The digital era has created a new form of textuality, defined ten years ago by British cultural critic Alan Kirby as digimodernism, manifested in both literature and art, and gradually replacing postmodernism. The new media-language theorist Lev Manovich sees similarities in digital art and the aesthetics of the Left Avant-Garde of the 1920s, as well as cinema. In the early and middle 20th-century cinema development produced an impact on modernism art. In the 21st century, digital technologies emerging from film aesthetics leave the footprints in contemporary art and theatre. Identifying the key principles of Kirby’s theory in particular productions allows partial revising Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of post-dramatic theatre, and raising a thesis on digimodernism as one of the contemporary tendencies in theatre. Thus, fundamental categories of theatrical language – space, time, character, narrative – are becoming relevant. The article aims to research the narrative in digital art and look for a similar strategy of sense construction in theatre productions, drawing conclusions on the effects of digimodernism on theatre. If a narrative is perceived as a sign system, there are two dimensions – the syntagmatic or “real narrative” and the paradigmatic or a range of choices from which narrative is selectively created. Manovich’s theory proves that in new media language paradigm and syntagma interchange, therefore the paradigm becomes a sense-bearer. Similar principles are applied in modern theatre directing. A typical example is the selected production by Latvian director Elmars Senkovs based on the classic play “Blow, wind!” (Pūt, vējiņi!) by Latvian poet and playwright Rainis. The author of the research concludes that the principles of digimodernism in theatre can change the visual perspective of the stage space, namely, the concepts of “downstage” and “upstage” are often replaced by the terms “top” and “bottom”, making the stage “flat”, similar to a screen. Meanwhile, the central perspective or the narrative as a sense-construction strategy still depends on the intellectual capacity and emotional sensitivity of theatre-makers as interpreters.
The Experiential Museum – Avant-Garde Spatial Experiments and the Reorganization of the Human Sensorium
