Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language: Reading Notes

- Since its beginnings, theater has always used technology to dazzle and mystify the audience.
- Since the early-mid twentieth century, video and projections have been used; sometimes as a gimmick, sometimes as a replacement for a backdrop.
- Projections and moving images do not work on stage, they distract the audience, they don’t have the same scenographic vocabulary.
- Theater “tricks” the audience by making the signified the signifier; a human represents another human, a chair represents a chair.
- When an audience sits in a theater, they realize that they are supposed to perceive the stage as what it represents, not what it really is.
- When something like a video is projected on stage, it disrupts the audience’s perception of the stage.
- Another issue is that the audience perceives the stage and actors as part of “here and now.” It’s being performed live, the sets are moving and changing, etc. But when an image is projected, while it still exists in the “here and now” it still also exists in the past. It’s been pre-made, pre-recorded.


To comment on the reading:

I saw a production of Hamlet where the ghost of Hamlet's father was used as a projection of some sort of otherworldly mist, and I thought it worked surprisingly well. The again, the author did say there were exceptions.


-Mark Escobedo