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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathPerformance
 
 
 
 
 

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scanning, and a pool of freely associated images was based on the mass media literacy of a generation for whom the pop industry and television were equally formative influences.

This essay can merely touch upon the more contradictory and conflict-ridden process of integrating stage performance and mediatization in Europe. Throughout the 1980s the Catalonian theater troupe La Fura dels Baus toured with a series of body-centered spectacles employing mechanical and electronic equipment and repeatedly centering on the viewer as the target of the performer's disinhibited actions.[32] In the meantime, the group is back on the same classical stage it originally tried to avoid, playing in large theaters. No survey of theatrical performances[33] would be complete without mentioning the technologically advanced troupe Dumb Type.[34] Composed of Japanese multimedia artists, the group's elaborate stage performances were based not on extreme physical feats, but rather precisely on the mediatization of the body.

A distinct line leads from the theatrical experiments of E.A.T.'s «9 Evenings» in 1966 to the later

 

multimedia spectacles mounted by rock bands or by directors and ensembles on the international theater scene (William Forsythe, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson, Wooster Group). The technical and logistic complications experienced in the course of the «9 Evenings» were an early demonstration of the problems of live electronics that even today make many directors reluctant to risk the imponderables of hi-tech sets, not to mention interactive performances. It was hence not only an ideological but also a pragmatic issue to stress the importance of the process as opposed to the result of these experiments. That the curiosity about new territory was not confined to classical theater venues was demonstrated by artists like Alex Hay, who as early as 1966 said: «I want to pick up faint body sounds like brain waves, cardiac sounds, muscle sounds, and to amplify activity, its changing tempo and value.»[35] His words illustrate the degree in which utopian visions were connected specifically with the permeation and amplification of the body and its linkage with media. Many performance artists subsequently worked on the question in different ways and in opposition to the mass media and theatrical

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