Review of «Manual de integración tecnológica en las artes escénicas», by Jorge Iván Suárez Álvarez.

Published in the journal Acotaciones No. 55. 2025

Critical review: Manual de integración tecnológica en las artes escénicas, by Jorge Iván Suárez Álvarez. Universidad del Atlántico, 2025

In contemporary academic writing on the performing arts, «technology» is often invoked as a disruptive force, a digital novelty that radically redefines the nature of live performance. That approach, however, risks producing a historical amnesia, overlooking the fact that the relationship between the stage and technique is as old as theatre itself. It is precisely at this crossroads that the Manual de integración tecnológica en las artes escénicas stands as a necessary and illuminating intervention. The book does not present itself as a chronicle of the digital avant-garde, but as a rigorous genealogy that places current innovation within a historical continuum, proposing a fundamental rereading of what we understand by technology in the context of the stage.

The author’s authority to undertake such a task is plain from his hybrid profile. Jorge Iván Suárez Álvarez is not only an academic with a solid grounding: alongside his studies in Stage Direction and Dramaturgy, he holds a doctorate in Fine Arts and a master’s degree in Scenography. He also has substantial professional experience as a technician, an actor and a director. This double perspective, fusing intellectual rigour with practical knowledge of the stage, runs through the central thesis of the book.

Through its ambitious historical sweep and its eminently pedagogical approach, this book establishes itself as a fundamental tool for academics, makers and students, offering an indispensable conceptual framework for understanding the present and setting out into the future of the performing arts.

The choice of the «manual» format is in itself a declaration of intent. Its structure does not simply catalogue innovations: it organises them into a coherent narrative that reveals the persistence of certain technical problems and solutions across an arc that takes in the Greco-Latin foundations and their architectural innovations, passes through the main historical landmarks, culminates in the digital age and opens onto the future.

The academic solidity of the undertaking rests on an exceptionally rich and varied documentary base that reveals a deep and many-sided dialogue. Jorge Iván Suárez Álvarez does not confine himself to a single theoretical tradition; he brings classical thinkers such as Aristotle into conversation with twentieth-century theorists such as Peter Brook and Bertolt Brecht, and canonical historians of Spanish theatre such as Ignacio Arellano and César Oliva with seminal thinkers of the digital age such as Philip Auslander (Liveness) and Steve Dixon (Digital Performance). Rather than merely drawing up a chronology, he actively sets out to build theoretical bridges — between Aristotelian opsis and Auslander’s «mediatised» culture, for instance — proposing a transhistorical reading of performance. This vast and rigorously documented map of the techno-stage is not, however, a simple exercise in historical cartography: its value lies in the forceful theoretical contributions that follow from the way it is drawn.

One of the manual’s many contributions is its corrective function in the face of a persistent disciplinary amnesia. By prising the concept of «technology» away from its capture by digitalist discourse and applying it to Renaissance perspective, to footlight illumination or to classical architecture, the author obliges the reader into an epistemological reconsideration. Technology ceases to be a mere addition and reveals itself as a condition of possibility of the stage. This conceptual shift is strategic, because it allows the history of theatre to be understood not as a succession of literary styles but as a technological evolution: a history of the technical mediations that have shaped the experience of the spectator and of the maker alike.

As a teaching tool, the value of the manual is undeniable. In a field of study often fragmented into specialisms — the history of scenography, digital performance studies and so on — this work offers a panoramic, integrating view, providing a complete map of the territory and systematising scattered knowledge, presented in a way that is accessible yet rigorous, and so keeping the promise implicit in its title. It is precisely these strengths — its vast scope and its synthesising rigour — that make the manual not a closed text but a fertile ground for debate about the horizons and the tensions inherent in its own ambitious undertaking.

An important book is not one that closes every discussion, but one that opens new ones. By its scope and its rigour, this book takes shape as a catalyst for debate, showing its capacity to stimulate critical thought and to set out future research agendas in the field of theatre and technology studies.

At a moment when the border between physical presence and digital representation on stage is becoming ever more porous and complex, Jorge Iván Suárez Álvarez’s contribution is of unquestionable relevance. This manual is not only a history of the technological past of the performing arts; it is, above all, a compass for navigating their future. It offers the critical tools and the historical context that coming generations of artists and researchers will need in order to engage with technique — not from uncritical fascination or Luddite rejection, but from the lucid awareness that technique has never been an appendage of the stage, but the very condition of its existence.

Andrés Beladiez. Autumn 2025