Body without Means (Gesture) in Richard Foreman’s Theater

The tradition of suffering and fragmented body (body-in-ordeal) is followed, yet rectified, by Richard Foreman through his firm belief in the possibilities of bestowing the body with creation and reconstruction. Body should be seen as the potential site for phenomenological enactment with the surrounding world as a response to the biopolitical overactualization. In reaction to the imposed cultural forms on the body, this article tries to offer a poetics of (dis) embodiment on Foreman’s stage in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s meanswithout- ends pillar of thought and experience, which is the “gesture.” Body is rewritten by Foreman in order to reconcile with new forms of embodiment or gesturality. Gesture enspheres the critique of the forms of embodiment that are either installed by the power or modified by the subjects. The performers’ silence with their pure bodily existence and the voices without bodily presence reveal Agamben’s gesture. Another facet of mediality and without-means-ness emerges with Foreman’s cinematic techniques that expose his own body to multiple distortions such as close-ups through which he questions his authority as both the director and the actor. Foreman disintegrates the body into a flesh stripped of all its cultural robes and, therefore, manifesting its being-in-theprocess and potentiality.