Theatre poetics: Highlights From Realism to Hyper-Naturalism and Beyond.

Keywords and concepts that characterized theatre writing, theatre practice and viewing at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century  (the years of Realism and early Modernity)  and at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century (the years of Hyper-Naturalism and a New Modernity).

Late 19th and Early 20th century poetics	Late 20th and Early 21st century poetics
Work—just one (readerly), concrete: theatre as final product Authorship Author/Creator Copyright law	Text/Intertext/Tissue of quotations (writerly)—a methodological tool: theatre as process (metatheatre) Recreator/Bricoleur/Auteur Death of the author (birth of the reader/viewer)
Theatre	Metatheatre (acknowledging the presence of the audience) The play is the thing Post-drama
Primary source/origins	Secondary source/lack of origins Palimpsest of past-present-future traces Pastiche: mixing and adapting of forms Regulated irregularity
Heritage/Past	Heritage as reusable memory bank The shock of the old through mixing, collage Participation in the discursive space of a culture
Paradigmatic	Syntagmatic
Metaphor	Metonymy
Symptom/Result/Outcome	Desire
Metaphysics	Irony
Grounding	Foregrounding: giving special emphasis to make words, character etc stand out through interruption, demonstration etc
Intermediated signs	Signs as signs
Generic purity:  production Literature-truth Novelty High infornation	Hybridity (blending genres): reproduction, crossbreed textual & performative Literature-discourse Pleasurable repetition-Redundancy
High-Low distinction	High-Low obliterated
Masterpieces: Anti-pop Anti-commercial Anti-consumerist	Appropriation of low art forms (TV, movies, cartoons, pulp fiction, daily consumer products etc) Pop: transient, expandable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, gimmicky, glamorous
STRUCTURE
Hierarchy (controlled play of signifiers	Diaspora/Free play of signifiers
Unity Order	Difference—arbitrary or intentional breaks in the convention, expectations etc thru juxtaposition, conflation etc Antiform (open).
Contained information-complete Fixity/Finality Placement Stability	Disponbilite: openness or spontaneity in the act of creation Displacement Transformation/Fluidity
Separation of scenes that suggests some (logical) linkage Beginning, middle, end	Sudden scene separation indicating an arbitrary change of locale, time etc. Each scene in dialogic relation to previous or next
Naturalism Representation/Unmediated Representation: context oriented Closed	Hyper-naturalism (i.e. Sam Shepard, Mac Wellman, Body Art) Presentation//performance/Mediated (i.e. Handke, Kaspar) Performance: generating transformations.  Art re-integrates what is “outside it”, an opening up of the field Performance: circumstantial (depends on the audience, situation, performer etc , here, now)
STORY
Mimesis (ergon) Closed form and cosmos Diegetic universe: framed reality	Anti-mimetic Event (energia), an active force Un-framed reality
Homogeneity	Heterogeneity/Hybridity
Focal center/convergence Centripetal/hierarchical One perspective	Kaleidoscope/diffusion Pastiche Centrifugal/diasporic Multiperspectival/Polycentrism
Intense whole/ One narration Promoting logical /causal progression of scenes What do they mean?	Intense moments/many micro narrations Episodic Scattered information-incomplete (Where is the reality?) How do signs mean?
