Description
- Abstract:
- Normally, we think of theatre and television as different modes or genres, and even as diametrically opposed; Theatre Crossing Television analyses the theatre-like qualities of television and the television-like qualities of theatre. This kind of spectating is characterized by several elements: the presence of two audiences, adherence to the unity of place, a two-dimensional stage picture, a performance that is framed or boxed, the ideal vantage point of the King’s seat, distanced viewing, a relationship between spectator and performer that oscillates between reciprocity and non-reciprocity, and a performance which the audience is made to believe is created especially for them. In the process of this analysis, I will also look at how many instances (if not all) theatre and television negotiate the twin poles of immersion and anti-immersion, with special emphasis on US practices in the period 1960 to 2015. Recent attempts at bi-directional communication in the theatre by Liz Lecompte, Robert Lepage, Robert Whitman, and Richard Foreman reflect how many artists and theorists working in contemporary theatre are deeply invested in an idea of intermedial or immersive theatre that offers a way for theatre to renew itself through new scenic, audio, and video technologies. Theatre that is dispersed in time and space by the displacement of performers, performance elements, audience members, and audiences requires not so much a new term as a greater historical awareness of precursors and theatrical precedent. Importantly, contemporary screen technologies encourage us to recognize how theatre in the modern period itself became a screenal technology, an insight that leads to renewed scholarly interest in the semiotic, sociological, and phenomenological gap between three-dimensional co-present actors and spectators and actors and spectators who are translated into and circulate as images, whether through mental projection or technological capture.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
Access Conditions
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Citation
Starner, Andrew,
"Theatre Crossing Television: An inquiry into the theory and practice of intermedial performance from the 1960s to the present"
(2018).
Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/08zb-d635
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Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies department....