Teatralitás és medialitás, avagy miért nem definiálható „a” színház
Teatrality and Mediality, or on Why It Is Impossible to Define “the” Theatre

Summary/Abstract: According to theatre historian Beatrix Kricsfalusi, the effort to define the theatre as such periodically returns in the history of European theatre. These definition attempts crop up, on the one hand, while creating the laws meant to regulate the practice of acting and theatre-making, and on the other hand, they start from the side of the practice and theory of theatre arts, characteristically in reform periods and crisis situations, when theatre creators position their activity against the inherited forms of theatre. The study analyses the issue of the normativity of theatre concepts in the context of the theatrical debates which have emerged in connection with the 2020 pandemic. Analysing these theatrical debates and the compulsive attempts at formulating definitions, Kricsfalusi argues that these imply the narrowing of the concept of the theatre and the disregard for innovative theatrical creations. Furthermore, as the author emphasizes, these debates understand by the concept of “the” theatre the bourgeois theatre based on the aesthetics of creating illusions. Thus, it is not by chance that theatre science, while being engaged in a productive dialogue with discourses describing the theatre in an essentialist way, has long ceased to try and come up with such definitions.

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