📹Cinematic Theatre

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Cinematic Theatre > Intro Page

I define Cinematic Theatre as a filmic production of a show that had, at one time, been performed live before an audience, most often in-person; the purpose of recording the in-person performance is to communicate to an audience (watching later) the emotional experience of the show and of being in the crowd. It is important for audiences to know they have a similar experience as other audience members, but temporal or physical co-presence is less important.

Cinematic Theatre is, ontologically, closer to film than to traditional theatre, but the goal is to retain an experience of theatricality. Using cinematic techniques, the recording is a high-quality archive that not only communicates the narrative of the show, but the sensation of being an audience member watching the show during its live performance. These works are not live broadcast or livestreamed (in contrast to Televisual Theatre, for example) but they can be found streaming online: sometimes as appointment viewing (discussed more in Televisual Theatre), sometimes for the span of a month after the in-person show’s run, and sometimes available indefinitely (i.e., until the streaming service decides to take it down).

Cinematic Theatre existed for decades before the Covid pandemic, with practical approaches evolving all the time; however, few theatre makers and critics have promoted this form alongside in-person performance, despite the potential benefits of reaching new audiences or engaging theatre fans who could not otherwise attend the show. For some theatre critics during the pandemic, like , ‘nothing can replace the shared pulse of a theater audience … the vivid thrill of being there’, or , saying that online theatre in general is ‘a skeleton of the thing itself’. These arguments suggest that Cinematic Theatre (and other forms of digital dissemination) are second-class citizens in the performance world – another long-standing argument epitomised in the famous Peggy Phelan/Philip Auslander liveness debate. , that ‘the common assumption is that the live event is “real” and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow artificial reproductions of the real’. Since then, arguments have ranged regarding the emotional impact of recordings to the affective nature of in-person gathering.

Second wave theatre artists bring this argument back into medial discussion by highlighting the dramaturgical differences between a film of a theatrical production and more traditional cinematic methods. In the article , the creator of Filmed Live Musicals Luisa Lyon is quoted saying: ‘I’ve spoken to industry people, theater professionals, who don’t understand the difference between “Hamilton” filmed live and “Singing in the Rain” – the difference between something filmed in a theater versus made on a soundstage’. Lyons evokes the difference between the full visual experience of being in a theatre space and watching performers on a theatre stage, compared to a play converted to a film, made on a set with film actors for a filmic audience.

in her pre-pandemic article ‘“We Are Not Making a Movie”: Constituting Theatre in Live Broadcast’, which focuses on real-time live cinema broadcasting by companies like the National Theatre, but her argument regarding filming describes pre-recorded, edited, Cinematic Theatre as well: ‘what they have in common at a basic level is the project of mediatizing live theatrical works from the theatre in more or less available light without removal of the production to a soundstage. . . . After all, the theatricality – the theatre-ness – of the resulting product was fundamental to the development of these translations’. As Australian Theatre Live’s Grant Dodwell told me in our interview: ‘that's what they say, “Well, you know you’re more cinema.” But no matter what you want to call it, it's still a stage play that you're watching. … because it is a hybrid. It is a variation’.

Audiences watching Cinematic Theatre understand this, and arguably, part of what they seek from a filmed play is the overall theatricality, which is not part of film as an artform. The nature of a theatrical experience can be translated to an audience that does not share physical space or temporal synchronicity with the performers onstage, and this format is, in fact, an important tool that helps students, rural audiences, and many other people interested theatre gain access to the artform.