Staging Worlds — A Relational History of Drama: 10 The Semiotic Horizons of Drama — Possibility, Continuity, and Transformation

Across epochs and cultures, drama manifests as a uniquely relational and semiotic practice. It is at once a repository of inherited patterns, a laboratory for improvisation, and a stage for reflexive exploration. The series has traced how drama arises from the co-individuation of worlds, how it stabilises through transmission and tradition, expands via innovation and formalisation, and deepens in complexity through co-authorship and reflexive awareness.

Drama’s horizon is defined by possibility. Each performance enacts relational fields, modulates semiotic alignments, and opens spaces for emergent meaning. The semiotic potential is both temporal and structural: inherited forms provide scaffolding for action, improvisation explores contingency, and reflexive interventions illuminate the dynamics of symbolic construction. In every enactment, performers and audiences negotiate a topology of meaning, traversing continuity and divergence, expectation and surprise, participation and observation.

Continuity ensures that drama remains intelligible across time and communities. Transmission encodes relational and symbolic structures, stabilising semiotic patterns while accommodating adaptation. Tradition provides a semiotic memory: conventions, genres, and archetypes anchor new performances within a coherent relational ecology, enabling participants to co-individuate worlds with cumulative depth and resonance.

Transformation arises through innovation, formalisation, and reflexivity. Drama evolves by expanding its expressive repertoire, experimenting with narrative and performative forms, and making its own semiotic processes perceptible. Reflexive theatre exemplifies the meta-semiotic turn, where the field itself becomes a subject of exploration. These processes demonstrate that drama is never merely representational: it is a generative system, continually extending the possibilities for relational, symbolic, and temporal modulation.

Ultimately, the semiotic horizons of drama illustrate the co-emergence of meaning, relational alignment, and human symbolic capacity. Drama is simultaneously a mirror and a lens: reflecting inherited structures, amplifying emergent potentials, and reframing perception, interaction, and cognition. Each enactment is an exercise in worlding, a modulation of continuity and novelty, and a negotiation of the semiotic conditions through which humans understand themselves, others, and the worlds they inhabit.

Through relational ontology, we see that drama is both a process and a technology: it actualises human potential for reflexive meaning-making, sustains collective worlds across generations, and opens expansive terrains for symbolic and relational exploration. Its semiotic horizons are infinite, and in navigating them, we confront the intertwined possibilities of continuity, transformation, and the becoming of worlds themselves.