Theater as an Expanded Field: Image in Gilles Deleuze and Hans-Thies Lehmann

Abstract

This essay characterizes the "theater of visual dramaturgy" (Hans-Thies Lehmann), or the theater as an expanded field, through the incorporation of diverse media, basing analysis on Gilles Deleuze's criticism of the "wiles of representation" and "the ontological difference between the model and the copy," and emphasizing that this theater opposes itself to the representation-image of the dramatic theater and of classic cinema, as well as to the simulacro-image of the mass-media world. Also cited: Anne Sauvagnargues' commentaries on the Deleuzean notion of "image-individuation," based on longitudinal and latitudinal modulations. This essay seeks to show that the expanded theater is the site, per excellence, for the development of a drama of perception, the issue now at the center of contemporary aesthetic reflection. In the confluence of languages, of signs of light and of the actor's body, we would find an image capable of proffering a critique of currently circulating images, or, in other words, a form that "affects the sensation and force of thought," in Gilles Deleuze's terms.

English version: Leslie Damasceno