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

A performance featuring a few performers (or none at all) is a familiar concept and an established practice. However, research on such performances in terms of their complexity as a dispositive that has undergone several transformations over time is scarce. This study focuses on one aspect of these historical and mediatized transformations: the links between nineteenth-century mechanical theater and avant-garde performances. An in-depth, long-term approach to the history of the dispositive is required to avoid overlooking its emergence and disappearance and focusing only on the self-professed innovativeness of individual artists. This study examines mechanical theater as part of the heritage of intermedial performing arts using a media – archaeological approach. Findings reveal several characteristics shared by mechanical and avant-garde theater: a predilection for developing machines and systems, devising hybrid (or quasi-autonomous) performing objects, and creating a virtual (or grotesque) world of moving figures and images. This approach demonstrates that the idea of the mechanical theater, where quasi-autonomous objects replaced performers, is a topos, a dispositive that reveals itself at different moments in media and performance history.