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cepted that the drunk is also a figure of speech, we must begin to look at him also as an ideological statement. A semiotics of the mise-en-scène is constitutively a semiotics of the production of ideologies. |
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All these things, this complex rhetorical machinery, are, moreover, made possible by the fact that we are not only looking at a human body endowed with some characteristicswe are looking at a human body standing and moving within a physical space. The body could not stagger if there were not an environing space to give it orientationup and down, right and left, to stand up, to lie down. Were the bodies two or more, space would establish the possibility of associating a given meaning with their mutual distances. In this way we see how the problems of the mise-en-scène refer to the problems of many other semiotic phenomena, such as proxemics or kinesics. And we realize that the same semiotic parameters can be applied to the semiotics of theater, of cinema, of architecture, of painting, of sculpture. |
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From the idiosyncratic character of the theatrical phenomenon we have arrived at the general problems of semiotics. Nevertheless, theater has additional features distinguishing it from other forms of art and strictly linking it with everyday conversational interactionfor instance, the audience looking at the drunk can laugh, can insult him and he can react to people's reactions. Theatrical messages are shaped also by the feedback produced from their destination point. |
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So the semiotics of theatrical performance has shown its own proprium, its distinguishing and peculiar features. A human body, along with its conventionally recognizable properties, surrounded by or supplied with a set of objects, inserted within a physical space, stands for something else to a reacting audience. In order to do so, it has been framed within a sort of performative situation that establishes that it has to be taken as a sign. From this moment on, the curtain is raised. From this moment on, anything can happenOedipus listens to Krapp's last tape, Godot meets La Cantatrice Chauve, Tartuffe dies on the grave of Juliet, El Cid Campeador throws a cream cake in the face of La Dame aux Camélias. |
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But the theatrical performance has begun beforewhen Averroes was peeping at the boy who was saying, I am the Muezzin. |
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