New visualities in contemporary theatre : media dramaturgies and the suspended image in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Katie Mitchell

Abstract

The turn of the twenty-first century was marked by social and political upheavals in Europe and other parts of the world, including the rise of terrorism and the recurrent financial crises. This situation has exacerbated diffidence in dominant political structures and fuelled alternative modes of thinking. In theatre, constructs like narrative, text, action, and character were subjected to further strategies of rupture than those that emerged through the work of the avant-garde in the twentieth century. In this context, digital technology and media can no longer be considered as separate from other elements of theatre-making, and are now intricately woven to a progressively more dominant degree. In the new century, theatre reflects the mind-set of a mediatised audience which has given rise to what has been called a ‘new visuality’, i.e. new ways of seeing, perceiving, and experiencing. Theatre groups and directors like Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Katie Mitchell utilise the image to construct new and different realities in time and space. Using forms of photography, painting, theatrical elements, and cinematic techniques, their art form is far removed from the various conventional constructs of theatre and cinema. Historically, the use of the image in theatre can be traced as far back as the 1920s when theatre-makers like Frederick Kiesler (1922) and Erwin Piscator (1927) produced hybrid forms of theatre and the moving image to give a different spatio-temporal reality. By looking at the work of contemporary theatre-makers Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Katie Mitchell, this dissertation considers what elements and techniques are employed to engage (to captivate and to alienate) audiences. In these contexts, practices of ‘media dramaturgy’ are used to allow audiences to experience and interpret in new ways, in the process privileging the role of the spectator. With this kind of rupture and fragmentation of staged reality in theatre, audiences question and find meaning through their own experiences and the media being used.