Completeness

What does it mean to talk about Completeness in theatre?

For me two different things...

First, there is the sense that theatre is a super-complete art form, one of if not the most complete there is. This is owing to the fact that it incorporates aspects of other art forms.  You have sculpture and architecture (set design) fashion and textile arts (costume design), performance, poetry/literature (The script), music etc.  And there's a great satisfaction to combining all of these different elements to head towards a shared vision.  It's not just text or just performance or just architecture, it's all of these things and more, combined. In theatre, the work of art expresses itself in multiple different ways simultaneously, and those simultaneous expressions play off of each other and create depth and nuance.  What does it mean to have this textual moment performed in this way in this environment? Change any of those things, and the moment changes. 

This is true even in stripped down, low-tech theatre (or what Peter Brook would call ROUGH THEATRE).  You've still made a choice to perform in that style, in that way. It may not feel like a choice because the rough theatre decision was made based on resources, but still a low-tech production of a show will be completed in a different way than one with more technical resources.  A black box theatre with no set in it is still a distinct environment.  You could've always chosen to do it not in a theatre, for example. 

What this leads us to is a second way of considering completeness.  If the complete theatrical event involves all of these component parts than it follows that no one part is complete all on its own. After all, if the script were complete on its own, or the performance, or the set or whatever, than they wouldn't need each other, and i like to consider my job through the lens of what a show needs.  This is not say we can't split the component parts up and appreciate each on their own. Of course we can (we do this most often with scripts, by reading them). And each are, in their own way, works of art.  But the combination of these little interrelated works of art is a locus of theatre's power.