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History Theory
HISTORY / THEORY
In the simultaneous use of the living
actor and the talking picture in the
theatre lies a wholly new theatrical art,
an art whose possibilities are as infinite
as those of speech itself.
— Robert Edmond Jones (1929)
Photo: Ioulia Kouskova.
Brianna Moran (Cassandra) and Amelia Winger-Bearskin (Noxi), MPS/ Cyburbia’s Time Traveler Zero Zero, 2004.
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ROUTES TO
ROOTS
some of the widely ranging, rhizomic, dialectically branching sources and
inspirations of contemporary multimedia scenography and performance,
a lateral and looping subjective geneology
the cinematic, episodic Epic Theater of Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill,
and Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Theater, in Germany, also in the 1920’s;
the Federal Theater Project’s Living Newspaper in the 1930’s;
HISTORY/THEORY 7
Kelly Wilson (Zeta), MPS/Cyburbia’s Silence & Darkness, 2004. .
ROUTES TO ROOTS
the scenic designs of Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, Caspar Neher,
Traugott Müller, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko,
Warwara Stepanova, and the Stenberg Brothers;
the paintings of George Tooker, Frida Kahlo, and Komar & Melamid;
Magical Realists and Situationists:
the satirical documentary theater of Karl Kraus;
the film fantasies of George Pal and Ray Harryhausen;
composers Robert Ashley, Brian Eno, Heiner Goebbels and R. Murray Schafer;
Fluxus and Happenings;
the stylized theaters of Pina Bausch, Caryl Churchill, Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Elfriede Jelinek, Tadeusz Kantor, Charles Ludlum,
Ariane Mnouchkine,Yuri Lyubimov, Heiner Müller and José Rivera;
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the filmic art-theater of Robert Whitman, Carolee Schneemann and Nam June Paik;
Jeffrey Shaw’s projection design for the band Genesis in the 1970’s;
Wendall Harrington’s projection design for
TOMMY, directed by Des McAnuff;
The Who’s TOMMY
the neo-gothic stop-motion animation of
Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay;
Robert Smithson’s theory of future ruins;
the 1939 and 1964 New York World Fairs;
Disney animatronics and Vegas sensurround;
arena rock and trade shows;
’60’s light shows and planetaria;
fiction by J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, William Burroughs, Octavia Butler, Don DeLillo,
Daniel F. Galouye, Ursula K. LeGuin, Marge Piercy, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut;
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LIVE MOVIES:
A PERSONAL (FUTURE) HISTORY
OF MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE
Dedicated to the theater ghosts of Mark Harp, E.T. Kirby and David Stubenrauch
GROUNDWORK
The business of workers in the theatre is, as I see it,
to express a timeless theme by means of the tools of one’s own time.
And we are not using the tools of our own time in the theatre.
— Robert Edmond Jones (1941/1952)
While other writers in this book document and discuss many contemporary new media
artists in the performing arts, this essay is concerned primarily with historical precedents
for the current wildfire of new technologies making their way onto the stage, and how these
new technologies change methods of, and approaches to, performance and production.
New technologies come, and new technologies replicate, mutate, malfunction,
evolve, devolve, obsolesce, and go. When they first arrive, we tend to fetishize them,
a feverishly melancholy act. This fervor for the machines can blot out what really
matters…meaning, content, narrative, story…
The panoply of computer graphics and animation, video, data, film and slide
projection, digital sound design, amplification and sound processing, and computer-
control of scenic elements represents just some of the new devices and processes
which are at the disposal of designers, technicians and other theater artists in the early
21st century. With the profoundly new kind of theater, opera, concerts and exhibitions
which can be crafted with these innovative tools comes a whole range of challenges in
how to use them, and especially in how to integrate them with live performers.
The singer-actor in new media theater today learns to deal with a
wireless microphone, to treat sound design as another character, to talk and
interact with projected characters, become a projected character and transform
back again, to lip-synch and digitally ventriloquize. They are not acting like they’re
HISTORY/THEORY 11
Triple-A Plowed Under, Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspaper, 1936.
LIVE MOVIES: A PERSONAL (FUTURE) HISTORY OF MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE
in a play. They’re not acting like they’re on film. They’re acting as one does in a
movie, interwoven, interspersed with phantoms of the same insubstantiality in
live movie
which we dwell in the technospheric mediascape.
Not only actors have a different task before them in new media theater.
So, too, do writers, directors, designers, composers, producers, stage managers
and operators. Writers compose “sampling scripts” in “synthetic fragments.” New
media (or multimedia, or projection) design shows up in the scenographic process
and no one’s really sure what to do, or what to do with it.
Multimedia designers are essentially filmmakers. The good ones are skilled
not only in creating on multiple two-dimensional picture planes, but also in three
dimensions, and in four, through time. Some set and lighting designers are skeptical,
even territorial, toward this (once again) new force in the theater; some resist, some
try to do it themselves. But it’s a different medium and discipline than most are
trained or adept in, so over the past ten years a growing number of artists now train
(often themselves) to focus solely on multimedia design.
It is important to de-mystify so-called “new media,” with the realization
that they simply are tools, and will soon be assimilated by theater’s production
apparatus as were nautical rigging, electrical lighting, servo-mechanisms, film and
slide projection, and sound sampling and amplification. Projections are simply
another kind of light, and the set and the costumes form the screens. This inter-
dependence necessarily leads to a unified, dialectical approach to scenography, and
to the fabled Gesamtkunstwerk
Gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork, total theater.
