Book, Contemporary staging, A: origins, trends, perspective[LS]

What is staging? What is its role in the constitution of the theatrical work that we call a spectacle? Is it just the explanation and/or harmonization of the elements contained in the play or whatever serves as the basis for a scenic representation? A simple external work of correction or criticism of the actor's gesture, voice, understanding, incorporation or interpretation? Or will it be all of this together, with a creative and methodological function in the synthesis of the responsibility of each of the actors who are brought into the scene and who are integrated according to the conceptions, tastes, tendencies of those who carry out this task, that is, the director? In other words, is he the author of a work that is called representation and/or theater spectacle? In Contemporary Staging, one of the main current exponents of the French school of dramatic art studies, Patrice Pavis, brings together and focuses, in all specificities, the issues that encompass this topic. Exposing each of the items in an objective and at the same time critical way, he develops his analysis based on a complete monitoring of the evolution of the mise en scène, followed by a survey to its extreme extent in reading and scenic improvisation, which allows him to an approach to staged and performative presentations. Punctuating the spectrum of his inspection in this field in general and in the spectacle watched in particular, he maps the trends in scenography and the versions given to textual production, especially in France, the problem of ritual and staging on stage, as well as the intersections between ritual and staging, anthropology and culture, media and theater in the process of scenic construction, deconstruction and re-construction in modernity and in the so-called post-modernity, with its repercussion in the theater of gesture and the actor and its effects on the interpretation of the classics. But this true summation of the arts of theater direction does not end in the rich objectification and conceptual, technical and aesthetic definition, as Patrice Pavis concludes this broad drawing with an assessment of the staging and an inquiry into the direction it will take in its process of existence and renewal as art. - J. Guinsburg