Abstract:

The idea of theatrical mise-en-scene refers to a series of operations destined to construct a representation through a performance in a scenic space that is shown directly to the audience. Thought first as the reproduction of a previous dramatic text and then as a mimetic reproduction of the world and men’s actions, the study of the mise-en-scene as a significant proposal has been postponed until a critical review of the theatrical fact, its ways of expression and its communication means are made.
The theory of semiotics is interested in the problems related to the sense production of cultural objects. The productive perspective of generative and textual semiotics makes emphasis in the way the sense of literary, theatrical and cinematographic texts do not lie on the text itself. In fact, the sense is not enclosed in them, nor in the codes and languages with which they have been intertwined, but, in the reconstruction activity which is the interpretation realized by the audience.
Hence, as generative semiotics deals with the sense articulation processes inscribed in the text’s structure itself, textual semiotics is interested in the form in which the sense is put in circulation through the strategies developed by the discourse and claims an act, a look which reconstructs the proposal of sense of the cultural objects and artefacts. These objects result from the intersection of a determined form of conceiving the world and a way of showing it, the form of the content and the form of the expression, respectively. From this moment, the semiotic project in progress is directed towards the inquiry of the sense attributed to the theatrical mise-en-scene, as in the mean time, there is an exchange with the spectators look that is produced in the reading process itself from which the spectator will set a certain role for himself. Thus, the semiotic project becomes reflexive as it is requires to understand the conditions, assumptions and compromises of its own comprehension of the world. The result of a questioning process of the pertinent model of looking of the spectator and its adequate positioning in a network of social, ideological and cultural relations in order to interpret the faced object. The spectator needs to construct a set of references to adapt to the interpretation model implied by the text.
The pedagogic proposal of the mise-en-scene work claims the attention of this double articulation of the significant production, attentive on the one hand to the configuration and semiotization of the scenic elements, what gives as a result a determined scenic construction. At the same time it faces the way in which the gesture work is performed, the elements that conform the space are set or the way the scenic machine itself prefigures and interpellates the look of the spectator. Thus, the spectator is also responsible of the final reconstruction of the sense of the cultural object, as a realization and an actualization of the meaning project contained in its semiotic deployment.
This paper tackles the analyses of the different conceptions of theatrical mise-en-scene and faces them with the specific features of the audiovisual scene production, specially the cinematographic and television formats with the aim of inquiring the mechanisms these particular semiotic texts use for the construction of sense and the implied requirements demanded to the audience for making a pertinent interpretation of them.

Keywords:

Theatrical pedagogy, mise en scene, socio-semiotics.