THE STAGE AS THE CHRONOTOPE OF MEMORY
THE STAGE AS THE CHRONOTOPE OF MEMORY

Summary/Abstract: According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, the chronotope represents the essential connection between time and space as artistic values in literature. Because the chronotope represents the pace where time becomes space and space becomes time, the theatre, in general, and the stage, in particular, may be considered an artistic bipolar background for this bipolar confrontation. The memory of a theatrical act does not relate to a certain objective reality but to a subjective and fragmented one. In other words, it needs the spectator’s memory as well as the characters’ memories, just as any act of translation needs the translator’s linguistic and cultural background. Staging a dramatic text may be considered as an inter-semiotic and inter-systemic negotiation between two discursive arts. As opposed to the memory of a museum, or of an archive, the stage becomes the place where the past turns into present. In the case of the theatre, the memory is a perfect architecture developed on three levels: the memory of a past event, the memory of an imagined past, ant the memory of the audience. All these levels of memory combine perfectly on stage, and more than that, they perform in an artistic mixture as there could be seen in the plays belonging to The New European Drama represented by Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. The study tries to analyse the relationship between the dramatic text, the theatrical show and the audience perspective, emphasising the function of memory. The study is an attempt of proving the possibility of considering the stage as a chronotope that was generated by the affective memory in the case of emitting, performing and receiving a dramatic text. The purpose of the study is to define the theoretical relationships between the dramatic text and the onstage performance from the perspective of the discursive configurations that characterize them. Both are semiotic system of artistic representation, but their structure and functions differ. The study is meant only to develop the analysis of both semiotic systems as discursive forms of expression that, in the process of onstage performance, generate an inter-semiotic negotiation. It is not a linguistic analysis but an interdisciplinary one, between two arts – literature and theatre.

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