The New Formats of the Multimedia Theatre

In this article I intend to provide a brief overview of the relationship between theatre and media, starting from the period of the “Theatre of Images” up to the present day, with a particular focus on video theatre in Italy during the 80’s: the rise of the alleged “second wave” of the experimental theatre and its protagonists (Barberio Corsetti/Studio Azzurro, Mario Martone). I will explore the implementation of projected moving images in theatre from the film-theatre of Josef Svoboda to the recent experiments with video mapping and techno-immersion on stage. I will continue with the examination of the role of technology and communication via computers, in reference to their influence in society and their effects on social interactions through important political examples given by The Builders Associations: what is interesting in their works is the extraordinary capacity to dramatise some concepts that until now have been dealt with in essays on the sociology of media: the New Public Space, the Panoptic, the New Connective Subjectivity, the Culture of “Real Virtuality”. Key concepts like dislocation and deterritorialisation, presence and ubiquity, take in fact, the shape of a powerful “mediaturgy”. The ancient style scene, inhabited by back-drop videos projected on a mechanical stage with mobile platforms, is the characteristic of the theatre of Robert Lepage, director, actor and film maker from Canada to whom a paragraph as the undisputed protagonist of the multimedia theatre is dedicated. His concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space is similar to the Gordon Craig's idea of using neutral, mobile, non-representational screens as a staging device.