Body trouble: Roland Barthes, theater, and the corporeal sign

A preoccupation with questions of corporeality characterizes numerous contemporary performances. Many of these explore the performing body's richness and complexity in both the stage's "incarnation" of a dramatic text and the spectator's reception of it. While literary representations of the human body have inspired a wealth of critical speculation and theorization, live performance often thwarts attempts to transpose textual approaches to the stage.;Theater, the body, and the study of signs and signification all play an important role at various points throughout Roland Barthes's protean career. Through examining his work, this thesis traces the resistance of the performing body to semiotic theory. The growing incompatibility between theater and Barthes's thought from Le Degre zero de l'ecriture (1953) through L'Empire des signes (1970) is emblematic of the problems that the body has historically posed to theater semiotics. However, Barthes's later works, namely Le Plaisir du texte (1973) and Fragments d'un discours amoureux (1977), theorize the body's role in the signifying process. While they rarely specifically address theater, they offer a provocative theoretical paradigm for approaching the body on stage.;The second half of this thesis explores the body's implications for theater practice, namely, how different productions choose to "embody" characters in performance. Focusing on the body as a signifier for racial identity, I examine three politically charged productions of French or Francophone plays: Jean-Francois Tilly's realist 'Y a bon bamboula, Judith Miller's Brechtian staging of Aime Cesaire's Une Tempete, and the Ariane Mnouchkine/Helene Cixous "poststructuralist" collaboration in the Theatre du Soleil's L'Indiade ou l'Inde de leurs reves. All "flesh out" racially and nationally specific characters, but in very different ways. The ultimate message concerning racial identity communicated by these productions is contingent upon the degree to which each recognizes the human body's renegade status in the semiotic economy of the stage.