Can Theater & Media Speak the Same Language?
Aronson
Notes by Kiri Rasmussen
● Theater and Technology
o Technology creates more spectacle
o History of scenography: exploitation of new technologies for purpose of creating scenic wonder and amazement
o New technologies attempt to minimize appearance of human agency
● Projected scenery, especially film and video, doesn’t work/function on the stage
● Use of projections and moving images are disconcerting and confusing and rarely function as its user intends
o Projections and images draw upon a fundamentally different vocab from that of the stage
o Content is overwhelmed by form
● Product of capitalist system
● Importance lies in its reordering of perception and is thus subject to a range of political, social, and economic influences
● Theater is the only art form to use that which is signified as the signifier of that object
● Key element: space/volume that implies time
o Sense of spatiality of the stage with its contours, volumes, and dimensions
● Add a projection to the scene:
o Audience experiences disjunction of perceiving a different world
o No spatial continuity between stage and auditorium and consequently no ability to comprehend time
● Illusionistic scenery only works from particular vantage point
● Disjunction partly comes from way in which audience understands temporal referents of the image
o Image is from the past—time-space continuum is abstracted and becomes an object for visual consumption
o Time transforms subject while preserving object
o Because photos produce images of the world rivaled only by the human eye, the eye has lost its historically privileged place as a processor of the info
● Key to comprehension=frame
o Creates internal logic that differs from surroundings
o Imparts sense of order and a consistent ontology that allows us to comprehend what we see
● Cinema/film transforms fantasy to reality while theater transforms reality into fantasy
● 2 realities conflict when projection and theater mix
o Frame has changed: one element among many
o Figure and ground: background and foreground changed
§ “Painting becomes figure against ground of wall it is hung on.”
o Projection is framed so it becomes the object seen against the ground of the set or stage
● Our eyes and cultural knowledge of photographs/cinematic images lead us to understand that the image seen within the frame is a mere fragment of the larger environment from which the image was produced
o Tension is created between the potentially unlimited expanse of the image projected and the self-containedness of the physical projection
o Tension between the unlimited bounds of the projected image and the architectural realities of the stage
● With video or film:
o Complicated by movement
o Physiological factor of the attraction of the eye for moving images—inexplicably drawn toward flickering image of movie even when a living being is equally available within the line of site=> competition for focus
● 2 perceptual orders/reality:
o Image/projection is created by light and isn’t tangible
o Stage set is created by objects made visible by their ability to reflect light
● 2 similar images are subject to vastly different interpretation because of the quality of the material and the context in which it is read
● Acknowledges omnipresence of video in contemporary society and calls into question our various modes of seeing
o Video doesn’t substitute for more conventional scenograhic elements in their productions
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