Multimedia design, in American regional theater, experimental groups and
grassroots companies, university-based theater, and even on Broadway, finds itself
in much the same position that sound design was ten or fifteen years ago, struggling
to unfold as a new, dynamic facet of the production apparatus. Today most directors
and production managers don’t ask whether a show needs sound design, but what
will the sound design be? Ten or twenty years from now, multimedia design (with
all the “new media” we can’t imagine yet) will inhabit an integral place in the design
spectrum. In the meantime, it’s amusing and instructive to witness, and participate
in, the growing pains, and the turf wars, and the experimentation and adaptation,
and yet another new dawn of technologically-enhanced social and artistic change.
LIVE MOVIES
The epic style…made use of dramatic devices which had already been discovered, but
whenever possible added technical innovations from the world of industry…we used film
projections as a kind of classical chorus. Furthermore, the film was not just used instead of a
painted back-drop, but in order to create a dynamic, moving world for the action on the stage.
— Erwin Piscator (1934)
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synthesize theatrical, musical and cinematic elements. I also stage ideas from non-
fiction sources that I think have important things to say, but which I am aware most
people will never read.
My life in performance began in the urban collectives I co-founded in
Baltimore — CoAccident, Impossible Theater (where we first used the term live movie
in 1985), Impossible Industrial Action, Desire Productions. From these Baltimore
companies, I expanded my work into collaborations with opera companies,
regional theaters, and theater ensembles across the country, working first as a
projection designer (creating systems of up to 18 computer-synchronized slide
projectors), and more recently as a multimedia designer, employing show control
systems, multiple video projections and digital sound. I learned this succession of
technologies in the trial-and-error heat of production, and in concerted research
sessions when they have been possible.
Today I work in two ongoing collaborative ensembles (which I co-
founded with multimedia designer Gail Scott White in the Virginia suburbs west
of Washington DC), Multimedia Performance Studio and Cyburbia Productions,
creating commissioned designs and original productions. These collaborative
productions feature multiple projected imagery as characters, settings, environments,
dreamscapes, language, and other scenographic elements. They interweave cinematic
and televisual technologies, techniques, and narrative devices (such as flashback,
slo-mo, rewind, lip-synch and simultaneous action). Live performers interact with,
become, and transform from, pre-recorded and “live” projected characters. In order
to accomplish this symbiosis, the company of collaborating artists often operates
simultaneously as a performance ensemble, a film and animation production house,
a digital garage band and a stagecraft laboratory, all geared toward producing
dynamic and critical multimedia performance spectacles.
The concept of a new stage form, a “live movie,” is based on the
premise that theater, performance art, opera, music theater, concerts,
dance, puppetry and other forms of live art should reflect the society for,
and in, which they are created. As photography challenged many of the
traditional functions of painting and printmaking, so film and television
have done with theater and live performance.
New media operate like viruses in the theater, where they can
change everything or wither in trivialization. They operate like a virus, an
ambivalent one, like language, or the flickering image. Much new media
theater employs new technologies, turning them in on themselves, to cast
light on the ways they shape and re-configure our world. It is an experiment
with new and traditional stage machines, developing imaginative
approaches to the integration of these technologies with the live action
and music of theater. While they may revel in the powerful beauty and
narrative liberation which projections and cinematic techniques can bring
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to theater, many artists resolve to learn new media and technologies, in part, so
that they might use the machines to critique the machines. The result is a hybrid
approach, part Luddite, part technophile.
If we stomp onto the stage, daubed in mud, and dance wildly with torches,
chanting, “We hate computers! We hate computers!” who will believe us, or care?
No one. But if we create sophisticated mosaics of new media and live performance,
with the same tools used to sell and promote surveillance systems and SUV’s
and predator drones and toothpaste and JawPhones and depleted uranium, then
perhaps our critique achieves “credibility.” Textually or sub-textually we can
encourage a collective investigation of humans and their machines, or even better,
their technics (a great, fading, Lewis Mumford word which I take to mean not
just the machines, but the systems we use to interact with them, and how we are
attached to them). Is theater to be a palliative, a narcotic, a “time-killer”? Or, if not a
call to action, at least a call to contemplation, research, analysis, imagining?
The “new media” entering the performing arts too often are greeted as
something out of nowhere, a cool new thing to toss into the mix. But the hidden
history of montage and projections and stylized performance and the incorporation
of new technologies into the stage apparatus goes back (at least) about a hundred
years, to collaborative experiments which arose in Russia and in Germany, and
spread later to the United States in the Federal Theatre Project. The onslaught of
WWII came down like a guillotine on these artistic experiments, and most of the
artists and scholars in question found themselves exiled, imprisoned, tortured,
executed, blacklisted or otherwise silenced. We emerged into the 1950’s with a
limited (and limiting) mix of abstraction and realism that became the dominant
aesthetics of the past half century.
LOST GHOSTS
All my life I have been opposed to realism in the theatre.
— Robert Edmond Jones (1952)
The 1920s and ’30s, another time when “new media” showed up on the stage,
gave rise to the Constructivist Theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Fantastic
Realism of Evgeny Vakhtangov, the Epic Theater of Erwin Piscator, the Federal
Theatre Project’s Living Newspaper, and others who employed new technologies
to cast light on social issues. They immersed themselves in searches for new ways
to structure a show, and in how to perform it. These explorations led them to
episodic construction (montage), and to new performance styles (stylization),
ranging from over-the-top satire to radical juxtaposition to restrained “alienation.”
They also rejected “realistic” scenic designs, and drew instead on new spatial and
compositional ideas from the Dadaists, Cubo-Futurists and Expressionists.
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HISTORY/THEORY 15
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the audience’s imaginations and critical abilities, and was geared to depict not
isolated inter-personal conflicts, but the rips and tears in history’s social fabric.
