From page to virtual stage: a socio-semiotic reading of stage directions

ABSTRACT

The interrelatedness of text and performance is a feature of semiotic approaches to drama. Because of their relation to performance and to social life, dramatic texts are among the most complex texts. A dramatic text creates an imaginary world which is “staged” in readers’ imaginations. Clarifying the playwright’s vision and facilitating transformation of the play from text to performance, stage directions are key components for the interaction with readers and spectators. Stage directions act as useful interventions which lead the readers to the world of the play and guide them to imagine the three-dimensional stage space. The receivers of the dramatic text complete their semiotization through adding their own interpretation to a virtual performance which they then place against any performance they see. This paper investigates how stage directions function as a focalizing element of the text which are important to the interpretive possibilities of a play. The paper probes how stage directions can be illuminated by the sensitive application of socio-semiotics to the encoding of motifs and stage imagery in dramatic texts as a meeting point of life, culture and imagination that generates meanings which are highly sensitive to receivers’ social and cultural backgrounds. Examples from stage directions as an integral part in the plays of Sam Shepard, an American writer, will be the focus of the analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-semiotics
• dramatic text
• stage directions
• semiosphere
• virtual stage
• performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nita M. Moghaddam is a researcher whose main focus is on semiotics. Her research interests include socio-semiotics, theatre semiotics, and semiotic-oriented analysis of dramatic text. She has been a university lecturer and active in writing and translating articles on subjects including applied semiotics, contemporary drama, semiotics of drama and theatre, modern and postmodern dramatists, and English literature.

Notes

1 The word “receiver” in this study covers both the reader of a dramatic text and the audience or spectator of a performance when the point being made is appropriate to both.

2 All quotations from The Unseen Hand are from Sam Shepard Plays: 1 (Shepard 1996).