Can Theater & Media Speak the Same Language

An innovation in theater was once considered anything that would hide the mechanics on stage with efforts of making the the production seem natural. Hiding the mechanics kept the magic on stage and kept the audience wondering how a specific effect was done. Driven by the thought of innovation, a German man by the name of Edwin Piscator introduced projections onto the  stage. Theater was considered to be the interaction of the events happening on stage with the audience, so when projections were introduced it complicated theater. Projections do not function in the same way as a set stage because a projection is the preservation of an object or element in the past. Whereas all of the components used in theater are in the present and in front of the audience. There is a fight between the physical elements and the projections that are previously recorded. A projection is very similar to a photograph in the sense that it's a caption of an object playing a role at that split second. Theater does not take previous events and try to pass them off as the present but actually has an object playing a role on stage. For example, there is a person on stage playing the role of another person. Theater tries to make the stage and production as "real" as possible by using time and space. In a performance there is the feeling of time and the space on stage is tweak in a way that makes the stage seem larger. The stage is "self-contained and delineated from the world around it," a practice known as framing. A projection also uses framing when dealing with live footage, but the problem with this type of projection is that the audience is not in the presence of the object being projected. The object in the projection might be in the middle of a storm and the audience is not able to feel the storm. This creates the argument between a temporary projection and physical performance. A projection only last as long as it's being projected whereas a set stage last until time takes its toll on it. The example used is a chair being projected compared to the chair on stage. The projected chair is only visible as long as the projection is kept on and the chair on stage will remain there until the theater is long gone. This difference between media and theater is too great for the two to ever be considered as one. There have been many great productions that incorporated media but there have also been many poor productions that reinforce the idea that media does not belong in theater. Theater is perfect the way that it is!!=]

-Justin