As new authors enter the stage, they bring with them new tools and
a new poetry of theatrical languages.
Since the 60’s a new language has entered the
stage. Performance Garages could be found equally cluttered
with naked bodies as
with television monitors. Now the bodies struggle to be noticed
as media has taken over many performance spaces. But that should
not be a bad thing.
The first time I used projection on stage I was
trying to find an alternative way to express dialogue without text.
Having come from a background of visual theatre I saw media not
as a cinematic tool but as an object, a puppet that can be manipulated
within the performance space. Like a puppet, a projected image
is not bound to human scale it can change shape, size and form.
However, just as one would ask “why a puppet?’ the same should
be asked, “why projected media?”
In an ironic reversal, theatrical language is now seeking a new language
from the medium that looked to theatre to learn its first steps.
The effect of the cross pollination between television, cinema,
and theatre is that a multi-lingual multi-mediated contemporary
audience has spawned who are conditioned to comprehend, communicate
and recreate in many mediated dialects. Like a lavish feast ready
to satisfy our insatiable appetite mediated theatre has become
a visual smorgasbord of sight and sound with each ingredient vying
to be devoured first.
Could we be in the time that Artaud once dreamt; a poetry of theatrical
language that isn’t just marginalized to the mise en scene
or bound to the rules of text based western theatre language.
As our senses are barraged at every possible moment it is easy
to slight text-based theatre as being out of touch with modern
audiences just as it is popular to dismiss the media as illiterate
shorthand. While the popular languages of cinema, television and
the Internet furrows deeper into our theatrical vernacular, there
needs to a dialogue on how best to make the theatrical voice a
chorus instead of a pig holler. To do that is to recognize that
the language of mediated theatre is multi-lingual and in order
to make a symphony work one must understand how each instrument
plays.