We are ever in danger of losing sight of those in history who are of little
use to the dominant culture. In our case, that culture has a vested interest in
cultivating and maintaining the consumer (not the citizen) who is plugged in,
overwhelmed, and feels relatively powerless to affect history, or even daily life.
STYLIZED
Now, I have seen a few things in my time…But not a single one can ever compare with the
impressions made on me those three days of [Meyerhold’s 1922] rehearsal for The Doll’s House
in that hall on Novinsky Boulevard. I remember shaking all the time.
It wasn’t the cold, it was excitement, it was nerves stretched to the limit…
— Sergei Eisenstein (c. 1940)
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The D.E.Trust — The History of the Fall of Europe by Ilya Ehrenburg, directed and designed by Vsevolod Meyerhold:
set model with moving walls and projection screens, 1924.
Meyerhold tore down the show curtain, revealed the back wall of
the theater, and shattered the barrier between the stage and the spectator.
Like Brecht and Piscator, he formulated a “presentational” (rather than
“representational”) style of theater. For Meyerhold, theater was a social art, in
both the bond with an audience, and in the collaborative production process it
takes to make it. He changed the way classical opera was staged, and proposed
a musical approach to the stage rhythm of plays; he rejected realism in its many
guises, denied the possibility or desirability of any kind of “naturalism,” and
espoused an episodic method of structuring dramatic material.
Ultimately, the stylistic method presupposes a fourth creator in addition to the author,
the director and the actor — namely, the spectator. The stylized theatre produces
a play in such a way that the spectator is compelled to employ his imagination creatively
in order to fill in those details suggested by the stage action.
— Vsevolod Meyerhold (1907)
But his most valuable contribution to new theater with new media was his creation
of a theoretical and practical approach to performance, to stylization, developing a
flexible method that found its way in the rehearsal and production process, through
his actor-training system, biomechanics. When he called his work a “Theatre of the
Grotesque,” he didn’t mean the word in any kind of gruesome, gory, eyeballs-
popping-out sort of way; he meant a heightened, sometimes poetic, sometimes
satirical, sometimes gymnastic approach that the actor takes to his or her material.
His closest compatriot in developing this kind of theater was Evgeny
Vakhtangov, who, like Meyerhold, also left Stanislavski to discover and create his
own work, which he came to call “Fantastic Realism.” In some ways, Vakhtangov
surpassed Meyerhold (sometimes criticized as too much of a “puppeteer”
with his actors) in the performance style he crafted, synthesizing Meyerhold’s
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EPIC PROJECTIONS
A complete revolution took place in stage design. By a free manipulation of
Piscator’s principles it became possible to design a setting that was both instructive and
beautiful…The playwright could work out his experiments in uninterrupted collaboration
with actor and stage designer; he could influence and be influenced…The integrated work
of art (or ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’
‘Gesamtkunstwerk’) appeared before the spectator as a bundle of elements.
— Bertolt Brecht (1939)
The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living, the
abyss whose silence heightens the sublime in drama and whose resonance heightens
the intoxication of opera — this abyss which, of all the elements of the stage, bears
most indelibly the traces of its sacral origins, has increasingly lost its significance.
The stage is still elevated. But it no longer rises from an immeasurable depth:
it has become a public platform. Epic theater sets out to occupy this platform.
— Walter Benjamin (1939)
Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) was among the generation of Germans who came
out of WWI feeling more solidarity with the Russian soldiers they’d fought
against, than with the German business classes who had sent them to war
in the first place. Piscator was associated with the Dada and Expressionist
movements; in the 1920’s, in collaboration with artists George Grosz, John
Heartfield and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, designer Traugott Müller, architect
Walter Gropius, composers Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill, and the writers Leo
Lania, Felix Gasbarra and Bertolt Brecht, he developed Epic Theater.
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Piscator was the most radical, politically and artistically, of the other
principal directors and designers discussed here. He used the tools of the Industrial
Revolution to critique and oppose the injustices visited on the majority of society
by the mercantile factory system, the growing “cities of strangers,” the alienation
made inevitable in citizens bound up in the slow transformation from old-style
imperialism to new-fangled “free market” global capitalism. Piscator’s generation
of political artists imagined a social revolution in Germany to rival the Russians’.
Piscator pioneered documentary theater. He devised multi-level staging, and
took advantage of improvements in stage lighting and mechanics. He introduced
loudspeakers, film and slide projections, and industrially kinetic sets. Like Meyerhold he
employed episodic narrative structure and montage methods of collective scriptwriting.
Epic theatre signified a performance free from the restrictions of realistic conventions, especially
those of the tightly-knit well-made play…Piscator became well-known for his advocacy and use
of any mechanical device that might help him. Unlike Victorian stage machinery, Piscator’s was
used consciously to reflect a modern scientific society. From the beginning, it was the film used
as an independent narrative device which enabled him to replace the lifeless scenery of the
realistic stage, and he often projected more than one image simultaneously.
— J.L. Styan (1981)
As examples of the prodigious (almost stupendous) rate of production that
Piscator generated in the 1920s, in one remarkable six month period (spanning 1927
and ’28), with his dramaturgical collective (Lania, Gasbarra, Brecht) and production
company, he created three exemplary works in the history of proto-“new media”
theater. The first was the pacifist Ernst Toller’s Hoppla, We Live!, staged on Müller’s
revolving three-level set, with 3000 feet of film projected onto four screens.
Hoppla,We Live! by Ernst Toller, directed by Erwin Piscator, designed by Traugott Müller,
multi-level set model with projection screens, 1927.
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Next, barely two months later, came Rasputin, the Romanoffs, the War and
the People That Rose Against Them, by Alexei Tolstoy and P. Shchegolev, this time
with 6000 feet of film projected onto Müller’s revolving hemispherical, multi-
level set, framed by documentary screens.
