Agents of Focalization: An Investigation of Robyn Orlin’s Intermedial Production of Les Bonnes

Abstract

This thesis examines the 2019 production of Les Bonnes presented by Robyn Orlin by investigating how its hybridized use of intermedial configurations work together to focalize spectators, and how Orlin’s chosen mechanisms function to re-express Jean Genet’s source material. I begin by introducing the terms focalization, hybridization, and remediation in order to establish a theoretical framework and an inventory of contemporary research on the topics that will guide the following chapters. This is mainly influenced by Patrice Pavis’s definition of focalization as a staging technique and the Hamburg Research Group’s analysis of the term in relation to media and narrative. Then, I offer a textual analysis as a way of establishing themes including role-playing and social structures implicit in Genet’s script, which will inform the thematic implications of the tactics to be analyzed in Orlin’s interpretation. Next, I examine how specific instances from my case study, such as audience positioning and intermingling, function to combine live performance with intermedial tactics to blur the boundaries of reality and reshape audience perspectives. Then, I focus on examples from Orlin’s production that involve film and live camera footage, orienting the principles of film narratology and New Media Dramaturgy to the hybrid configurations being analyzed. The final chapter concludes by bridging the dramaturgical analyses of specific tactics with questions about how contemporary productions of pre-established texts function to re-express their source material. Continuing to use Orlin’s production as an example, I utilize perspectives from Adaptation Studies to inform this discussion. Positioning the director as a dialectical agent, I outline how contemporary production teams can elicit new experiential perspectives for their spectators by implementing an array of medial configurations and staging techniques that are informed by the cultural, aesthetic and technical elements that resonate with the “here and now” of their current environments.