Izabella Pluta's first monograph is built around the deceptively straightforward image of a performer onstage; or, better, the interpreter and the image projected from the stage (p. 11). Indeed, simple as it seems the perspective already entails a wealth of conflicting notions and fundamental questions that are only further exacerbated when taking into account the second part of the book's title – intermediality – and today's technological era. For who exactly is meant by ‘the interpreter’? and what are we precisely to understand by ‘projected images’ in a mediatized context? The inherent complexity of the matter leaves little room for simplistic solutions, and it is therefore all to the author's credit that she addresses her subject not by recycling existing categories but rather from a relational angle.
Pluta pointedly plays on the multiple connotations of the term ‘interpreter’ to stage the transformative process as the true star of the show through four thematic sections: a historicizing introduction retracing the interrelation of theatre actor and technology; a conceptual part presenting a range of possible pluri-medial relations sprung from the beautifully phrased ‘spectacle vivant à composante technologique’ (p. 13); an analytical part where selected cases are addressed along a ‘permutational’ approach integrating actor, dispositif and projected image; and a final part addressing the critical reception of the ‘intermediality-vogue’ in both the theatre and theatre studies. Primarily pedagogical in intent, such an approach effectively attempts to extract the heuristic potential of what to many still stands as experimental practice.
To achieve this, Pluta matches so sound a structure with a lucid argument conducted in a very fluid French, and the result is predominantly productive. However, by being above all spectator-centred and driven by a distinct desire for exhaustiveness, L'acteur et l'intermédialité struggles at times to remain focused on its prime object of study – i.e. the actor. Regrettably so, for the author clearly is an expert on all things intermedial, as witnessed by her extensive use of English, French, German and Polish sources to substantiate her claims. Having virtually read every publication on the matter in these languages, her enthusiasm often gets in the way of the study's heuristic targets. Put differently, after the almost four hundred pages of Pluta's book we have been provided with a panorama of contemporary intermedial theatre practice and its implications for the spectator, yet have learnt surprisingly little about the actor's own experience. Granted, in the chapter ‘L'acteur entre les médias’ the author does address the embodied cognition of the intermedial ‘interpreter’, but paradoxically only from the very specific perspective of immersive virtual reality environments.
To be certain, L'acteur et l'intermédialité stands as a considerable conceptual achievement, and Izabella Pluta's depiction of the intermedial actor as reciprocal agent (p. 122) and ‘mediaphoric body’ (p. 125), for one, in itself already justifies the book's heuristic objectives. Perhaps its relevance will accordingly prove greater for theoreticians than for actors reflecting on their practice. Still, as a pedagogical tool with ambitions ranging wider than the anecdotal, this was a deceptively courageous choice to make.
