Theatricality: From Oral Traditions to Televised "Realities"

Any concept of theatricality should be based upon the structural essentials of the specific cultural production of theater, in its most comprehensive sense. Theater is a type of social communication whose specificity is, first, the ostentatious display of audiovisual movements. The body's activities are their primary agency. This can manifest itself in innumerable forms. In oral societies, full-fledged theater occurs when a single body´s facial expressions, utterances, gestures, and movements perform story-telling or praise-singing, demarcating and creating a particular space and a specific physical relationship with onlookers; the creative cooperation of several bodies is at the core of more complex theater forms. The presentation of bodies that interact in person is the most widespread, "classical" form of theater. Many types of theatrical performance employ and operate objects and techniques available at the time in order to represent the bodies' actual interaction, and to objectify their creative practice. Thus we see the use of puppets, marionettes, and of shadows in "pre-modern" and "modern" societies, and state-of-the-art audiovisual technologies in our time. Other forms combine both modes of theatrical production. Our attraction to theater rests on the ostentatious presentation of creative human skills, the demonstration of physical abilities, the intelligent timing of activities and the making of specific spaces; this includes the handling of technologized (cinematic, videotaped, computerized) movements, and screening the flow of audio-visually mediated images in contemporary "live theater." The staging of such abilities is the necessary—perhaps even primary—source of theater's aesthetic pleasure.

Second, as communicative practice, the presentation of such movements, the interaction of bodies displaying skills and manifesting creativity, is inherently a symbolic action. In other words, performance always tends to be a semiotic process. The participants can denote and connote, and thus can refer to phenomena that are very different from the actual audiovisual movements. It is this potentiality that many discourses have established as the defining feature of theater. This applies not only to the western "Aristotelian" tradition, which considers the staged representation of characters in interaction and fictional worlds in general as "theater proper." Zeami highlighted representation or role-playing to "imitate" social life as a fundamental characteristic of his Noh theater (1984, 10). ¹ Nigeria's traditional Yoruba itinerant theater earned one of its names, Agbegijo, from masking, one of its constituent elements (Adedeji, 1978). Agbegijo designates "one who takes wood or wooden face-mask to dance with," meaning people/bodies that show something different from what they actually (physically) are (Adedeji, 1972, 254).

Audiovisual movements and symbolic action are inseparably intertwined, and are equally significant to a comprehensive conception of theater. This has been borne out by western forward-looking, avant-garde aesthetic performance practices and by pertinent theories that have developed since the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as by new insights into non-western theater forms. In the first two decades of the century, Georg Fuchs and the Futurists extolled non-mimetic dance and/or acrobatics—virtually the whole range of circus and variety shows—as the models for a genuine theater, because of their fascinating display of perfected bodily skills and highly organized ("dramatized") feats. In consonance with his view that visible movement is the primary component of drama or theater art, Edward Craig pointed to the hustle and bustle in a restaurant or a spectacular parade as great dramatic events. They need not or even should not have a mimetic dimension; they might only connote some general, abstract principles such as uniformity and harmony. It was the spectacular movement per se and the seeing of action and ordered things that he considered to be the essence of the "art of the theater." ²

Futurist and Bauhaus artists underscored and broadened Craig's approach. Pursuing different objectives, both groups attempted to transform theatrical performance into a "mechanical activity" and even into the presentation of purely "technologized movement." Around 1916, Fortunato Depero claimed that the construction of the stage must...