The multidisciplinary nature of theater

Ken Nintzel (Artist, New York) [BIO]

Email: kennintzel@hotmail.com

 

ABSTRACT:

The aim of this paper is to explore the inherent multidisciplinary nature of theater. Based on its composition of art forms, theater has the ability to communicate on many different levels, because it is not solely reliant on text or dialogue as its primary means of expression. Theater has the means to orchestrate the visual arts, the corporeal arts, the musical arts and the media arts, as well as linguistically to tell a story in real time and in a shared space. Theater, as a mode of expression, can be created without the constraints of language because of its multimedial composition. Antonin Artaud has discussed this issue extensively in his manifesto on the Theater of Cruelty in The Theater and Its Double. Theater is a multi sensorial experience, because it possesses the ability to combine all the arts into one art while still allowing each art to communicate in its own way, a communication on simultaneous levels of awareness.

With the accent shifted from text, dialogue, and language, as the mode of communicating meaning, the other arts come to the forefront to speak. Essentially by removing language the multidisciplinary nature of theater makes room for a universal one.

I offer my work as a theater artist as a means of exploration as well as a closer examination of Artaud’s writings, to further investigate the multidisciplinary nature of theater.