There and then  (abstract): absence of presence Naturalism	Here and now (physical): present-ness of presence Hypernaturalism
Contained (information)	Scattered (information): a flow Fluid, illogical, randomly structured (like TV) Infinity of the text
Dramatic action	Narrative action
Interactive structures	Autonomy of the stage signs
Purpose/Closure	Game/Playfulness/Non-telic/The eternal present/Movement of the world as play
Definite historical period/history as continuity	Conflated or contrasting periods
Tracking approach (dialogue determined by plot) Theatre (and story) as final product	Turns approach (dialogue as free radical)—the play/performance becomes a discovery Theatre (and story) as a process
TIME
Linearity/coherence/cause and effect Real: cutting across real boundaries Time as a continuum Time as given. Objective	Nonlinearity/incoherence juxtaposition Meaning occurs at the interface/junction between beats Loosely related parts Frequent shifts (of place, time etc): Influence of television Time as discontinuous Time as relative. Subjective (thus: slow motion, speedy, repetitive etc) Acceleration, simultaneity, speed, colage (like video art)
CHARACTER
Characters in accordance to the whole	Characters disobedient to the whole
Autonomous character / Integral Subjectivity	Split character/Bifurcated Loss of subjectivity Constant transformations Only fragments, parts are left
Character: Psychological and sentimental identification (interiority): based on need, desire, goals etc. Integral traits: one character	Exterior, gestural, kinetic projection (dexterity): no psychologisms Contradictory traits
Character specific (each speaks within a certain range): causal relationship between character’s class, gender etc and level of speech Character producer of language	Character no longer identifiable Character clash, juxtaposition from opposing historical eras, genres, styles etc Language frames character: we change our speech depending on the situation Wittgenstein: language the cause of character and not the result
Character internal motivation (Euclidean) Unmediated entity	The device of language as motivation  --language shifts; more playfulness, imaginative, inventive Interfaces between human beings and the machine. Ghosts of the self, simulations Mask  covers self, shows transformation, lack of  subjectivity
ACTOR
Actor becomes character Agent of the author (or director)	Actor performs character Actor as subject and object of the creative process Conspicuous appearance
One character for every actor	Multiple characters for every actor Multiple identities Bodily fragments highlighted, objectified Body is cut up The voice as an autonomous element—use of microphones for alienation effects: dissemination of the self
Actor behind character (matrixed): through line, arc, fleshing out, conflict	Actor in front of the character (dematrixed)
Mask (and technology) to elucidate character	Interfaces between human beings and the machine.  Ghosts of the self, simulations Mask  covers self, shows transformation, lack of  subjectivity
Transformation of the other  (character)	Transformation of the self (actor) Body as site of discursive struggles (i.e. feminism)
One narrator privileged	Multiple narrators with no preference (also related to politics of identity, gender, sex)
Protagonist-driven	No central character necessary; maybe ensemble
The actor as a subjected subject (subtextual)	Surface textuality
The body as the carrier of (an)other story  (serving signification)	The body as the story (a sign of itself): center of attention, auto-sufficient.  Body absolutized
LANGUAGE
Language with logical coherence	Language with no coherence. Dissected Fragments of speech Innovative Alienation of word and meaning—this leads to visual, musical, improvisational, gestural solutions (re-instating theatre as ritual)
Dialogue based on conflict Conflict-driven scene (opposite viewpoints) Circumstance-driven scene Belief-driven scene	Dialogue promotes conflict indirectly
Language (word) as part of system	Language (word) as free radical. Protean Freewheeling conflation
Language as the tool of drama Language generates stories	Language as material of drama /event Language generates images
Language as meaning	Language as sign (or sound)/object
Conventional syntax	Unconvetional syntax
Landscape	Lang-scapes
The words have history	The words are historicized
Gesture depends on language	Autonomous gesture
Language reflects culture	Language is a counterpoint to culture
Monologic play: character predetermined by psychological profile	Dialogic—character shaped/scalped by language
Character specific dialogue Language related to job, class, age etc	Multivocality (combining multiple speech strategies) Playful grafting
The meaning of things	The materiality of things
The truth-like look of representation	The performance of presence
The “other” world	This world
Pain as representation	The pain of representation Gesture precedes thought Gesture precedes language Gesture precedes knowledge
Theatre of myth	Theatre of the social/real
AUDIENCE
Audience as (passive) spectators Readers	Audience as witness  (acknowledged as active presences) (Mis)readers
Reception (hot), total, final: feel at home Synoptic: gives view of the whole Audience feeling at home	Reception (cool) eclectic, open: estranged Synoptic: partial, immediate Audience not feeling at home
The politics of myth/representation What does it mean?)	The politics of reception: the play is negotiated in the moment Transformative politics of perception
SELF
Romantics: genius, individuality Unitary Identity Cogito-logocentric subject Human body is in space	Construct Sign Non-unitary Open to change, transformation, redistribution Decentered self Partial  identities Inscribed in language Ecstatic subject Re-invents subjectivity through fragments and polyvocality The human body is of space (a symptom of sensory, somatic and other stimuli)—mainly in physical theatre
SPACE:
Stage location for the representation of preexisting meanings, texts Authentic Unmediated Uncontaminated Real	Stage: towards the creation of meaning Inauthentic Mediatized/technology/reproduction What’s real? Hyperreal (in which the real is lost) Can we separate reality and media? Image and reality? In this space the origins of voice, thought, authenticity impossible Ghosts, simulations