Kathryn's Aronson Reading Notes

Kathryn Wahlberg

Notes on Aronson’s
“Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language?”

Page 1:

*From the beginning (Ancient Greece) theatre has been a technical spectacle.
*Aristotle—Spectacle is “the least artistic” aspect of theatre.
*1920s director Erwin Piscator added to “the scenographer’s palette”: projections, film, video.
*These mainly used as scenery, illusionism, setting components.
*Projections etc. rarely function as intended—disconcerting.
*Fundamental truth of stage: “Theatre is the only art form to use that which is signified as the signifier of the object.” (i.e. a person represents a person, a chair represents a chair.)

Page 2:
*Key element: Space or volume, implies time.
*Though time in context of play may be different from actual time, audience understands that actors and action exist in time and space similar to their reality.
*Projected imagery—no spatial continuity between stage and auditorium, thus no comprehension of time.
*Set illusions of space work only form particular angles.
-Pictorial space mimics exterior world but is inward looking.
*Eye observes stage’s live images through normal visual processes and photograph’s reproduced images mechanically—Inevitable clashing.
*Live video feed deal with time issues but spatial dislocation still exists.—If “live” where are these objects/people in relation to stage?

Page 3:
*Framing: How does audience deal with stage and actors occupying same space as audience, yet depict a different world?
*All styles of stage imply a frame (proscenium literal), defined as: “A self-contained space carefully delineated from the world around it.”
Page 3 (continued):
*Frames allow us to place representational images together without visual dissonance.
*Movies can present us with an infinite world that theatre, in some sense, cannot.
*Movies transform fantasy into reality.
*Theatre—being composed of real immediate objects, transforms reality into fantasy.
*Film running on stage with live actors brings corporeal, imagistic, and symbolic reality are brought together and often conflict.

Page 4:
*Onstage objects move against static stage.
*Cinema—movement enhances by moving camera/directorial intention.
*Human instinctively drawn to flickering video image, even if live actors are present.—Competition for focus.
*Frederic Jameson: “The cinematic ‘thickens’ the photographic.”
-Sobchak: “Transforms thin abstracted space of photograph into thickened concrete world.”
*Objects on stage exists for audience as long as they are onstage, and then continue to exist offstage.
-Projections are gone completely when the projection stops.
-Concepts of “erasure”. Two realities.
*Architecture, flat images (windows), sculptures often successfully combined.
-Key element: Vocabularies combined with awareness of how one informs the other.
*Wooster Group: Video not substitute for conventional sceneography. Becomes challenge to motion of theatre in our time.

Page 6:
• “Our modes of perception and our modes of thinking are undergoing a radical change for first time in some 500 years. The new technologies cannot be placed onstage without acknowledging and understanding this fact.”