Christophe Collard on "mediaturgy"

Christophe Collard Blog Post

John Jesurun’s theatre production Faust/How I Rose (orig. 1996) marks an instance of what performing arts scholar Bonnie Marranca has called mediaturgy – i.e. a multi-medial compositional method highlighting the performing arts’ so-called ‘dilemma of liveness.’ Broadly speaking, the story – or better: its narrative ‘progression’ – starts on the apocalyptic warzone of Earth and ends in the Sartrean hell of a physician’s waiting room. In-between, the work addresses the Faustian pact in a “galaxy [that] has spun out of control” from the perspective of the devil, here depicted as a punk-rocking surfer-girl at one point doubling Goethe’s Gretchen, while Faust himself remains aloof and diplomatically disconnected.  The language leaps back and forth between the grandest archaisms and the coarsest contemporary slang, mediated by the sight of the actors reading out letters, or speaking into microphones, with the sound of disembodied voices on the soundtrack. This panoply of styles is indeed characteristic of experimental dramaturge/director John Jesurun’s constant play with recognition and estrangement, mixing catch phrases from advertising slogans, snippets of poetry and pop song lyrics with aporetic debates on the nature of the universe presented on a set made up of oversized canvases continually projecting lush and dazzling imagescapes. To literary theorist Harold Bloom, such a theatrical ‘double vision’ combining artistic product and creative process is essentially Faustian because it implies an “absolute consciousness of self compelled to have admitted its intimate alliance with opacity.”