Although performance studies classify it as performative art and critics tend to classify it as such, theatre can be defined as a hybrid and a paradoxical art in many ways, primarily because it is also a mimetic art. It is, therefore, a performance art in the same way as dance and music and a mimetic art in the same way as literature (the novel, poetry) and painting.

On the one hand, theatre recreates a world on stage or in the performance space, a "chronotope" with an "hinc and nunc", a "process" which is ephemeral and non-reproducible. On the other hand, mimetic arts, which also belong to theatre, represent or reproduce the existing world: they constantly refer to it in one way or another. Mimetic Arts are "Arts of representation, of absence: the painting or the film are also presents, being-there, but figuring a fiction, an absence" (our translation). In concrete terms, theatre not only performs a new "world" on stage, but at the same time, it also refers to the "real" world.

According to Ferdinand de Saussure's diagram of the linguistic sign below, the theatrical sign ("sound-image") refers both to the object chair that exists in the world (the spectator has an image of what a chair is) and to itself since it exists concretely or notionally on stage as a set object.

Diagram of the linguistic sign according to Ferdinand de Saussure
@Cécile Chantraine Braillon

Therefore, when analysing a play, it is essential to remember this double nature of the theatre dialogue and that it constantly reminds us, explicitly or not, that we are in the theatre and attending a performance.