ABSTRACT
The ontology and location of theatre have undergone many strange mutations over time. Its cultural status has also waxed and waned. On the one hand, notions such as theatricality or spectacle, whether intended positively or negatively, have tended to expand theatre beyond the strict confines of the performing arts and have turned it into a globalizing medium, occupying the whole of the social scene. On the other hand, ever since the rise of cinema, television and now digital media, theatre has often been depicted as an increasingly residual form, under siege from newer technologies of representation, as though theatre were, in itself, inherently less technological because of its reliance on the raw materials of human bodies, time and space. As a result, whilst theatricality has been increasingly influential as a notion in contemporary art practices ever since the 1960s – heralding among other things the performative turn of performance art, the spatializing turn of installations and the relational turn of participatory art – the traditional boundaries of theatre have appeared to be more permeable and unstable. All along, theatre appears to have been perennially in crisis, its fragile ontology plunged into the middle of socio-technological revolutions that have deeply affected the definition of all its seemingly 'natural' properties.
