Jeroen Coppens

This article analyses two theatre pieces by Rabih Mroué as statements and reflections about how images work. “The Pixelated Revolution” (2012) and “Three Posters” (2000) are lecture-performances that probe the power of images in the context of war. Both performances use images “on the brink” of death, the first showing gripping footage from demonstrators in the Syrian civil war and the latter integrating a real video testimony of a Lebanese suicide bomber into the theatre piece. These precarious images between life and death are used to theorise the image in an alternative way. Specifically, Mroué stages the image as self-critical metapictures, as has been theorized by W. J. T. Mitchell. Furthermore, Mroué treats the images as if they were actors, as if they had a life, a death, and ghostly (re)appearances of their own. This relates to Mitchell’s later approach, looking at images as living organisms. If images are alive, what lives do they lead, both within and beyond the theatre?

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 (Röttger 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).

This paper was presented at the 7th international conference on the Image, hosted in Liverpool on 1-2 September 2016.

Abstract:
Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an explicit interest to deal with theater as a visual event. Bringing theater studies in close connection with visual studies, it has been argued that theater is an image-producing medium (Jackob & Röttger 2009) that is embedded in historical scopic regimes (Bleeker 2008). As such, theater provides a stage for the image and critically engages with culturally specific practices of looking.
This paper aims to carry this idea further by considering the theater as a space for (re)animating the image, in which images are brought to life within the space and time of a theatrical event. Drawing on W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of the metapicture (1994), the paper analyzes how Romeo Castellucci’s M.#10 Marseille (2004) creates theatrical “thinking images” that carry in them a reflection on their underlying medial operations and visualize how representation works. Moreover, the performance experiments with an animistic attitude toward the image, staging the image as a “living organism” (Mitchell 2005).
Combining a critical exploration of the processes of medialization with the magical animism of watching living images, M.#10 Marseille paves the way for what Hans-Thies Lehmann has called a politics of perception (1999), in which the image is rediscovered as a heterogeneous entity that speaks to the spectator in a self-critical and magical way.

There is no performance without the spectator. This holds true not only for traditional drama, but also for contemporary interactive – and even virtual – forms of theatre. Concepts of spectatorship are now continually being redefined, as spectatorial practices have until recently been neglected in academic discourses. The spectator is no longer a passive and immobile subject.
Promoting an ever-shifting notion of spectatorship, this collection of essays explores the field of contemporary performing arts by revealing the interplay between audience and community, gaze and passivity, image and living reality, self-ownership and alienation. Incorporating recent developments in philosophy, theatre studies and performance studies, the authors offer insight into the practices of a wide array of Flemish and international theatre and performance artists, such as Blast Theory, Ariane Loze, Margareth Obexer, Sarah Vanagt, Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Kurt Vandendriessche.

Recent evolutions in the theater practice since the turn of the millennium show a clear renewed interest in the trope of visual illusion. This tendency is remarkable, because postdramatic theater is traditionally associated with an inclination away from coherent narrative and illusion. The present research explores this tension, endeavoring to understand the reappearance of visual illusion on the background of a theater tradition that is known for its anti-illusionistic stance.
The research analyzes how visual illusion is constructed on the theater stage in highly visual dramaturgies that stage complex interactions and transactions between different media. At the same time, the analysis focuses on how these dramaturgies influence contemporary accounts of spectatorship. This dual approach brings together theater studies and visual studies in order to understand theater as a visual event that unfolds between the spectator, the object of vision and culturally and historically specific ways of seeing that mediate the relationship between both.
As a case in point, the analysis scrutinizes the system of linear perspective and the practice of trompe l’oeil as two central visual strategies of illusion that appear on the postdramatic stage. Considering how new media are staged according to the conventions of these strategies, this study aims to uncover how visual illusion in postdramatic theater critically engages with historical scopic regimes while simultaneously exploring new, contemporary ways of looking.

Dramaturgies in the New Millennium brings together original contributions on the topic of dramaturgy in contemporary theatre and performance practices, both from renowned international scholars as well as from emerging academics. Rather than offering a comprehensive overview of dramaturgical practices in the new millennium, the volume maps out possible routes for the (near) future of dramaturgy as a concept and as a practice. Consequently, the volume is built up around three main topics: the shifting historical and economic conditions of dramaturgy, dramaturgy’s facilitation of encounters, and the politics of perception and movement in dramaturgical practices.

This is not Europe. Unter diesem Titel fand vom 25. August bis 4. September 2016 die Biennale Wiesbaden statt. Unter der Leitung des neuen Intendanten des Staatstheaters Wiesbaden, Eric Laufenberg, und der (bemerkenswert) jungen Kuratoren Maria Magdalena Ludewig und Martin Hammer, erfand sich das Theaterfestival nach 24 Jahren neu.

De Biënnale van Wiesbaden heeft zichzelf na 24 jaar opnieuw uitgevonden: van traditioneel theater- festival tot geëngageerd gebeuren dat midden in de stad, het continent en de wereld staat. Vooral met het programma 'Het asiel van de vermoeide Europeaan' gaf de Biënnale ons vermoeide en ongeïnspireerde continent een schop onder de kont.