Theatre and the Installation of Media

The ontology and location of theatre have undergone many strange mutations over time. Its cultural status has also waxed and waned. On the one hand, notions such as theatricality or spectacle, whether intended positively or negatively, have tended to expand theatre beyond the strict confines of the performing arts and have turned it into a globalizing medium, occupying the whole of the social scene. On the other hand, ever since the rise of cinema, television and now digital media, theatre has often been depicted as an increasingly residual form, under siege from newer technologies of representation, as though theatre were, in itself, inherently less technological because of its reliance on the raw materials of human bodies, time and space. As a result, whilst theatricality has been increasingly influential as a notion in contemporary art practices ever since the 1960s – heralding among other things the performative turn of performance art, the spatializing turn of installations and the relational turn of participatory art – the traditional boundaries of theatre have appeared to be more permeable and unstable. All along, theatre appears to have been perennially in crisis, its fragile ontology plunged into the middle of socio-technological revolutions that have deeply affected the definition of all its seemingly ‘natural’ properties.

In this chapter I address the fraught relationship between theatre and media through the lens of installation art and its performative relation to ‘spectatorship’. The notion of extended theatricality is brought back to a particular site and temporal interval (installations are generally ephemeral, like live performance), where the stage is set for other performative presences to act. Under certain circumstances, installations can foreground the relationship with media, shown, staged and experienced as a theatre – that is, in a particular mode whereby media are themselves subject to mediation and shown in the midst of mediation. Interpreting the relationship between media and theatre simply as a power struggle between hegemonic and residual forms contributes to a discourse centred on a confrontation of distinct technologies whose outcome can only be either integration and assimilation, or resistance and refusal.