And finally, three months later, the picaresque anti-war epic, The
Schweik, adapted from Jaroslav Hasek’s comic
Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik
novel by Max Brod and Hans Reimann; this production featured conveyor
belts, or treadmills, to convey action and character movement, and George
Grosz’s life-size cut-out marionettes and satirical cartoons.
It is now possible to have a still, then a moving film and then a still again. Thus film can be
used to support, or to take further, or even to run ahead of the action, or it can be used as
reportage; or quite simply as living film scenery (photomontage)—to portray for instance
the sea, a factory or a street. Or as George Grosz used it in my production of
The Good Soldier Schweik, with his excellent, grotesque animation film…
— Erwin Piscator (1933)
For us, man portrayed on the stage is significant as a social function. It is not his relationship
to himself, nor his relationship to God, but his relationship to society which is central.
Whenever he appears, his class or social stratum appears with him.
His moral, spiritual or sexual conflicts are conflicts with society.
— Erwin Piscator (1929)
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MULTIMEDIA AMERICANA
[In a 1930s Living Newspaper] the scenic action was a mixture of different theatrical strategies…
projected films, maps, and statistics…Satire, puppetry, visual projection, shadow-graphic acting,
crowd scenes, and a fluid style of space-staging, in which characters were isolated
by precise lighting plots, were all brought together within a single production.
— Stuart Cosgrove (1989)
Between the World Wars, American theater artists — among them Hallie Flanagan,
Elmer Rice, Robert Edmond Jones, Mordecai Gorelik, Lee Simonson, Harold
Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Joseph Losey — gravitated toward European
(particularly German and Russian) theater. The momentum away from Realism and
Naturalism, through Expressionism, resulted in a steely flowering of Constructivist
and Epic theaters, harnessing (and experimenting with) the “new media” of their
time, to create multimedia productions, sometimes documentary, sometimes
satirical, and almost always stylized.
In response to the effects of the Depression on performing artists, Hallie
Flanagan was recruited by Harry Hopkins to form the Federal Theatre Project
(1935-1939), which put artists to work in a way not seen before or since, and
emphasized the importance of live theater across the American cultural landscape.
(The FTP was therefore, of course, a predecessor of the National Endowment for
the Arts.) The FTP created and produced many kinds of theater — Marc Blitzstein’s
folk opera, The Cradle Will Rock (richly documented, along with the FTP itself, in
Tim Robbins’ film, Cradle Will Rock); Orson Welles and John Houseman’s “voodoo
Macbeth” with the New York City Negro Unit of the FTP; Paul Green’s outdoor
pageant, The Lost Colony
Colony; and simultaneous performances around the country (22
productions in 18 cities) of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here
Here, which speculated
a hypothetical fascist takeover of the United States.
Among the FTP’s many programs, the one which embodied, and
responded most to, European theatrical advances was the Living Newspaper.
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Projections, masks, spotlights, loudspeakers, ramps, and characters in the audience were some of
the devices used [in the Living Newspaper’s Triple-A Plowed Under, directed by Joseph Losey and
H. Gordon Graham, NYC, 1936]…The projections, still a new theatrical concept in America, could
include dates, statistics, charts, maps and headlines, or they could be more visual:
photographs, animated cartoons, and short film sequences…
— John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown (1978)
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The drama of the future will deal, not with objective experience or subjective experience,
but with both varieties of experience at the same time, expressing our essential duality in
a new theatrical idiom, involving the simultaneous use of the stage and the screen.
— Robert Edmond Jones (1943)
Why care about a “Theater of the Future”? To help it get there? To be there when it
arrives? What led this lauded designer, used to working in “real world” materials
and theatrical lighting, to focus on a kind of theater he did not even attempt to
make himself, but could see on the horizon as one of the fruitful directions in
which production and performance might move? Jones wrote of this concept in
1929, and again in 1943.
And then, in 1952 he delivered a series of lectures at Harvard, Towards a New
Theatre (now available in book form, edited by Delbert Unruh), one of which was “The
Theatre of the Future.” In these lectures, Jones crystallized his thinking on a new form
of live theatre featuring cinema as a central component. In this, he was an American
theatrical prophet of “new media theater,” perhaps half a century before his time.
A theater of the future? Not just one which grafts on new machines
and technologies, but brings along with it a new way of creating productions,
cognizant of the possibilities that unfold from a stylized, montage-based approach
to composition and production.
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SCENOGRAPHY
A dynamic, multi-layered notion of convergence can be found in the work and
theories of the Czech designer Josef Svoboda (1920-2002), perhaps the original
“scenographer,” and maker of “total theater,” who, much like Jones, espoused a
unified approach to design. No doubt one of the reasons for this was Svoboda’s
desire to blend and synchronize live and mediated performers, and “real” and
projected, multi-planar settings. (These explorations are well documented in
Svoboda’s The Secret of Theatrical Space and Jarka Burian’s The Scenography of
Josef Svoboda, both indispensable titles in the library of any multimedia designer,
or anyone headed for the crossroads of theater and film.)
Svoboda (along with a few others — Yuri Lyubimov, Tadeusz Kantor,
Heiner Müller, Ariane Mnouchkine) provided us with a living link, in the
second half of the 20th Century, to the pre-WWII art-theatrical avant-gardes.
In his work — in opera, theater, exhibition/exposition design, and in the
Laterna Magika — some of the myriad ways projections and new media might
contribute to new stage forms come to light.
