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Spring 2008 103 Dean Wilcox isAssistant Dean for the UndergraduateAcademic Program at the North Carolina School of the Arts where he teaches The Aesthetics of Dissonance, Chaos Theory and the Arts, Postmodern Drama, and PerformanceArt. In addition to working periodically as a lighting designer, he has published articles and book reviews in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research International, and Modern Drama on topics such as the intersection of semiotics and phenomenology, Josef Svoboda’s multimedia design for Intolleranza, the convergence of chaos theory and performance, Karen Finley’s deconstructive technique, and ambient space in twentieth-century theatre. How Do You Read a Sign that No One Has Ever Seen Before? A Post-Semiotic Analysis of Chance-Driven Events Dean Wilcox We are used to, in the past, this idea that artists make defined finished things which the public then looks at. This is slightly different. This is like creating a seed and planting it . . . and it grows into whatever it grows into. —Brian Eno, 77 Million Paintings I was first introduced to semiotics while working toward an MFA in lighting design. My initial reaction was to dismiss it as needlessly complicated. I thought, “Yeah, I got it. Things mean things. Why do I need to learn a new language to talk about that?” But slowly the ideas, vocabulary, and insights afforded by semiotics began to unlock previously unseen ways of analyzing and discussing performances. Dissecting how a production signified, or at the very least, was put together, allowed me to understand better how I might approach the design process myself. Things still meant things, but now manipulating those elements and the context within which they were viewed became a much more complex and fertile procedure. As designer gave way to critic and scholar, I was drawn to performances that acknowledged the complexity of the semiotic process by toying with signification. The rich and varied work of people like RobertWilson, Meredith Monk, and Richard Foreman simply dripped with signs begging to be explored. Semiotics was a good first step in discussing this material but never quite seemed to capture everything that transpired in performance. The convergence of performance elements seemed to exceed the language of semiotics, indicating a need to move beyond semiotics for a more comprehensive method of analysis. I began to investigate other methodologies—deconstruction, phenomenology, chaos theory—which in one way or another draw on semiotics, but also offer specialized languages and ideas that aid in exploring elements surpassing the semiotic frame. My journey, as it turns out, is not all that unique. In the “post”-script to the 104 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism second edition of his influential Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Keir Elam discusses the pragmatic and methodologically conservative approach of British and American theatre: Semiotic performance analysis, being itself an ‘avant-garde’and methodologically anti-traditionalist endeavor, tended to look for its objects and for its ideal models of theatricality precisely in the avant-garde, anti-traditionalist forms of theatre, in the hope of bringing about a “natural” alliance or symbiosis between theory and practice.1 What is it about the avant-garde that is both attractive to critics using semiotics and brings about the development of postsemiotics? While the entirety of this question is beyond the scope of this paper, I propose to focus on a few key avant-garde elements—chance and indeterminacy. The term “post” is a very popular modifier when added to structuralism, modernism, semiotics, and “dramatic,” suggesting something beyond, an evolutionary trope that indicates time and movement, but also incorporates the very idea it exceeds. As Hans-Thies Lehmann articulates in Postdramatic Theatre, a genre that develops in conjunction with the postsemiotic, “the prefix ‘post’indicates that a culture or artistic practice has stepped out of the previously unquestioned horizon of modernity but still exists with some kind of reference to it.”2 The concept of “post” indicates a palimpsest in which past and present co-exist.As long as someone somewhere is performing an un-ironic version of The Crucible, the postdramatic will share the stage with the dramatic. As long as...

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