The World On Stage Notes

- approach theater semiotically

• "all that is on the stage is a sign"

• anything deliberately put there for artistic purposes becomes a sign when it enters illusionary space and time

- approach theater phenomenologically

• signs achieve vitality
• being of the world
• power of sign not necessarily exhausted either by its illusionary or its referential character

- theater is a language whose words consist of an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be
- art exists that one may recover the sensation of life, exists to make one feel things
- purpose of art is to impact the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known
- technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar", make forms difficult, increase difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself, must be prolonged
- art is a way to experience artfulness of an object, object is not important
- if art is a way of endowing the world with meaning, it is also a way of allowing the world to express itself
- unlike a sign, the image is unique and unreproducible, whereas the sign is of no value unless it repeats itself
- theater ingests the world of objects and signs only to bring images to life
- Nelson Goodman says that something may be a work of art on one occasion but not every occasion; when is art not what is art
- theater is a means of looking objectively at the subjective life of the race as something prepared for the community out of the substance of its own body