Playing for and against the microphone: the theatrical soundstage, the cinematic meeting interface

• Authors: Nenad Jovanović
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article argues for an analogy between the early talkies and the video telephony software-based theatre productions that have proliferated since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic: both the crude sound equipment employed for the late 1920s films and the static streaming and recording devices used to make online theatre/theatre online productions require the performer's close proximity to the microphone. The latter kind of artwork's 'user interface stage' is the site of a paradox, simultaneously fragmenting the spacetime of a written scene and reconstituting the fragments in alternately theatrical and cinematic fashions. I use Mint Theatre's The Gin Chronicles in New York (2020) as a source of examples of this innate contradiction's potential to transcend the notion of medium specificity (and its 'betrayal') that surrounded the emergence of the talkie and to help forge a new model for the Foucauldian heterotopia.

Keywords

EN

early sound film; online theatre/theatre online; early sound theory; heterotopia; The Gin Chronicles in New York

Discipline

• ARTS_&_ARCHITECTURE: ARTS & ARCHITECTURE

• Publisher: Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts
• Journal: Theatralia: Revue současného myšlení o divadelní kultuře (Theatralia: The revue of contemporary thought on theatre culture)
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 11-28
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Nenad Jovanović

• Theatralia, redakce, Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Katedra divadelních studií, Arna Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic