In Carl Lavery and Rezvan Zandieh’s chapter Artaud is afforded further examination. By adopting a hyphenated notion of a ‘re-turn’, Lavery and Zandieh challenge a historiography that would describe Artaud’s impact as being on the medium or discipline of theatre alone. Their ‘re-turn’ is not predicated on restoring an originary Artaud, nor does it aim to provide yet another reading or interpretation of his artistic work. By proposing a particular mode of arranging bodies and objects in time and space, Artaud’s theatricality overspills its disciplinary enclosure and informs other artforms. They posit Artaud as a performance theorist whose ideas allow for a unique take on the indeterminate borderline existing between theatre, conceptualism and installation art. To investigate that liminal fold, they place Artaud in dialogue with artist Christian Boltanski, whose relationship with theatre and performance they tease out.

Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès and Estelle Doudet counter the perception that ‘French medieval theatre’ might be French, medieval, or even theatre. Whereas theatre created from the seventeenth century onwards is termed ‘modern’, activity prior to this period is often portrayed as unsophisticated and non-professional. Bouhaïk-Gironès and Doudet argue for a new approach to the theatre that emerged between the mid twelfth and mid sixteenth centuries, which firstly testifies to its rich and varied nature. Second, they decentralize the geographical frame implied by ‘French’, recounting the French-speaking theatre activity taking place over France’s borders. Finally, they describe the sophisticated processes of collaborative performance-making, rehearsal and stage production that evolved during this period, which gave rise to a whole new lexicon of terms for describing practices by playwrights, actors, producers and audience members, many of which are used in European languages to this day.

This essay examines the link between eros and metaphysics in “The Seducer’s Diary.” It argues that Johannes approaches seduction as a performative rather than strategic medium, in which the goal is not conquest but a way of playing with reality. The diary, on this reading, allows us to explore the erotic structure of our most fundamental experiences of mediation and serves as a key to understanding the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic existence.

The chapter approaches Kraftwerk‘s oeuvre from a conceptual perspective and treats the band as performance artists. After discussing the artistic major influences, the first three albums from 1970 to 1973, later disowned by the core team of Ralf Hütter and Florin Schneider, are considered aginst the conceptual notion of ‘industrielle Volksmusik‘ (i.e. electronic pop music). Next, Kraftwerk‘s concept albums from 1974 to 1981 are analysed using key themes and lead aesthetics such as retro-futurism, man-machine, and post-humanism. The chapter then examines the impact of digitilisation on the artistic production of the band and discusses the reversal of the primary mode of operaton from the recording of new studio albums towards the curation of the core work in the period between 1983 and 2003. To conclude, the chapter looks at the evolution of their stage craft up to the current fully immersive and ritualistic audio-visual performances. I evaluate to which extent Kraftwerk can be seen as a paradigmatic example of a pop-cultural Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, fulfilling Richard Wagner‘s promise of a true Zukunftsmusik (future music).