🥑Dramaturgy and Semiotics Smashed on Toast

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Remix Theatre > Dramaturgy and Semiotics Smashed on Toast

The other digital theatre forms I have discussed in this project integrate what I consider different components of theatre and performance, like theatricality (Cinematic Theatre), liveness (Televisual Theatre), embodiment (Virtual Reality Theatre), and a sense of presence (Interactive and Gamified Theatre). The Remix form, in contrast, is much closer to multimedia works and are further, ontologically and practically, from traditional in-person performance. This is the category that most makes me scratch my head and wonder, ‘Is this theatre?’ Since post-pandemic theatre artists are engaging more with digital forms including multimedia art, I have decided that yes, I will classify this group as theatre, since my research examines theatre makers pushing the boundaries of their pre-pandemic practice and the boundaries of multimedia art. the nomenclature and the difficulty of genre labels in a postdigital world in which the hypermedium of theatre is incorporating new media to make new forms:

In the early twenty-first century, however, genre has slipped back into contention with the emergence of categories such as ‘verbatim, magical realism, grunge, promenade, postdramatic and cosmopolitan’ theatre, to name only a few terms of recent usage. These genre concepts reflect a different set of values from earlier dramatic ideas since they privilege characteristics of theatre that speak as much about the process of making as they do about textual source materials; they make intertextual or multimedia references to forms in literature, music or film; and they focus on the organisation of the modes of reception with which a spectator negotiates the imaginative time and space of the event.

This list of genre labels is useful to illustrate the struggle to define what type of art we are watching since artists, including theatre makers, are naturally curious about exploring new ways to make performances. Remix Theatre is heavily intertextual and multimedial in the process of their creation, the tools integrated, and the references made – and this meta-referencing is part of the dramaturgy of the show’s narrative and the hoped-for audience interpretation. These post-pandemic digital shows burst out from the proscenium arch of the digital device by referencing the world filtered through these devices in numerous ways.

Like many other digital theatre forms, Remix Theatre relies on , or a type of art that can incorporate numerous other types of art to create a single unified work. For , the internet is a prime example of a hypermedium, with the ability to open several images and texts (and now, video and audio) in overlapping ways. Hypermedia are not required to coordinate the contained media into an experience or narrative; however, hypermedial art forms like theatre typically use media in this way, more towards a multimedia approach. In Multimedia Performance, : ‘Integration [into one final work] is therefore important in understanding multimedia performance as an intermedial and interdisciplinary formation in culture’. The semiotics of each media layer must ultimately tell one story or convey one experience, regardless of the source of the original symbolism; hypermedia like the stage and the internet take on this semiotics best.

We interpret media components in different ways depending on whether we view them as purposeful or not – semiotics, the study of how reality is , is a major component of Remix dramaturgy, as the audience will have several signs and signifiers to interpret to follow the progression of the show. Considering the semiotics of the collage-like melding of film and theatre into a new performance art in the 1960s, :

The meaning of the theatrical elements used in the new work depends more upon the relationship of each element to the others than it does upon the character of the image itself. A totally abstract image such as a projection of shifting amorphous yellow light may exist only in its sensory dimensions when related to non-objective material, but it may also be seen as a ‘warning signal’, ‘reflection from the water’, ‘ghost’, etc., when set in a context that generates cognitive meanings. At the other extreme, a completely recognizable image may create little ‘meaning’ when placed next to abstract material …