The Moving Image in the Theatre: CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP AND THE COMBINATION OF FILM AND THEATRE GRAMMARS IN THE THEATRICAL EVENT

Abstract

A host of value judgments are implicit in the rhetoric and methodology of contemporary scholarship relating to the use of the moving image in the live theatre. Human performance is often fetishized in these studies, whilst the moving image is admonished as a contaminant which brings into the theatrical event a host of cultural paraphernalia including a perceived ideology derived from its mediatized code. These problematic assumptions have sustained a self-limiting paradigm of ‘intermediality’ that offers a narrow vocabulary through which to notate contemporary mainstream theatre productions that use video projection, such as Katie Mitchell’s Waves (2006) and the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch (2006). This thesis offers a radical departure from contemporary scholarship by unpicking the logic of the existing discourse to construct a new paradigm that embraces the creative grammars of mainstream theatre and moving image productions.