Postdramatic Theatre
It is the goal of contemporary theatre and the academe to surpass the traditional semiotic perspective based on structuralism. Artists and theorists have been striving to view theatre from a more post-structuralist and/or deconstructivist perspective, and since then, have paved the way for postdramatic theatre. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, theatre companies have been looking for ways to remove the presence of literature, even words in drama, in order to create new methods of evoking sense and meaning through a theatrical or performative process. Derrida proposes that the key to deconstructing classical theatre is to remove the old structures of theatre, then redefine its essential elements in order to create a de-centered theatre—this idea is inspired by Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Contemporary theatre breaks the structures of drama by redefining the concepts of meaning and interpretation in elements such as character, conflict, time in progression and space of reference. This poses a question in theatre as the art of representation, but with post-drama, is mimesis still integral to theatre? Performances that have gone against canonical drama and a theatrical text itself prove that theatre has gone beyond words in order to show scenic semiotics, which is the basis for
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Contemporary theatre would suggest that Derridean elements of postmodern theatre are present, and are no longer rooted in traditional dramatic structures. Theatre, therefore, can be considered without taking into account the traditional structural categories (as in binary oppositions), and find another opposition between theatre and society, between drama and postdrama. The question is, does this generate a new theatrical paradigm, or is postdrama only a