-its-not-theater/.

what are these theaters he's talking about??

An important outlying theme of this novel is the difference in perceptions of the classes and the difference in how each class treated each other. The theater, while bringing together a lot of different classes and placing them in the same place, still had ways to separate people based on class. The theater, described in Fantomina, was no exception and utilized location as a method to separate the different social classes. This separation is outlined when our unnamed protagonist is describing the woman at the playhouse, “a Woman who sat in a Corner of the Pit”, indicating that she was of a lower class. Alternatively, our protagonist is first described as, “happened to be in a Box one Night at the Playhouse”, indicating that she was of a good class. This difference in location of each class is a great indicator of how each class was perceived. For the members of the higher classes, they were seen as more important and more respectable than the lower classes. This characterization of the higher classes is evident by the better seating and better view of the stage given to the box seats since they were physically higher than the pit area. This difference in height in the seating locations resembles a superiority complex given to people sitting in the boxes, while giving the constant reminder to the people in the pit that they were less important than the high classes located in the boxes. Source: The Haymarket Theatre

This is a picture of what a theater at the time would look like. In the picture, the pit is the area in the bottom and the boxes are the balconies off to the side on each floor. This picture gives a visual representation of how theaters at the time would separate the high class from the low class using location differences between the boxes and the pit.

The choice to start the setting of Fantomina in a playhouse reflects the idea that our unnamed protagonist takes on the workings of an actor to fool Beauplaisir with several different personalities and costume disguises. During the course of the story, our protagonist is described as “had no sooner design'd this Frolick, than she put it in Execution; and muffling her Hoods over her Face, went the next Night into the Gallery-Box, and practising as much as she had observ'd, at that Distance, the Behaviour of that Woman” in order to deceive Beauplaisir into being with her multiple different times. In this quote, our protagonist acquires the façade of the women in the theater by putting on clothes that resembles her outward appearance and by observing her habits and attitudes. The phrase "practising as much as she had observ'd" sounds a lot like what an actor or actress in a theater would do when trying to become their role and get into character. It could be that the setting of the playhouse at the beginning of Fantomina instilled a sense of acting in the mind of our protagonist that enticed her to continue pretending to be someone she is not by changing her outer appearance and personality throughout the novel.

By explicitly invoking the theater with the actor image, Latour shifts the metaphor to one that involves not only the monologue and the monologuer, but also the director, stage designer, the props master, and the stagehands. Compared to my earlier invocation of Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed, Latour seems to emphasize Brecht's Dialectical/Epic Theatre, which wears it's stagedness on its sleeve. I try to recommend my 1900 students check out the theater on campus, because so many of the under-examined elements of presentation are clearly explicit choices.

Thinking about this in terms of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, and the use of theater games to help people understand situations through performance, rather than through tools like discussion. He terms the participants "spect-actors," moving them from outside spectators to inside participants through various role-playing games.

Particularly, Barad's line about "unexamined habits of the mind" draws my attention. Boal's spect-actor is often caught in moments of invisible theater, having an emotional response to a (later revealed to have been staged) event, then forced to examine those responses.