In a parlor game played by the Surrealist group--the foremost avant-gardists of their time--participants made their marks on the quadrants of a folded sheet of paper: a many-eyed head, a distorted torso, hands fondling swollen breasts, snarling reptilian-dog feet descending from an egg-shaped midsection. The "Exquisite Corpse," as it was called, is still very much alive, having found artistic and critical expression from the days of the Surrealists down to our own. This method has been used in collective artistic protocols as the "rules of engagement" for experimental art, as a form of social interaction, and as an alternative mode of critical thinking. This collection is the first to address both historical and contemporary works that employ the ritual of the "cadavre exquis." It offers a unique overview of the efforts of scholars and artists to articulate new notions of crossing temporal and spatial boundaries and to experience in a new way the body's mutability through visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic frames. Bringing together diverse writers from across disciplinary boundaries, this volume continues the cultural and methodological innovations that have unfolded since the first days of the "Exquisite Corpse."

"Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theater" investigates the connections between hearing and deafness in experimental, Deaf, and multicultural theater. Author Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren focuses on how to articulate a Deaf aesthetic and how to grasp the meaning of moments of "deafness" in theater works that do not simply reinscribe a hearing bias back into our analysis. She employs a model using a device for cross-sensory listening across domains of sound, silence, and the moving body in performance that she calls the "third ear." Kochhar-Lindgren then charts a genealogy of the theater of the third ear from the mid-1800s to the 1960s in examples ranging from Denis Diderot, the Symbolists, the Dadaists, Antonin Artaud, and others. She also analyzes the work of playwright Robert Wilson, the National Theatre of the Deaf, and Asian American director Ping Chong. She shows how the model of the third ear can address not only deaf performance, but also multicultural performance, by analyzing the Seattle dance troupe Ragamala's 2001 production of "Transposed Heads", which melded classical South Indian use of mudras, or hand gestures, and ASL signing. Through an engagement with the performance of moments of the third ear, Kochhar-Lindgren reveals how deeply perception and the making of meaning are interlocked. The shift in attention limned in "Hearing Difference" leads to a different understanding of the body, intersubjectivity, communication, and cross-cultural relations, confirming it as a critically important contribution to contemporary Deaf studies.