READING #5: Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language

- theater has been fascinated with technology
- yet until the 20th century theater technology was primarily mechanical. The technician's task was to make things move and sometimes to make actor's defy the laws of gravity.
- there has been new components in the scenographer's palette: projections, film, video.
- the placement of technology and imagery on stage is tantamount to carrying on a conversation with two languages: communication is still possible, but content is overwhelmed by form.
- theater is the only art form to use that which is signified as the signifier of that object.
- space or volume, implies time.
- the projection is in the present, but the image is from the past; the image was photographed, filmed or videoed prior to presentation
- time has transformed the subject while preserving the object
- on stage that combines live images observed through normal visual processes and photographic images observed through normal visual processes and photographic images in which an eye observes mechanically reproduced images, the two systems inevitably clash.
- No image has anything to do with the wall in which they are hung
- Theater is not unlike a painting: within a larger envelope, a larger frame. we can view the world on a different scale that obeys different rules and yet sit in our seat relatively undisturbed by this cosmic rupture.
- what makes the movies more attractive than theater or opera is: ability to present us with an infinite world. we can defy the laws of time and space as movies take us in a blink of an eye to worlds past and future, far and near.
- Even if it is a large projection, we see it in relation to the living actors, scenic units, and even the wall of the theater. corporal reality, imagistic reality, and symbolic reality are brought into proximity and often into direct comflict.
- onstage we see objects in movement against the generally static ground of the stage or scene. But in cinema, nothing is stable.
- A stage set, is permanent and unchanging.
- The very idea that one image, the projection is created by light, and the other the stage set, is created by objects that are made visible by their ability to reflect light, creates two preceptual orders, two kinds of reality.
- too often theater creators are more concerned with the technology and the momentary theatricality of the filmic or digital image than with understanding and exploring the way in which two vocabulary systems intersect.