Theatricality: From Oral Traditions to Televised "Realities"

Abstract

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.