Please join the Theater & Performance Studies Workshop Monday June 2nd from 3-4:30pm for a talk by Artemis Willis (Cinema & Media Studies) “The Lantern Image between Stage and Screen.”

Willis’ talk will explore the problem of stage/screen relations at the turn of the last century by way of the magic lantern show. Projected performances that hovered between stage melodrama and early motion pictures from the 1880s to the 1910s, lantern shows featured series of projected tableaux. Analyzing compositional strategies across a range of lantern images, Willis argues that they not only highlight intermedial exchanges between theater and cinema, but also exemplify “lantern specificity”, viz., a quality specific to the medium of lantern slides in operation and effect. The lantern image’s particular use of composition, staging and optics, she posits, amount to a mode of pictorial dramaturgy that complicates stage/screen debates, and demonstrates what the lantern, as a translator of media as well as a medium in its own right, can do apart from theater and cinema.

Location: Classics 113

Light refreshments will be served. People with disabilities whobelieve they may require assistance, please contact Matt Stone at matthewcstone@gmail.com.