Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance ― Deep Time of the Theatre

This book develops media archaeological approaches to theatre and intermediality. As an age-old art form, theatre has always embraced ‘new’ media. To create theatrical effects and optical illusions, theatre makers were ready to integrate state-of-the-art technics and technologies, and by doing so they playfully explored and popularized scientific knowledge on mechanics, optics and sound for live audiences. This book highlights this obvious but often overlooked relation between media developments and the history of intermedial theater. By considering the interplay between present intermedial performances and their archaeological traces, the authors assembled here revisit old and often forgotten media approaches and theatre technologies. This archaeology is understood less as the discovery of a forgotten past than as the establishment of an active relationship between past and present. Rather than treating archaeological remains as representative tokens of a fragmented past that need to be preserved, the authors stress the return of the past in the present, but in a different, performative guise.

Nele Wynants is a postdoctoral researcher in the fields of art and theatre at the Free University of Brussels-ULB and the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her work on the interplay of performance, media history and science have appeared in many journals and books. She is editor-in-chief of FORUM+ for Research and Arts.