(Re)Animating The Image. Staging Media in Romeo Castelluci's M.#10 Marseille

Jeroen Coppens

doi:10.21825/doc.v34i1.16368

Abstract

Contemporary theater practices show a clear shift toward the visual, leaving behind the authorial voice of the text in dramatic theater. Bonnie Marranca already noticed how avant-garde artists use text merely as pretext (xi) in a theater of high visuality (xii) and also Hans-Thies Lehmann affirms the contemporary preoccupation with visual dramaturgy (93). In the wake of this evolution, theater studies has focused more and more on theater as a visual event, proposing theater as an image-producing medium able to reflect on the politics of image-making (Rottger and Jackob) and capable of critically engaging with historical ways of seeing (Bleeker). Interestingly, these accounts foreground theater as a self-reflective medium that deconstructs the operations of making and seeing images. The article continues this line of thought, analyzing how different media (painting, sculpture, photography and cinema) are staged in the visual dramaturgy of Romeo Castellucci’s M.#10 Marseille. We argue that theater’s critical potential toward the visual is anchored in the clash of the spatio-temporal logics of these respective media. Nevertheless, the account of theater as a self-reflective vision machine also falls short, as it fails to acknowledge the magical aspects of the (re)animation of the image on the theater stage. As visual dramaturgies provide a stage to bring the image to life, they go beyond a self-critical account of theater and experiment with an animistic attitude toward the image as a living organism (Mitchell).

Highlights

In the last three decades, there has been an interesting shi toward the visual within theater practice and an explicit attention for the importance of the image in theater discourse
We will look into Kati Röttger and Alexander Jackob’s account of theater as an image-producing medium (2003) and into Maaike Bleeker’s concept of theater as a critical vision machine (2011)
In their own right, focus on theater’s capacity to engage with the medial operations at the bases of image-making critically and selfre ectively. They o er critical insights to understand contemporary theater practices that actively stage the image within the theater, such as Romeo Castellucci’s M.#10 Marseille (2004)

Summary

Introduction

In the last three decades, there has been an interesting shi toward the visual within theater practice and an explicit attention for the importance of the image in theater discourse. We will look into how Castellucci’s theater images operate and how they perform visuality as an event; as an unstable relation between the spectator and what is seen.

Results

Conclusion