Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (review)

Performances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have often been characterized by a converging of media forms, creating pieces that blend and blur the lines between the various media these performances employ. Located at the borders between visual, aural, and literary art forms, "intermedial performances" maintain a "self-conscious reflexivity" in the ways they blur generic and media boundaries (11). Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, the editors of the collection Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, present a series of extremely well-written and persuasive articles that develop topics that range from theatre as a "hypermedium" to the historical avant-garde.

Intermediality in Theatre and Performance is divided into three sections: "Performing Intermediality," "Intermedial Perceptions," and "From Adaptation to Intermediality." The first section seeks to "redefine theatre: not as a composite art, nor as a dramatic art, but as the stage of intermediality" (29). In his opening chapter, Kattenbelt connects the likes of Bertolt Brecht to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's notion of hypermediacy, which "acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible" (38). Kattenbelt develops this connection by stating that "film provides the illusion of reality . . . , whereas theatre provides the reality of illusion" (37). This "reality of illusion" is the stage of intermediality, which is, in essence, a theatrical stage. Theatre uniquely provides a "performative situation" in which film, television, and digital video may operate "not just as recordings on their own, but [operate] at the same time and above all [as] theatrical signs" (37). Kattenbelt's chapter thus seeks not only to include theatre in the theoretical conversations that have typically excluded it as a significant medium in the digital age, but also to offer the theatrical stage as the fulcrum of confluence for various media forms.

Kattenbelt's chapter makes strong gestures in a significant direction for performance studies. The subsequent chapters from Ralf Remshardt and Andy Lavender importantly extend Kattenbelt's work by highlighting the specificity of the particular media at play in intermediality. Remshardt notes: "If it is true that today 'we cannot even recognize the representational power of a medium except with reference to other media,' as Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin write . . . then certainly the obverse holds true as well: any medium will to some degree define the specific mediality of the media that contextualize it" (41). Building from this media-specific analysis, Lavender's chapter develops the notion that media are given a different "status" when they are staged concurrently in the theatre. His discussion of the piece Jet Lag: "Part One: Rodger Dearborn" by The Builders Association is one of the book's most compelling examples of intermediality. The piece, which brings together a stage performance and a video projection on a large screen, exploits its artifice, making the camera and wires part of the narrative. The premise of the piece revolves around the true accounts of a sailor who, while competing in an around-the-world race, sent falsified reports of his progress. Jet Lag is "a piece about communicating untruths, contriving data and voyaging yet not progressing" (58), through a stage design that involves the audience in the artifice of these falsified reports. The performance projected from the camera onto the large screen looks "as though he is in the middle of the storm-tossed ocean. . . . As hypermediated by the theatre, the scene is palpably fabricated" (58). Lavender's thesis concerns "the simultaneous coexistence, the mutual play of what might appear to be two distinct media—the screen and the stage—and the ways in which their very co-relation produces effects of immediacy that are deeply involving—more, deeply pleasurable—for spectators" (56).

The second section of the book, titled "Intermedial Perceptions," begins with Peter Boenisch's chapter, which, after clarifying how theatre is indeed a medium, turns to interrogating the term "intermediality": since "remediation" is a common aspect of every medium, any medium (including theatre) "will always remain in-between the various layers [of other media]." He continues: "If this is...