Semiotics and performing arts: contemporary issues

ABSTRACT

Contemporary experiences highlight a crisis in representation which reveals itself through profound changes in the processes and instances at work in the postmodern/post-dramatic performance. As well at the level of production as at the one of reception, important transformations have occurred regarding action, feeling, perception of the stage, fragmentation, crisis of the body mediation, and crisis of the invariant supports of the performance. The consequences of those innovative processes are numerous: they influence the theoretical approaches, and among others the semiotic perspectives. Three types of questions about the relationship between semiotics and nowadays theatrical practices should be explored: First, the place of externality. By reconsidering the issue of the origin of meaning, as general semiotics does, the semiotics of performing arts opens the way for externalizing theories (embodiment, the study of bios/life, and theories of corporeity). Second, the issue of the researcher and in particular his or her exteriority regarding the object. This question points the demand of scientific rigor which characterizes recent research on the performing arts. A paradox which is virtually a dual injunction: the more ephemeral the object, the more imperious the need for scholarship. Although particularly relevant with regard to contemporary concerns centred on the subjectivity of the utterance (presence, effect of presence, intermediality, body–machine relations, etc.), does semiotics still have a universalizing vocation? How can one reproduce the experience of subjectivity?

KEYWORDS:

• Semiotics
• post-dramatic theatre
• performance
• crisis
• meaning
• subjectivity
• constructivism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

André Helbo Emeritus chair of Performance Studies at Université Libre de Bruxelles. International coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus program in Performing Arts Studies (2006–2014). Current President of the International Association for Semiotics of Performing Arts and Head of the Centre européen d’études en arts du spectacle vivant (Cenarts-V). His main interests and books regard semiotics, intermedial studies, and performance/theatre theories. Editor of the International Journal of Semiotics DEGRES (165 issues until now). Member of the Executive Board of IAS-AIS.

Notes

1. Workshops: (1) Modes d’approche du spectacle vivant (2009). (2) Comprendre la performance (2010). Académie royale de Belgique (Collège Belgique). Podcasts available at http://www.lacademie.tv. International Conferences: (1) Savoirs et performance spectaculaire, 23–25 April 2010, Université libre de Bruxelles (cf. Helbo 2011), (2) Interdiscipline et spectacle vivant, 28–29 April 2011, Académie royale de Belgique (Collège Belgique, cf. Helbo 2013), (3) Babel aimée. La choralité d'une performance à l'autre, du théâtre au carnaval. 27–29 March 2014. Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis (cf. Bonhomme et al. 2015), (4) Transdisciplinarité en question (s). Le champ du spectacle vivant, 9–10 October 2014. Université de Paris 8. Online: http://www.univ-paris8.fr/Journees-d-etudes (cf. AISS-IASPA, Brussels, 2016), and (5) Les métamorphoses du spectateur, 29–30 April 2015, Académie royale de Belgique (Collège Belgique, cf. Helbo 2015a). Podcasts available at http://www.lacademie.tv.