Abstract:

Contemporary stage practice increasingly allows a theatrical environment to be made without building very much of it. Light can establish a wall, a change of time, a boundary, or a field of attention. Projection can turn an otherwise ordinary surface into another place. A responsive digital image can alter its behaviour when a performer moves. These possibilities have encouraged a shift from scenery understood mainly as an object towards scenography understood as a changing relationship among body, light, image, sound, architecture, and audience perception [1]–[3]. This paper examines that shift through the idea of scenographic dematerialization. The term is used here in a specific sense: not the disappearance of material technology, but the reduced dependence of scenic meaning on fixed physical objects. The discussion brings lighting, corporeality, and digital media into the same analytical frame. It also considers selected Indian examples, including Amitesh Grover’s The Last Poet and Girish Karnad’s Broken Images, alongside the wider arts-and-technologies context identified by the British Council [4]–[6]. The article is a practice-informed qualitative conceptual study. It does not claim audience measurements, interviews, experimental results, or unpublished production data. Instead, it reads documented practices through scenographic theory and through questions that arise naturally in theatre making: what happens to the performer when the environment becomes responsive, when does light begin to function as scenery, and when does technology cease to support dramaturgy and start competing with it? The paper proposes four connected movements for understanding dematerialized scenography: object to field, illumination to spatial construction, predetermined cue to responsive environment, and isolated technology to dramaturgical integration. The argument is not that digital media should replace physical stagecraft. Rather, its value lies in the degree to which material, luminous, digital, and embodied elements work together to produce a coherent theatrical space.