The dramaturgical aesthetic of recent postdramatic performance returns to medieval representational modes: an eye can be used as an ear, and vision can be orchestrated like the auditory space of simultaneous relations. Whether an immersive, site-specific, one-to-one, or digital/new media performance, such performance has no one point of view, no “one” in control; success or failure is largely determined by individual and collective will. Closing the loop means beginning, again, in non-Euclidian space.

In the 1890s Aby Warburg began to articulate a theory of performance that he called the “Pathos Formula.” He conceptualized this formula around the figure-of-woman-in-movement—“Nympha.” The “Nympha” occupies the same place in Warburg's theory as “strips of film/strips of behavior” does in Richard Schechner's “Restoration of Behavior.” Warburg's Nympha illuminates how the invocation of film strips as culturally neutral inflected performance studies from the outset with a gendering that has been reflected and contested ever since.