Description
This book develops media archaeological approaches to theatre and intermediality. As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced ‘new’ media. To create theatrical effects and optical illusions, theatre makers were ready to integrate state-of-the-art technics and technologies, and by doing so they playfully explored and popularized scientific knowledge on mechanics, optics and sound for live audiences. This book highlights this obvious but often overlooked relation between media developments and the history of intermedial theater. By considering the interplay between present intermedial performances and their archaeological traces, the authors assembled here revisit old and often forgotten media approaches and theatre technologies. This archaeology is understood less as the discovery of a forgotten past than as the establishment of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need tobe preserved, the authors stress the return of the past in the present, but in a different, performative guise.
Table of Contents
1. Media-archaeological Approaches to Theatre and Performance: An Introduction; Nele Wynants.- 2. Mechanisms in the Mist: A Media Archaeological Excavation of the Mechanical Theater; Erkki Huhtamo.- 3. “Rendre réel aux yeux du public” – Stage Craft, Tricks, and the Féerie; Frank Kessler & Sabine Lenk.- 4. Vanishing Technology: Transparency of Media in Stage Magic; Katharina Rein.- 5. Deep Space or the Re-invention of Scenography: Jozef Wouters on Infini 1-15; Karel Vanhaesebrouck & Jozef Wouters.- 6. Perfumed Performances: The Reception of Olfactory Theatrical Devices from the Fin-de-siècle to the Present Day; Érika Wicky.- 7. Performing Astronomy: The Orrery as Model, Theatre and Experience; Kurt Vanhoutte.- 8. Capturing Bodies as Objects: Stereography and the Diorama in Kris Verdonck’s ISOS; Kristof van Baarle.- 9. Robots and Anthropomorphism in Science-Fiction Theatre: From Rebellion to Domesticity; Kara Reilly.- 10. Cinema’s Savoyards: Performativity and the Legacy of the Magic Lantern; Edwin Carels.- 11. The Art of Anamorphosis: Subverting Representational Conventions and Challenging the Observer; Rudi Knoops.- 12. Mediated Visions of Life: An Archaeology of Microscopic Theatre; Nele Wynants.- 13. The (Not So) Deep Time of Social Media Theater: An Afterword; Sarah Bay-Cheng.