For Expo ’58 in Brussels, with director Alfred Radok, Svoboda introduced
the Laterna Magika, which combined live and filmed actors and settings, and,
with the multiple-screened Polyrekan, he set a new standard for multimedia
exhibits in world fairs and expositions. He also enjoyed an illustrious career
designing more than seven-hundred productions in more traditional theatrical
contexts. Trained as a cabinet-maker, and in architecture, his theatrical design
career more or less began in the wake of WWII, at the Theatre of the 5th of May, in
Prague, and soon thereafter at the National Theatre, where he was head of design
for almost fifty years. He also designed Goethe’s Faust with Giorgio Strehler at
Milan’s Piccolo Theatre, Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Laurence Olivier at the
Old Vic, and opera sets for (fellow Czech) Milos Forman’s film, Amadeus.
Svoboda’s legacy is multi-fold: he elaborated, in practice, a theory
of scenography which called upon theatrical artists to engage in heightened
collaboration; he envisioned design as revealing itself as a production unfolds;
he projected large, custom-made transparencies and closed-circuit video onto
actors, mirrors, floors, staircases, scrims, fog and string; and he emphasized
the importance of technical and historical research and experimentation in the
pursuit of artistic breakthroughs. Like Meyerhold and Piscator, he dreamed of
a theater designed specifically for new multimedia technologies, and his plans,
too, were never realized.
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The brain has changed. Eisenstein changed it all, when, in the 1920’s, he broke up
the static frame of film (into which characters mostly had thus far walked), into
a linear mosaic, an image language, montage, that perpetually unfolds in cinema
time, a language that forms itself in the brain as the viewer watches. Every jump
cut, close-up, long fade, and succession of images that creates a visual narrative,
owes its existence, at least in part, to the work of Eisenstein. And Eisenstein
studied with Meyerhold, from whom, many have suggested, he borrowed the
episodic montage method from their stylized work in the theater.
We don’t really know (let alone understand) what images flashing
before our eyes at 24 or 30 frames per second might do to, and in, our brains.
After almost a century of the flickering wraparound depictions in which we
are increasingly immersed, we live in Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle,
among Jean Baudrillard’s simulations, more real than what they simulate.
Recently I ventured to enlist the collaboration of a talented student
digital artist for a production. His first response was, “You mean a play? I don’t
like plays. All they do is talk, talk, talk…I need something to look at!”
Young audiences today might easily focus on five things at once,
but may have trouble engaging a single phenomenon in depth for an
extended period of time. They seem to have no interest in pondering a stage
outfitted to stand in for a kitchen or a living room, where they are expected
to sit as voyeurs to re-enacted psychological terror. We drift and stagger
into becoming a society peopled by children whose attention spans have
been zapped by the rapid-fire military-entertainment complex, and whose
adults have begun to find the drudgery of daily consumerist existence too
depressing for anti-depressants.
We can bemoan the collective attention span deficit that our
technosphere has engendered in a new generation of theatergoers, but if there
is to be a “theater of the future,” they will form the core of its audience. This
transformation of multimedia sensibilities leads to a new kind of work for the
stage. New media performance explores the traditional social and philosophical
concerns with which most vital theater has always dealt, and seeks to transform
the world, one roomful of engaged, imagining earthlings at a time.
Contradiction and paradox: theater artists using film to save theater from
film, while the current immersive, manic social drive for mediated experience
is fundamentally opposed to the live theater event. And the phantasm (mock/
shock prophecy) of VR headset parties — partygoers alone together, and
helmeted, nodding to and fro in the exurban “living room,” like drugged,
mutant insects — flickers and looms in the ruins of the future.
If film was the medium of the 20th century, we have no inkling yet of what
it might be for the 21st. In the performing arts, will it be New Media Theater?
Multimedia Performance? Live Movies? Cyborg Theater? No agreed-upon
name yet to call it (a good sign, most likely), but it’s alive, kicking and ticking.
For sources see Suggested Reading, p. 224.
26 LIVE MOVIES
LIVE MOVIES
RICK DAVIS
HISTORY / THEORY 27
FAUSTIAN BARGAINS AND BRAVE NEW WORLDS
In front of him, on one of the taller walls, a serpent’s head appears; the
snake lunges, slithering to its full length across the side panels, leading Faustus’s
gaze (and ours) down the runway where, in a flash of light, Mephistopheles
makes his surprise appearance, to his (and our) wonderment.
Kinetic visual imagery reinforcing textual truth, visceral impact,
and snazzy sleight-of-hand stagecraft: this moment from Doctor Faustus1
crystallizes, for me, the promise of deploying multimedia, or “new media,”
in the service of the theater. When driven by a strong text, placed in a context
where all the collaborative elements of the theater (at the risk of redundancy,
let me enumerate them: text, acting, the various design elements, directing,
dramaturgy, and that final collaborator, the audience) are given their proper
weight, multimedia becomes a powerful and distinctive tool, capable of
profoundly expanding the imaginative possibilities of the stage.
When employed for its own sake, however (defined perhaps by a
selective diminution, by omission or commission, of one or more of those
“elements” above), multimedia runs the risk — as do any of the elements — of
weakening the impact of the theatrical event. The keys to the kingdom marked
“Gesamtkunstwerk” on the gilt-edged maps are found on the ring of proportion,
order, and balance.
Historical Excursus
Revolutionary moments in stage design and technology (for that is what
we’re really talking about) have come before, and they have always had a
push-pull relationship with their contemporary dramaturgy. Without the
winch, the treadmill, the chariot-and-pole machinery of the late 18th and early
19th centuries, the great melodramatist Pixérècourt (he who famously said “I
write my plays for those who cannot read”) could not have conceived of, let
alone staged, his famous rescues, such as that in Le Chien de Montargis (The
Dog of Montargis), the 1814 prologue to Rin Tin Tin and Lassie Come Home.
