ABSTRACT
Bonnie Marranca uses the term ‘mediaturgy’ to describe works which ‘embed media in the performance rather than simply using it as illustration or decoration’ (2010, p. 16). In mediaturgy, the dramatic text—if any—is either improvisatory or collaboratively and computationally produced on stage or through various mobile or online applications, and it is often fragmented, flexible and fluid. Seda Ilter (2018, p. 70) calls such texts ‘technotexts’, that is, texts ‘whose composition and formation are based on and take place through media technologies’. In the relatively recent field of theatre translation studies (Glynn 2020), technotexts give rise to new questions on interlingual translation, while the intermedial context of mediaturgy imposes the perspective of multiple intersemiosis on the analysis. This essay examines the challenges arising from the contemporary mediated and intermedial ‘liveness’ (Auslander 1999), by drawing on a case study. Considering opera as a distinctive intermedial form of theatre, the essay explores the digital opera Echo and Narcissus, by the Greek artist collective “Medea Electronique”, a piece fully created on stage by live-coding (Magnusson 2014). In so doing, it aims to trace the new, mediaturgical dramatic texts to discuss the modalities of their translation and their reception across different languages.
