"Can Theater and Media Speak the Same Language" (Keith's Reading Notes)

Reading notes for Aronson's article on Theater and Media

Aristotle's Warning: "spectacle is 'the least artistic' aspect of theater"
Past method: minimize the appearance of human agency

Thesis:
projected scenery, an especially film and video, does not work -does not function- on the stage!

Why projections do not work well onstage:
1. Product of a capitalist society (subjected to political, social and economic influences)
2. Theater is the only art form to use what is signified as the signifier of that object (ie chair signifies a chair)
-dealing with real surfaces and volumes (wood floor treated to look like tile still functions as a floor)
-we sense the spaciality of the stage
-actor exists in real time
KEY ELEMENT: a) space and b) volume, which imply c) time

When scenography includes a projected image...
-the audience experiences the disjunction of perceiving a different world
3. With projected imagery: no spacial continuity between stage and auditorium and, consequently, no ability to comprehend time
4. Pictoral space, while possibly mimicking the exterior world, remains self-contained and self-referential
-sets create an illusion of continuing the space of the auditorium onto the stage
-we experience the stage in the here and now
5. Photographs: Time has transformed the subject while preserving the object
-turns them into fetish objects (ie family portraits: look back on)
~"The eye has lost its historically privileged place as a processor of information. On a stage that combines live images observed through normal visual processes and photographic images in which an eye observes mechanically reproduced images, the two systems inevitably clash"
EXCEPTION- live video feed

KEY TO OUR COMPREHENSION= the FRAME
-frames create self-contained space carefully delineated from the world around it
-Theater: the action that unfolds before our eyes is framed by the stage
-Internal logic: a world on a different scale that obeys different rules

~"individual spectators are obliterated in the darkened auditorium and become a communal audience" similar to Feminist Spectator (oh fuck... thats TA61. not this class...)

Movies
-present us with an infinite world (no FRAME)
-documentary capturing reality> believing that what is on the screen must in some way be true
vs Theater
-composed of real objects
-transforms a concrete reality into a kind of fantasy> everything on the stage becomes a sign
=TENSION is created between the unlimited bounds of the projected image and the architechtural realities of the stage

Movies
-the movement is specifically enhanced by the subjective intentions of the director or camera operator
-experienced as subjected and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world

Stage set= permanent and unchanging (set is replaced but remains)
Projection= nothing but light/shadow> no corporeality
~"the very idea that one image, the projection, is created by light, and the other, the stage set, is created by objects that are made visible by their ability to reflect light, creates two perceptual orders, two kinds of reality"

My Question
1. Theater=present/Film=past(preserved): What about a period piece playing video clips (news, etc) that would be contemporary to the plays setting? No contrasting time periods...?
-Keith