We sometimes forget, as our own pendulum of taste and practice
swings, that the Realists and Naturalists of the late 19th century (a
heterogeneous group that includes, somewhat uncomfortably, bits and pieces
of Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, Antoine, Chekhov, Stanislavski), were the visual
innovators of their time, taking us beyond the world of two-dimensional
canvas (complete with painted furniture and glassware) and semicircular
conversational tableaux. We should not forget that the fourth wall was once
a radical idea in service of a higher truth.
And then along came AppiandCraig, that strange Swiss/English
amalgam of revolutionary aesthetic theories, with a welcome call for (a
return to? a discovery of?) atmosphere and poetry and metaphor in stage
28 LIVE MOVIES
RICK DAVIS
Timmy Ray James (Mephastophilis) and Ed Gero (Faustus), Doctor Faustus, Theater of the First Amendment,1998.
HISTORY / THEORY 29
FAUSTIAN BARGAINS AND BRAVE NEW WORLDS
lead the spectator’s eye around the stage; to pick out the significant detail; to
accelerate the rhythm of the visual text through quick blackouts.2 Lighting made
sculptural approaches to design not only possible but almost essential, and
brought new expressivity to the human face and figure. Lighting made the very
air a poetic medium. Drop this book right now and pick up Jean Rosenthal’s
The Magic of Light3. She was, for a time, Orson Welles’s lighting designer (a term
she probably invented, along with many of the practices of the profession) and
Graham’s and Balanchine’s, and to read her words about the emotional value
of light in the world and in the theater is to see both with new eyes.
Welcome back to this volume. Though Jean Rosenthal lit her share of
Broadway musicals (up to Fiddler on the Roof
Roof), I doubt that she would recognize
the form today. Gordon Craig’s dream of a design-driven, textless theater has
come true, albeit in an ironically inverted paradigm. The ascent of the outsize
tire, the descents of the chandelier and the helicopter, the dancing teapot, the
pounding sound and the rock-show-style use of that oxymoronically-named
tool, the “intelligent lighting fixture” (you’ve seen them — they’re the ones
that have the unearthly, penetrating color temperature of those new BMW
headlights, and their beams sweep and swoop down on their hapless actor-
targets, hunting them like the latest Air Force “smart bombs”): all of these
impressive effects have been harnessed in the service of — what? Or have I got
the question backwards? Who is serving whom?
Theater historians (when they’re in a certain mood) like to chart the
inverse relationship between the quality of the drama and the exuberance
ofthe stagecraft in a given period. The Greeks and the Elizabethan theater
made do with merely brilliant writing, and little or no scenic support
beyond the architecture of the theater itself;4 the spectacles of the 18th and 19th
centuries (see Pixérècourt, above) made stunning use of perspective painting
and machinery, but the dramas themselves do not stand up. The Broadway
musical’s pendulum reversed course in the early 1980’s and hasn’t stopped
swinging toward spectacle. What happens? Do the big productions just eat the
good scripts? Do audiences drive the transaction, seeking ever-stronger “hits”
of this addictive drug, this uncontrolled lack of substance?
Caveat Emptor
What does this have to do with the emergence of multimedia design in
contemporary theater? Let the buyer beware: we must struggle to harness
this powerful tool only in pursuit of a unified vision of the theatrical event,
the Gesamtkunstwerk
Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art” that Wagner named and that still
stands as both a theoretical ideal and a practical litmus test.
30 LIVE MOVIES
RICK DAVIS
HISTORY/THEORY 31
FAUSTIAN BARGAINS AND BRAVE NEW WORLDS
art (by critics), pornography (by Supreme Court Justices), and productions by
all theater folk everywhere in the phrases “that works” or “that doesn’t work.”
So let me jumble up Aristotle’s sacred six a little bit differently,
recognizing that drama has, in fact, changed a bit in 2,500 years; that society
has changed even a little bit more; and that human nature has changed
perhaps the least of all. The scheme is to take the six elements and pour them
into two bottles, one marked Load and one Delivery7. Into the Load bottle flow
Plot, Character, and Thought (or Theme), in whatever order and in whatever
proportion is desired. Ibsen’s Load bottle is a different color from Chekhov’s;
Kaiser’s from Brecht’s; but all are full. The bottle holds the “stuff,” the
“quiddity,” of the dramatic event. How does it go, who’s in it, what are they
like, and what’s it about? would be the relevant questions to ask and answer
while filling up the Load bottle. The answers do not presuppose any particular
world-view or style; the only mandate is to fill the bottle.
Into the Delivery bottle, we pour Language (or Diction), Music, and
Spectacle, all the expressive tools of the trade. Again, the proportions will vary,
and an almost infinite range of combinations is possible. August Wilson and
Lanford Wilson and Robert Wilson, David Hare and David Edgar and Caryl
Churchill, Shakespeare and Schiller and Wole Soyinka: compare authors (or
auteurs) of real substance and, as with the Load, you’ll find full Delivery bottles
with distinctly different mixtures.
My modest proposal for a new poetics of multimedia-in-theater comes
down to this: balance the bottles. Be sure that Load=Delivery. Too much Load
plays like lead. Too little Load plays like Cats. This great new tool, this brave new
world of theatrical possibility is too beautiful to spoil through lack of rigor in its
application. We need the great plots and characters and thoughts (or themes) to
be delivered anew. We need new stories (events, characters, experiences) of our
own devising that play with and around the new technology, that are inspired
and enabled — but not dominated — by it.
32 LIVE MOVIES
RICK DAVIS
1
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Theater of the First Amendment, Fairfax, Virginia, 1998. Directed by Rick Davis,
set design by Jason Rubin, lighting design by Martha Mountain, costume design by Howard Kurtz, multimedia design by Kirby
Malone and Gail Scott White.
