Avant-garde performing arts meet mechanical theater: a dispositive analysis

Abstract

Performance without (or partly without) performers is a well-known artistic practice and concept but it has not been researched in all its complexity as a dispositive transformed through the ages. In this article, the author considers one area of these historical and mediatic transformations—connections between the mechanical theater as a popular 19th-century spectacle and selected examples of performative avant-garde works. The paper claims that without a deep, long-term approach, we may miss the emergences and disappearances of dispositive in history, and concern too often on innovativeness, declared by the artists. The article interprets the former mechanical theater as part of the intermedial performing arts heritage. The author analyses the mechanical theater as a dispositive and uses a media archaeological approach to investigate the chosen area. The article points out several connections: creating machines and systems, working on hybridized or even partly autonomous performing objects, and making the virtual or grotesque world of motion figures and images. It will allow us to point out that the idea of the mechanical theater, in which performers are replaced by (partly) autonomous objects, turns out to be a topos, a dispositive that reveals itself at different moments in the history of performance and media.