Famous directors, precursors of a new theater, such as Maurice Materlinck or Edward Gordon Craig, wanted to represent life on stage, weaving some conventionnal elements into the stage, instead of just making the best of the bodily presence of the actor on stage. They repressed the very simple imitation of real for some artificial and symbolic theatre questionning the representation of human's figure and the illusion of the living. Getting rid of the actor's body like it is in its private use, in its everyday life, through the use of masks, puppets or even elder technologies as light works or optical effects, heralded the appearence of the new medias on stage. Thereby, emerged back in the 90's, many inorganic characters made with video projections in two or three dimensions, holograms, and the presence of humanoids and androids. We can find that will to replace the actors' bodies with artificial caracters using technological projections in Denis Marleau and Stéphanie Jasmin's video caracters, Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon's holograms, and again in Oriza Hirata's robots. All these atypical characters, whether they own or not some materiality (or corporality) on stage, or that they are physical or virtual, all of these own different levels of presence according to their integration on stage and dramaturgy, to their self-suffiency and to the interplays they share with each their environnement and the real bodies with which they interact and perform. As we will see, these new theatrical and aesthetics practices that aim to use some Anthropomorphic and Technological Artificial Characters, do question the impact of our time, dealing with digital and robotic revolution, on our corporealities and our humanity, definitively raises a number of issues…

 

Thesis research in the performing arts:

Personnages artificiels anthropomorphes et technologiques à la scène