Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Perhaps the Medium-Specificity of the Contemporary Performing Arts is Mutation?
- Theatre Between Performance and Installation: Three Contemporary Belgian Examples
- The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics
- Using Recorded Images for Political Purposes
- A Campsite for the Avant-Garde and a Church in Cyberspace: Christoph Schlingensief ’s Dialogue with Avant-Gardism
- Echoes from the Animist Past: Abattoir Fermé’s Dark Backward and Abysm of Time
- Folding Mutants or Crumbling Hybrids?: Of Looking Baroque in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
- Making UNMAKEABLELOVE: The Relocation of Theatre
- Witness Protection?: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Intermedial Reproduction: Rimini Protokoll’s Mnemopark
- Rimini Protokoll’s Theatricalization of Reality
- Digital Landscapes: The Meta-Picturesque Qualities of Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Audiovisual Sceneries
- The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s ‘Cinema of Contraptions’
- The Theatre of Recorded Sound and Film: Vacating Performance in Michael Curran’s Look What They Done To My Song
- Doubled Bodies and Live Loops: On Ragnar Kjartansson’s Mediatized Performances
- Between Solitaire and a Basketball Game: Dramaturgical Strategies in the Work of Antonia Baehr
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Theatre Between Performance and Installation: Three Contemporary Belgian Examples
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Perhaps the Medium-Specificity of the Contemporary Performing Arts is Mutation?
- Theatre Between Performance and Installation: Three Contemporary Belgian Examples
- The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics
- Using Recorded Images for Political Purposes
- A Campsite for the Avant-Garde and a Church in Cyberspace: Christoph Schlingensief ’s Dialogue with Avant-Gardism
- Echoes from the Animist Past: Abattoir Fermé’s Dark Backward and Abysm of Time
- Folding Mutants or Crumbling Hybrids?: Of Looking Baroque in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
- Making UNMAKEABLELOVE: The Relocation of Theatre
- Witness Protection?: Surveillance Technologies in Theatrical Performance
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Intermedial Reproduction: Rimini Protokoll’s Mnemopark
- Rimini Protokoll’s Theatricalization of Reality
- Digital Landscapes: The Meta-Picturesque Qualities of Kurt d’Haeseleer’s Audiovisual Sceneries
- The Productivity of the Prototype: On Julien Maire’s ‘Cinema of Contraptions’
- The Theatre of Recorded Sound and Film: Vacating Performance in Michael Curran’s Look What They Done To My Song
- Doubled Bodies and Live Loops: On Ragnar Kjartansson’s Mediatized Performances
- Between Solitaire and a Basketball Game: Dramaturgical Strategies in the Work of Antonia Baehr
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Summary
Wenn heute viele sensible Menschen ihre Aversion gegen das Theater damit begründen, dass ihnen dort zuviel vorgelogen wird, so liegt das Recht dazu nicht in seinem Zuwenig, sondern in seinem Zuviel an Wirklichkeit.
Denn der Schauspieler überzeugt uns nur, indem er innerhalb der künstlerischen Logik verbleibt, nicht aber durch Hineinnehmen von Wirklichkeitsmomenten, die einer ganz anderen Logik folgen.
Georg Simmel, ‘Der Schauspieler und die Wirklichkeit’ (1912: 5)In the age of mechanical and especially digital reproduction, the factual and material presence of the artwork is very relative. It is no longer truly necessary to be close to the real work in order to study it, interpret it or aesthetically appreciate it. Every act of theatre seems to form an exception to this instance. Of course, the theatrical performance can be reproduced in film (or in words or images), but everyone will agree that watching these documents will never be a true match to the experience of sitting in the theatre. Exactly this architectural domain of the theatre is of importance here, even more so than the formal characteristics of the medium of the theatre.
The importance of the place where the artwork is revealed and for which it is made can be shown by comparing the theatre with its two derivatives: the installation and the performance. Both installation and performance art have nothing to do with the theatre. They are made for, and in reaction to, the museum. The inevitably spatial installation ‘installs’ a space in a space: it establishes and settles itself as a new space in the already existing space of the museum. Even when the installation is made for the public space, and not for the museum as an enclosed building in stricto sensu, the installation reproduces a much smaller version of the already existing – and nowadays nearly global – sphere of art. The same goes for the performance: an artist decides to make a work of art with his own body. He or she moves and behaves temporarily as a ‘normal’ person could move. But the artist is not a normal person, since he or she works inside the museum – or rather, the Museum, understood as the art world.
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- Information
- Bastard or Playmate?Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and Contemporary Performing Arts, pp. 17 - 30Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012