2
Whether playwrights should ever have been given access to that latter tool is a subject for a different essay, but I contend
that the inability of many modern writers to complete the arc of a scene is due to the easy availability of the blackout switch.
3
Rosenthal, Jean E.; Wertenbaker, Lael: The Magic of Light, New York, Theatre Arts Books, 1972
4
I am reminded of a remark by the great Russian émigré designer, Alexander Okun, with whom I had the pleasure of
working as dramaturg on a couple of projects at Center Stage in Baltimore in the 1980s. As he was designing The Tempest for
us, he said that he stared at his blank sheet of drafting paper one day and “felt Shakespeare all the time sitting on my left
shoulder, whispering, ‘Alex, who… needs… scenery?’”
5
A memorable coinage by one of multimedia’s pioneering practitioners.
6
This time you needn’t put the book down right this second, but sometime this week, go find and read the Václav Havel play of
the same name.
7
For these oppositional terms, I am indebted to a wonderful voice teacher, John Koopman (emeritus of Lawrence
Conservatory), who used them to describe two equally important components of balanced vocal production.
HISTORY / THEORY 33
LIVE MOVIES
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU
LOOKING AT
PERFORMANCE ART
Performance art is a term that often causes confusion if not fear, conjuring
images of out-of-control artists thumbing their noses at both traditional
arts practices as well as at the society from which these practices emerge.
Much of the misunderstanding about the form has arisen as the result not
only of the ways that performance art has challenged traditional arts and
theatrical practices, but also by the way it has been characterized in the
media. Performance art was singled out by political opponents of federal
arts funding almost from the very inception of the war against art (a potent
subdivision of the larger “culture wars”) that is still very much with us
today. Almost immediately following the brouhaha over photographs
by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano instigated by critics of the
National Endowment for the Arts, it was performance art that became the
preferred target and favorite whipping boy of conservative commentators.
The so-called “NEA Four” — Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and
John Fleck — who successfully fought in court the rescission of their grants
on the grounds that these decisions had been political were all performance
artists. As a result, performance art became characterized in the media in
sound bytes created for maximum sensationalism and infused with ridicule.
Finley, whose evocatively heartbreaking works were written and performed
with equal parts pain and anger, was reduced in the media to “the woman
who smears her naked body with chocolate”; Fleck, the creator of resonant
work of depth and urgency, became simply “the man who urinates on stage.”
Photo: Ioulia Kouskova.
HISTORY / THEORY 35
Kelly Wilson (Elektra), MPS/Cyburbia’s Time Traveler Zero Zero, 2004.
LOOKING AT PERFORMANCE ART
36 LIVE MOVIES
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU
HISTORY / THEORY 37
LOOKING AT PERFORMANCE ART
38 LIVE MOVIES
LIVE MOVIES
JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK
MUSINGS
ON MULTIMEDIA:
THE CYBORG THEATRE
AND BEYOND
HISTORY / THEORY 39
MUSINGS ON MULTIMEDIA: THE CYBORG THEATRE AND BEYOND
40 LIVE MOVIES
JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK
and spectacular thrills and effects. After about a decade of engagement with
the ideas in Baudrillard’s Simulations, the science fiction of William Gibson,
Teresa de Lauretis’s feminist critiques of technology, Deleuze and Guattari’s
Thousand Plateaus, then on through Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the gaze in film,
and Donna Haraway’s cyborg, in the mid-90s in-depth explorations of hyper-
text, cyber-space and computer technologies began to appear in works by
Brenda Laurel, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, and Allucquère Rosanne
Stone to name a few. These technological analyses made room for the further
gender-driven work of Anne Balsamo, Elizabeth Grosz, Sue-Ellen Case, and
Lisa Cartwright, The Cyborg Handbook edited by Chris Hables Gray, Katherine
Hayles’s ideas of the posthuman, and the positing of “liveness” by theatre and
performance studies scholar Philip Auslander, which may be a turning point
back into the realm of theatre studies.5 Technology was no longer a “given”
but something changing the face of live performance as it has done in feminist
criticism, media studies, and cultural studies. A new genre of performance had
emerged alongside the emergence of new computer and digital technologies.
Mine is one of a few voices attempting to analyze and understand this new
genre, this increasing form of “live” theatre and performance that is not fully
live.6 Although I have theorized multimedia work around the ideas of the
cyborg theatre because it specifically draws attention to the ways in which
the integration with technology can frame and re-shape ideas of what it
means to be human in a mediatized age, I have also observed several trends
developing, both woven through my concept of the cyborg theatre and within
a more generalized “multimedia theatre,” that I briefly highlight here. These
categories are in no way meant to be fixed or conclusive, in fact they often
overlap and filter into each other; the number of artists experimenting with
multimedia in live performance is ever-growing, and with this growth yields
unpredicted possibilities. However, trends are emerging and certain themes,
techniques, and visual effects are being explored. The following outlines some
of the trends, possibilities, and examples that the integration between bodies
and technology has yielded in recent years.
1. New Scenography
One of the most commonly used applications of evident multimedia on stage
is in stage design and scenography. Emerging from such innovations as Erwin
Piscator’s use of documentary film and large scale projections on stage and
his conceptions of a “Total Theatre” as well as from Josef Svoboda’s masterful
compositions blending ideas of lighting and scene design, contemporary
practitioners are increasingly allowing multimedia to stand in for “old
HISTORY / THEORY 41
MUSINGS ON MULTIMEDIA: THE CYBORG THEATRE AND BEYOND
fashioned” painted flats, design and texture, and even actual physical
objects such as doors, cupboards, or staircases. Translating the language
of film and photography to the stage, scenery can shift rapidly on stage,
scenes can abruptly switch from place to place in a seamless fashion, the
colors and textures of a space can shift, mutate, and transform with a click.
