What happens between the theatre stage and audience?
19.05.2014
Traditional stage design is increasingly being combined with new media technologies in the performing arts.
In her doctoral dissertation Vähän väliä – näyttämön mediaalisuus ja kosketuksen arkkitehtuuri (Something in-between – the mediality of the stage and the architecture of touch), Maiju Loukola from Aalto University's Department of Film, Television and Scenography examines the ways in which video and image projections are integrated with staging and how these affect the audience's experience of a theatre performance.
The intersectionality of the physical stage and the multimedia elements creates a multi-sensory and corporeal experience for the audience. According to Loukola, the viewer's body can even be thought of as a site in which the theatrical performance and scenography take shape.
– Scenography allow us to understand a space in terms of relationships and dynamics. The stage becomes an experiential and sensory element; a space and a situation, Loukola explains.
In both her research and artistic work as a scenographer, Loukola considers issues related to the audience's comprehensive sensory experience of the media theatre’s stage.
– Media scenographers are not only concerned with the visual elements of a performance, which would sublimate the other senses in favour of sight. A sensory experience is always real and concrete, regardless of whether it is affected by physical, tangible materials or by virtual, mediated effects, Loukola stresses.
Mediating corporeality in scenography
In experiencing a piece of media theatre, the viewer is simultaneously a corporeal subject and a member of the audience – the experience is both personal and shared. Indeed, the core of the experience, i.e. the viewer's experiential body, is already in and of itself mediated and mediating. Media theatre empowers the spectator as a self-mediator in the theatrical setting.
– The space created by media projections is not actually tangible; it remains at a distance. On the other hand, it may approach the viewer, penetrating the audience's experiences. Difference and similarity are created in the lived and mediated space, transforming the stage into a subtle and game-like current, Loukola continues.
This current or spark can, according to Loukola, enrich and aid our understanding not only of art but also of people's own conceptions of themselves and the world around them.
– The embodied mediation of media technologies shapes our understanding of place, time, presence and identity, and it has long-since pervaded debates in the world of art and humanist philosophies. We are connect to the world through our senses and are most certainly not alone in this.
Mediation is an increasingly relevant and current theme in scenography, with new experiential and performative spaces taking physical form alongside media spaces and virtual environments.
– Intermediation becomes visible in the fragmentation of moments of discovery, stage elements, the relationships and fractures between actors and events, and in the unlimited potential for virtual transformation.
– Here, the mediation we experience is more pronounced than in theatrical situations in which we encounter people and physical objects on the stage.
Further information:
Maiju Loukola
maiju.loukola [at] aalto [dot] fi
tel. +358 50 523 1910