Staging the World: Performance Space as an Unified Field of Drama and Society

• Autor(a) principal: Palinhos, Jorge
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/12129
• topic: Architecture; Theatre; Site Specific; Anne Bogart

«All the world is a stage», wrote Petronius, and the same was repeated by William Shakespeare plagiarizing the Roman writer. They were both wrong, because in both their lives, the world – or at least the theatrical world – was not all of it a stage. In fact, according to Jean Duvignaud, theatre was defined by two polarizing spaces: the stage and the audience. The first where the drama took place, the second where the drama was supported and socialized by its watchers. However, contemporary stage somehow breathed life to the dream – or nightmare - of Petronius and Shakespeare. That was what Walter Benjamin already felt in epic theatre, noting that in his time the “dead people” on stage and the living people in the audience were mingling more and more, and the frontier that divided them was becoming more and more blurry, so that the Magic Circle of Johan Huizinga or the Magical Conclave of Jean Duvignaud became more and more all-encompassing, turning all the world into a stage, but also the stage into a world. Drawing from the classical and contemporary theories and ideas of Aristotle, Georg Simmel, Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin, Erving Goffman, Jean Duvignaud, Raymond Williams, Richard Schechner, Miwon Kwon, Cathy Turner, Markus Montola and Ian Bogost about drama, performance, game, and adventure, and also on concepts of social theory and the theories of action, I will try to understand the meaning, impact and limitations of fictional interventions in real space, focusing on a anecdote told by the renowned theatre director and thinker, Anne Bogart, to try to understand the particular relationship between performance and space and the impact that it can have on their creators, participants, spectators and on the surrounding environment.