The third session of the Toronto Reading Group on Affect will be taking place at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, November 30th at Art Metropole. Continuing the model that began in the last session of being informed by the writing from one of the five commissioned artists from Edition IV, we will begin the next session with a text by Emily Wardill, specifically The Theatre, the last segment from We Are Behind, her book collaboration with Ian White, that accompanied her exhibition at de Appel arts centre last year.

The Theatre opens with “There is no advertisement, no invitation. People are there, but nobody is there because they want to be an audience, and nobody is there because they want to ask anyone else to be an audience. Like a public street, though this can take place inside.” Returning the reading group directly to questions of performativity with which we began, the theatre is not only an architecture or an idiom, it is also a locus – a theatre of action, a theatre of war.

In addition, we will read Brian Massumi’s text Fear, (the Spectrum Said) [Positions, 2005], which begins and ends with an emphasis upon affective modulation and in several ways relates to the limits between the individual and the collective that are often mediated in the theatre.