Theatricity

Madame Carreno’s fleet fingered manipulation of the chords and rapid passages did much to make the hearer forget the theatricity of the work.

The power of the human tongue to sway the human reason is probably not so great as it was in the days of Demosthenes on the Crown, or Cicero against Catline,^([sic]) but mankind, still dearly loves the polished sentence, the well-turned period, the graceful theatricity of the trained orator.

One of the solos to be given by Mrs. [Clara Yocum] Joyce will be “Farewell to the Forests” from [Pyotr Ilyich] Tschaikowsky’s “Jeanne d’Arc.” In speaking of her rendition of the number recently a critic says: “[…] Her singing is effective not by virtue—or by vice—of any stentorian power, but through the sincerity of its appeal, the entire freedom from the theatricity in the interpretation, the innate refinement and sound discernment of the artist.”

The unthinking may applaud a [Lord] Byron who goes to Missolonghi to draw his sword in foreign quarrel; to some it savors of theatricity and quixotism when a man goes up and down the earth looking for a fight he may take part in.

The aria in question was the song of Pamina’s lament for Tamino, from Act II of “The Magic Flute.” She sang it, not with the self-conscious and pretentious theatricity of a prima donna striking an attitude and aiming to electrify, but with such naïveté as we may imagine [William] Wordsworth encountered when he listened enraptured to the song of the Solitary Reaper.

The Teleprompter as a posthuman apparatus has a number of qualities reinforcing the relationship that forms between the human subject and the text through the prompter’s mediation. One could say that both the prompter’s method of application and the device’s historical provenance result in theatricity being its most prominent characteristic. For it introduces a mystification into the gazing order by definition – ‘I am looking at you, but in truth I am not.’