description
This paper considers a medium as a substantial translator: an intermediary between the producers and receivers of a communicational act. A medium is a material support to the spiritual potential of human sources. If the medium is a support to meaning, then the relations between different media can be interpreted as a space for making sense of these meanings, a generator of sense: it means that the interaction of substances creates an intermedial space that conceives of a contextualization of specific meaningful elements in order to combine them into the sense of a communicational intervention. The theater itself is multimedia. A theatrical event is a communicational act based on a combination of several autonomous structures: text, scenography, light design, sound, directing, literary interpretation, speech, and, of course, the one that contains all of these: the actor in a human body. The actor is a physical and symbolic, anatomic, and emblematic figure in the synesthetic theatrical act because he reunites in his body all the essential principles and components of theater itself. The actor is an audio-visual being, made of kinetic energy, speech, and human spirit. The actor's body, as a source, instrument, and goal of the theater, becomes an intersection of sound and light. However, theater as intermedial art is no intermediate practice; it must be seen as interposing bodies between conceivers and receivers, between authors and auditors. The body is not self-evident; the body in contemporary art forms is being redefined as a privilege. The art needs bodily dimensions to explore the medial qualities of substances: because it is alive, it returns to studying biology. The fact that theater is an archaic art form is also the purest promise of its future.