Bodies in action
Nevertheless, semiotics cuts a far narrower swath in theatre studies than in literary analysis. Semiotic inquiry frequently focuses on relatively conventional productions of dramatic texts, and has oen been less auned to avant-garde experimentation or broader conceptions of performance that radically depart from theatrical tradition. Some semioticians, including authors of magistral studies in the 1970s and 1980s, more recently concede the epistemological limits of semiotic analysis for theatre. Semioticians continue to pursue a post-structuralist semiotics in which the spectator navigates an open performance text, but they do so alongside other theorists who locate the powerful ontology of performance in what resists, exceeds, or undoes the codes and meanings that would contain it. When performance is understood as a crisis in signication that contests the theatrical medium itself, the charge of theatre semiotics invites reconsideration.
