Fiona Shaw in Conversation

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Unmediatisable Eye Contact

If ‘unmediatisable’ is a word... If ‘mediatisable’ is a word... Actually, it could be argued whether anything can be mediatised without being altered. But at least on the reception end, sentiments can be evoked by a mediatised object (or work or thing) as much as the ‘real’ (or ‘original’ or unmediatised) one. Roland Barthes certainly felt emotional when looking at his mother’s photographs [1] . There have been a lot of discussions on the affect of online performances especially during the pandemic [2] . But what cannot be mediatised in the sense that without actual physical presence the feelings one normally experiences would fail to transmit through media? (Obviously with current technology, it is still difficult to replicate tactile, olfactory or gustatory sensations telematically, but they are not my major concern here because in the context of theatre, these senses are fairly rarely crucial elements of a performance.) Today I participated in a site-specific work produced by One St...
Read more

Theatrical Duality in Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces

Image
  Theatre has always been fascinated with the relation between the make-believe world onstage and the reality of everyday life. According to Erving Goffman, when in a theatre, performers and audience agree to assume the make-believe world onstage and ignore out-of-frame activities that do not belong to this world. It implies a double awareness on the audience’s side that many scholars have addressed. In an eighteenth-century essay on ‘illusion’, Marmontel points out that theatre spectators are simultaneously seeing a fictional story and a real event (95). This is echoed by Pavis who names it ‘the double game of illusion’, in which theatrical illusion and reality or ‘disillusion’ can never stand alone but appear ‘always as a pair’ (178). Walton describes the experience of theatre going as between two poles: one distanced from the represented world and the other immersed in it (273). His observation reveals that this duality is not a dichotomic relation, but rather a continuum betwee...
Read more

Public Sphere vs. Domestic Sphere in Online Theatre

I have spent a good part of 2020 watching online performances as theatres are closed all over the world. In the a-hundred-or-so pieces of Covid theatre there emerged three sets of spatial relationships that are particularly interesting: ·       -  Imaginary space and real space ·       -  Virtual space and physical space ·       -   Public space and domestic space In the previous entries, I attempted to explore the issue of theatrical duality, which mainly deals with the first relation between the imaginary and the real. Digital theatre, however, because of the use of media, is much concerned with the interplay between the virtual and the physical. Pre-Covid online performances often explore possibilities of theatricality and interactivity in the virtual space. An early practice is Desktop Theatre’s waitingforgodot.com (1997) which ‘stages’ Beckett’s story in a chat room. RSC’s Such Tweet Sorrow (2010), a twitt...
Read more