The Scene of Foreplay

Giulia Palladini is a researcher and critical theorist. Her work focuses on the politics and erotics of artistic production, social and cultural history. She explores relations between labor and pleasure, work and free time, temporality and affect, historiography and the archive, addressing both contemporary performance and performance history. Her approach is informed by historical materialism, Marxist and feminist theories, and queer theory. She has joined the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton in 2017.

Giulia is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor, and Leisure in 1960s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2017). The book proposes the idea of foreplay as a theoretical framework for discussing a particular mode of performance production, existing outside of predetermined structures of recognition in terms of professionalism, artistic achievement, and a logic of eventfulness. Matching an original approach to historical materials and theoretical reflection, The Scene of Foreplay addresses the peculiar forms of production, reproduction, and consumption developed in the 1960s scene (observed in particular through the figures of Ellen Stewart, John Vaccaro, Ruby Lynn Reyner, Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Tom Eyen, Jack Smith, and Penny Arcade) as labors of pleasure, creating for artists a condition of “preliminarity” toward professional work and also functioning as a counterforce within productive economy, as a prelude where value is not yet assigned to labor.