Theatre Journal

Through an analysis of two recent productions by the New York–based new-music group the International Contemporary Ensemble, this article considers the means by which the mediated body, technologically and otherwise, enables a reimagination of the relationships between traditional theatre, contemporary music, and music theatre. A new production of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's 1969 Eight Songs for a Mad King, in which the King's image is projected onto a video screen in real-time, and a workshop of composer David Lang and artist Mark Dion's recent collaborative project, Anatomy Theater (2005), in which a hanged woman's body is publicly dissected in an eighteenth-century English dissection theatre, both move toward a means to consider the theatricalization of the musical body onstage and the blurring of genres within technologically mediated live performance.