UC Santa Cruz

The integration of digital media into traditional theatre is at once inevitable and impossible. The convergence of film and theatre is quickly becoming commonplace in live performance; vast new possibilities are opened up by extending – through increasingly cost-efficient projections – nearly every element on stage, including scenery, costumes, props, and even performers. However, I hypothesize that the projected and performed aspects of digitally-integrated theatre are structurally incompatible. When isolated, both mediums operate similarly, using signs to represent reality without ever asserting itself as real. However, the presence of projected media in live theatre appears not as referential, like the actor’s representation of a character, but as self-reflexive, like the director’s statement, read before curtain is given the chance to rise. While this opens limitless possibilities of what can be delivered to the audience’s perception, its reliance on photorealism can bypass the dramatic process; projected media is both gilded and gelded by the real. This manifesto will pull from prior research in the fields of theatre, film, and projected media, and synthesize these arguments to investigate the divergence of film and theatre on the basis of structural differences, including semiosis, deixis, and liminality. However, through the exploration of aesthetic strategies used in seven personal case studies, this manifesto will also propose five tenets of media design aimed at the successful integration of the projected and the performed in live theatre.