Is It Still The Ring? Theatre and opera semiotics : a space for avant-garde productions
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Otakar Zich was a Czech aesthetician, who is now considered as a founding figure in the history of the semiotics of theatre. His 1931 book, The Aesthetics of Dramatic Art, inspired semioticians and structuralists to develop further some ideas about theatre and opera performance: especially, the ideas of the semiotic nature of the stage and the distinction between the actor as a person, the actor-in-role onstage, and the dramatic character as a mental concept in a spectator's (reader's) mind. Zich himself followed ideas of German psychology (e.g., J.F. Herbart) and aesthetics (e.g., F. Schiller) and applied them to the mainstream performance art of his times. In my presentation, after introducing Zich's general views of performance arts, I'd like to show Zich's ideas about the opera Die Walküre and R. Wagner in general, as a courtesy to the Salzburg Festival; the final part of the presentation will point out that Zich's personal distrust of the avant-garde does not prevent us from applying his theory to avant-garde operatic performance, even such as works by Robert Wilson. |
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