audiences are accustomed
to witnessing an actor’s body in three media:
theatre – where we share a physical space with the actor
cinema
video
I process the image of the actor’s body
differently in each media
the postmodern live performance
often plays with those differences
playing with the differences in aesthetic consumption
cinema and video fuel
a public hunger for visual images
including human bodies
and narrative
theatre cannot compete successfully
in attracting audiences
whose access to these media is
inexpensive
unlimited
at the close of the 19th century
the new medium of cinema promised
or perhaps
threatened to revolutionize theatre
early in the 20th century
Robert Edmund Jones
a remarkable and innovative American stage designer predicted
film would provide the fundamental mise en scéne for theatre
Jones’ prediction did not come true
film did not establish itself as
a dominant component in live theatre
it came to function instead
as a new and competing medium
for the presentation of narrative
theatre did use film occasionally
in the experiments of Piscator
but film did not
become a conventional component
of theatrical performance
in competition with live theater
cinema extended and developed the mode of realism
this phenomenon
freed theatre to experiment beyond realism
simultaneously sustain and extend expectations
of mass audiences
whose aesthetic sense has been trained
by the verisimilitude possible in cinema
audiences trained in film
expect theatre
like film
to concentrate upon the representation
of “lifelike” behavior
the extension of the conventions
of late 19th century realism in film
this may explain
the hold in which the realistic mode
grasps American theatre
video
is the medium of postmodernism in many ways
Fredric Jameson argued that literature and film
have lost their place as
“the richest allegorical and hermeneutic vehicles
for some new description of the system itself.”
that place
has been taken by video
operating in two forms:
as a relentless flow of images in commercial television
and as the experiments of “video art.”
for the most part
film maintains a narrative structure
forming itself on the basis
of a determined progression through images
that build a cohesive experience
what spectators perceive as individual segments
or programs on video
may imitate that kind of structure
but the segmentation and the omnipresent availability
and the anonymity of video
force us to perceive it as a continuous flow of images
a viewer can move readily and arbitrarily
among different channels
shifting from one source of the flow to another
amplifying the disjunctive aspect of that flow
the segmentation becomes – arbitrary
segmentation
amplified by the shift from channel to channel
breaks any notion of rational progression
provides the sense of a ceaseless play of images and sounds
a flow made up of kaleidoscopic images
a cacophony of sound
video replaced text
as the instrument through which we access information
as Kanye said…
“Sometimes people write novels
and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.
I am not a fan of books.
I would never want a book’s autograph.
I am a proud non-reader of books.”aKanye, Reuters, February 2009
my sense of the world itself
has become mediatized
the world is what appears on the screen
a ceaseless flow of images
a ceaseless kaleidoscopic
cacophonous display
enabled
framed
fueled
by a hyper market place
that invests objects with value
References