| Summary: | 1984 marks an important year in the career of avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson. In the same year that his monumental opera "the CIVIL warS" was unceremoniously cancelled before its premiere at the Olympic Arts Festival, the very first revival of "Einstein on the Beach" opened to critical acclaim at the Next Wave Festival. Despite this difference in public reception, both productions represent Wilson at his most experimental, particularly in terms of his use of electronic media to highlight the impact of postmodern technologies on our perception of lived reality. In keeping with Wilson’s signature style, both "the CIVIL warS" and "Einstein on the Beach" feature constantly changing screen projections and painted flats that emphasise the frontal perspective of the proscenium stage to create the visual impression of a two-dimensional image. However, this ‘flattening’ of the theatrical space does not signify the transformation of physical objects into simulacral representations and instead presents a dialectic between live and mediated forms that enhances the bodied spatiality of the performance. Based on this premise, this research paper builds on the existing critical scholarship that explores the intersections between avant-garde performance, phenomenology, and the role of technology in the postmodern world, in order to determine how the inclusion of electronic media in Wilson’s works has transformed the spatial and temporal interactions between actors and audience. While Wilson’s productions are informed by the increasing mediatisation of the late twentieth century, his works ultimately employ electronic media self-reflexively to enhance the physical presence of the actors and reembody the audience in their own act of spectating. In this regard, Wilson’s works position themselves against the media-saturated world of the mid-1980s by presenting a contemplative space that not only defamiliarises spectators from the mediatised condition of lived reality, but also resensitises them to the embodied and visceral sensations of being there in the shared space of the performance. Overall, this research paper foregrounds the potential for live performance to reclaim the immediacy and intimacy of physical presence in an increasingly mediatised world.
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