Theatre : the art of human being : locating the cultural value of theatre in the Age of Broadcast Media and a retrospective paper on the process leading towards the 2000 performance Involving Eternity
This essay is concerned with the position of theatre as cultural commerce in the postmodern milieu of electronic broadcast media. It is the partial fulfillment of an MA degree in Theatre Making as studied from a performer's perspective. The other part of my final project was comprised by the 2000 performance of a play entitled Involving Eternity, a video of which is available through the Drama Department of the University of Cape Town. Thus the essay is a research document and ideological treatise supporting and grounding my recent work as a theatre maker and actor. I begin by examining the position of theatre in relationship to popular culture and the newly emerging aesthetics of the electronic era. The dynamics that separate the theatre from new forms of popular culture are strongly defined and examined. It is my position that the theatre cannot compete on the same front as technological media and I set out the reasons why I believe this to be so. The gulf existing between live performance and Media culture constitutes a political and ideological gap in the climate of the emerging technocracy and so I go on to examine these two field in closer detail. My analysis of broadcast media is focused on how these new aesthetic modes can be said to be reforming social perceptions about reality and representation. I draw from the theories of Jean Baudrillard and Phillip Auslander to present the critical position, which post modern discourse offers regarding these notions. Ultimately I foreground the notion of simulation in contemporary aesthetics and the erosion of the phenomenological space. My analysis of performance focuses on the emergence ofthe new ideologies of actor training ideology. These systems are best characterized by the work of the Odin Teatret and Jerzy Grotowski . My theory is that this work has created a framework in which the Theatre can return to contemporary culture by providing a counter discourse to the technological. A technology of the self. Lastly by way of example I illustrate how this theoretical position influenced the practical work on my play Involving Eternity.
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