ABSTRACT
Inscribing theatre within a theory of media presupposes-rather hastily —that theatre can be compared with artistic and technological practices like film, television, radio or video. That involves comparing theatre with what is usually opposed to it: (mass) media, technical arts, the techniques of the culture industry. We would do theatre a disservice by measuring it against media grounded in a technological infrastructure that it has done without; we would also endanger its specificity. On the other hand, however, theatre practice happily moves into other areas, either by using video, television or sound recording in the performance, or responding to the demand for television, film or video recording, reproduction or archival preservation. Exchanges between theatre and the media are so frequent and so diversified that we should take note of the ensuing network of influences and interferences. There is no point in defining theatre as ‘pure art,’ or in outlining a theatre theory that does not take into account media practices that border on and often penetrate contemporary work on stage. But can we go so far as to integrate theatre in a theory of media and so compare it to technical arts and practices? Besides, what are media?1 The notion is not well defined. Media might be defined by a sum of technical characteristics (possibilities, potentialities) according to the technological way in which the artistic product is produced, transmitted and received, reproducible to infinity. The notion of media is thus not linked to content or theme, but to the current apparatus and state of technology, None the less, this technology of technical reproduction and production of the work of art implies a
certain aesthetic, which is useful only when concretized in a particular individual work, aesthetically or ethically judged. Discussing novelistic technique, Sartre said that every technique points to a metaphysics. We could say the same thing of the technology of media; it makes sense only when linked to aesthetic or metaphysical reflection on the passage from quantity (reproduction) to quality (interpretation). Technically describing the properties of media such as radio or television is not enough; we must appreciate the visible dramaturgy as we see it in a given broadcast or as we foresee it for a future production. I would like to invite the reader on this journey, which requires no particular knowledge of computer science.
