Toward a Rhetoric of the Stage: The Scenic Realization of Verbal Cliches

Abstract

The objective and method of the semiotics of the theater consist of overcoming the opposition between text and stage scenery, treating the visual and the verbal (or textual) as semiotic systems both independent and interdependent, showing the nature of the interaction between the image and the text (Pavis, 1976:33. My translation.). In the semiotic perspective, theater is viewed as a global system composed of several subsystems interacting in complex, scarcely explored ways. The structure of what we will from now on call the theatrical implies that the production of meaning takes place, not only on the level of each separate system, but also and essentially at their intersection, and principally at the intersection of the textual and the in one of its main aspects, the corporal. The image in the theater is above all a physical presence: the moving bodies of the actors, the various objects manipulated on the stage, the costumes. Defined as human body as well as stage object, the includes a major part of the scenic element.' The so-called verbal/visual solidarity is thus to be examined as an interdependence between text and body; and any exploitation of visual semiotics will have to take into account this particular status of the image in the medium. The basic relationship between textuality and corporality in the polysystem is here examined from both a limited and a very precise point of view. It is analyzed in a contemporary practice which constitutes in itself a reflection on the language of the theater: the scenic transposition of a verbal cliche, or corporal translation of a linguistic unit defined as a collocation and as a