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Mixing Theatre and Film

Theatre and film are intimately related representational media. In both, actors embody fictional characters to convey narratives. At the same time, as both practitioners and theorists have long recognized, there are profound ontological, phenomenological, and structural differences between them. One of the most significant and least explored of these differences is that theatre and film conventionally engage radically different modes of representation. Film is primarily a pictorial medium. Theatre, by contrast, is a ludic medium, that is to say, a medium rooted in the spirit of play and make-believe. This lecture will clarify this distinction and its significance, and explore the special challenges and opportunities it presents to artists who produce work that combines flesh-and-blood performers and physical spaces with video, including media-enhanced theatre and augmented reality projects.

David Saltz is Executive Director of Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) at the University of Georgia, and the Head of the Department Department of Theatre and Film Studies. He is a specialist in modernist theatre and performance, performance theory, the philosophy of art, and directing. His primary research focuses have been performance philosophy and the interaction between live performance and digital media. He was Principal Investigator of Virtual Vaudeville, a large-scale research project funded by the National Science Foundation to simulate a nineteenth-century vaudeville performance on the computer. He has explored the use of computer technology extensively in his own work as a director and teacher. Along those lines he established the Interactive Performance Laboratory at UGA, has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally.

Website: https://www.drama.uga.edu/directory/people/david-saltz

Dec 9, 2022 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)