Eirini Kartsaki 
On Repetition 
Writing, Performance and Art

On Repetition aims to unpack the different uses and functions of repetition within contemporary performance, dance practices, craft and writing. The collection, edited by Eirini Kartsaki, explores repetition in relation to intimacy, laughter, technology, familiarity and fear – proposing a new vocabulary for understanding what is at stake in works that repeat. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistics, sociology and performance studies – and employing case studies from a range of practices – the essays presented here combine to form a unique interdisciplinary exploration of the functions of repetition in contemporary culture.

Table of Content

Persisting Forever: Introducing Repetition 

Eirini Kartsaki


 


Chapter 1 – Of Secret Signals, Absent Masters and the Trembling of the Contours: 15Walter Benjamin, Yvonne Rainer and the Repeatability of Gesture

Swen Steinhäuser


 


Chapter 2 – All the Home’s a Stage: Uncanny Encounters Between Auditorium and Oikos 

Alan Read


 


Chapter 3 – Repetition as Technology of the Numinous in Performance: The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramovic´

Silvia Battista


 


Chapter 4 – When Is a Joke not a Joke? Reading (and Re-reading) Stewart Lee’s ‘The Rap Singers’ 

Emma Bennett


 


Chapter 5 – The Crying Channel 

Claire Hind and Gary Winters


 


Chapter 6 -The Cyclical Pleasures and Deaths of Symbolization: How to Become 117 a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaptation of Frankenstein 

Lauren Barri Holstein


 


Chapter 7 – A Pointless Pastime? Early Nineteenth-Century Pin-Prick Imagery

Alice Barnaby


 


Chapter 8 – Repeated Acts of Intimacy and Harm in Andrea Brady’s Mutability: Scripts for Infancy 

Gareth Farmer


 


Chapter 9 -‘I Was Not HEARD’: Trauma and Articulation in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk 

Linda Kemp


 


Chapter 10 – Déjà-vu, Doubles and Dread: The Uncanny and Christopher Smith’s Triangle 

Ruth Mc Phee


 


Chapter 11 – Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes 

Eirini Kartsaki


 


Afterword: Repetition or Recognition? 

Clare Foster

About the author

Eirini Kartsaki is a teaching fellow in theatre and performance studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is also the editor of On Repitition.