ABSTRACT
The issue of presence has always come up more pointedly in the theater, since theater is the locale where reality and imagination change places. The exclusive characteristic of theater is that it treats its subject, human communication, via human communication: on stage, the actors portray human communication in their own human communication. Naturally, a metalanguage remains necessary to comprehend uniquely theatrical phenomena, in other words, the terminology of the study of theater, just as there is need of a common poetics to bring the usage of individual poets into a common language, into an intellectual community—and just as there is a need for literary theories providing deeper understanding. The practice of the “theater of movement” illustrates the director’s changing role well: that theater does well without a director, handing the function of realizing the work’s entirety over to the actor. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
