Text published in Rethinking Dramaturgy: Errancy and Transformation, CENDEAC, Murcia, 2010, pp. 39-56

The validity of the performing arts as a medium is related to their resistance to be fixed. Contrary to what occurs with literature and cinema, per- formance practices cannot be converted into closed texts. Hence the impossibility of documenting them. Hence the frustration of semiotics in its approximation to the performance world. Hence too the interest in their study as an approach to new penomena in communications and creation derived from the network and implementation of digital technology in an artistic environment.

When speaking about dramaturgy and not about text, we think of an intermediate space between the three factors that make up the theatrical phenomenon: theatre, acting and drama. Theatre is the place of the spec- tator (social or performance space); performance («actuación»), the place of the actors (expressive or dynamisation space); drama is the place of action, whether codifiable or not in a text (formal or construction space). And we can then discover how in different epochs and contexts, from each one of these places, the other two have been submitted to criticism and transformation. And we can also understand that dramaturgy is a place somewhere in the middle of these three places and therefore at the same time nowhere. It is a space of mediation.

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