Corresponding in frequency to the decrease in actual costs, a scenographic
use of multimedia on stage is often delivered by artists without critical
attention to its reading qua multimedia and lately, in show after show,
appears randomly as moving backdrop, projected texture, text, or tableaux.
However, when executed with calculated thought, scenic projections can
be both effective and visually exciting. For example, Laurie Anderson’s
multimedia pieces, from her United States I-IV in the early 1980s to the more
recent Songs and Stories from Moby Dick in 1999, have long featured a densely
complicated array of projected still and moving images that saturate the
space almost as “synesthesia,” or “visualized sound,” foregrounding both
abstract and concrete inner workings of characters as well as providing mere
visual integration with her unique sound compositions. In contrast, Robert
Lepage realizes deliberate, slow and haunting projections which evoke in
images what words cannot to create a landscape through time and space.
Often understated, Lepage’s multimedia is such an integrated aspect of
his dramaturgical spaces, providing spaces of memory and depth that are
impossible to separate from the non-mediated images. Ridge Theatre/Bob
McGrath and Laurie Olinder have also created a visual aesthetic using large
scale projections that create stunning composite images, such as in their
piece Jennie Ritchie, based on work of “outsider” artist Henry Darger, in
which entire scenes of his drawings were replicated using projections and an
ensemble of live actors.
Introducing languages of film, video, and computer imagery has
provided innovative and flexible approaches to scenographic demands,
as well as providing the basis for a new genre of multimedia, or cyborg
performance, to which I return in point #4. (The examples I include here
highlight some of the more memorable scenic possibilities, which also open
up through further integrations with specific dramaturgical frameworks to
provide a more challenging site for analysis.) The 3-D experiments of San
Francisco-based director George Coates use a combination of computer
projections, 3-D films and slides, and live actors, to draw viewers from
location to location as if in a film, from rain forest to desert, from literal to
abstract location. The British company Forkbeard Fantasy inverts classic
cinema tricks and animates the live space with, for example, films of locations
such as a long corridor with doors on each side through which actors enter
and exit simultaneously on screen and off. The young company Big Art
42 LIVE MOVIES
JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK
Group uses cinematic backgrounds that sweep by as live actors integrate their
bodies into the moving scenery. These are but a few of the more imaginative
applications of a multimedia-based contemporary scenography.7
HISTORY / THEORY 43
MUSINGS ON MULTIMEDIA: THE CYBORG THEATRE AND BEYOND
3. Linking Bodies
New technologies have always been integrated into the stage, from the latest
forms of lighting, to pulleys, hydraulics, cars, conveyor belts, the list goes on
— artists use the live performance site to question, expose, examine, and re-
imagine the new technologies in a given contemporary moment. It is within
this framework that artists are experimenting with VR technologies, infrared
and other military derived technologies, and more commonly, internet
and web-based technologies. The proliferation of personal computers and
broadband internet connections has inspired many practitioners to develop
work around the possibilities of these technologies. Used to connect home
computer audiences to live performance, such as in some of the work of
Stelarc and Orlan,12 or to link live audiences in remote locations, in such
examples as Cathy Weis’s LIPS project, Yubiwa Hotel’s Long Distance Love,
or the recent Stationhouse Opera’s Live From Paradise, these now pervasive
technologies are being investigated on stage as both tool and plot device. In
the telepresent productions I have been a part of as an audience member,
the application of internet or linking technologies, while not yet perfected,
has attempted to generate connectivity between communities, cultures, and
locations that expands the boundaries of what it means to be an audience, as
well as raising important issues of archiving such multi-sited performances.
These performances often take place in different time zones and cultural
contexts; for example Cathy Weis’s Not So Fast, Kid! took place between
Macedonia at 3am and New York City at 9pm; Yubiwa Hotel’s Long Distance
Love connected a site under the Manhattan Bridge called RedLab Theatre to
a club Club AsiaP in Tokyo (which I saw just after 9/11 when phone lines to
NYC were still down but through the computer connection audiences and
performers could share and exchange experiences). Performances also take
place by simply stretching audiences across several cities within a country —
in Stationhouse Opera’s Live From Paradise, audiences in the London audience
could recognize friends from their position at the Birmingham Fierce Festival
location,13 and provide as well new choreographic possibilities for live and
44 LIVE MOVIES
JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK
4. Deconstructions/Reconstructions of Film
Sometimes called “Live Film,” some of the most sophisticated multimedia
based work being explored today falls into this category. Rather than alternate
between one medium or the other, artists such as Builders Association,
George Coates, Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White’s Cyburbia Productions,
Big Art Group, and the UK-based companies Stationhouse Opera, Forkbeard
Fantasy, The Chameleons Group, and imitating the dog (to name only a few)
are working to integrate the techniques of theatre/performance and film
in ways that continue to foreground the live qualities of the theatre. These
companies facilitate integrations between the two forms that surpass the
development of new scenographic techniques and propose a new genre of
cyborg theatrical performance.
One distinguishing feature of this category is an examination and often
a deconstruction of working film and video techniques and their translation
into the live performance space. The artists transform the languages of the
mediums they are working with to the stage — often quite literally. For
example, in the Builders Association’s Xtravaganza, blue screen or Chroma
Key techniques used in the creation of special effects in film and video are
visibly exposed on stage. Actors standing downstage, before a large blue
screen, create a scene that is simultaneously mixed into footage of a black
and white film on a larger screen upstage, creating a living film in front of
the audience. The use of multiple cameras on stage provides an experimental
space for the development of techniques such as mixing images, as in Big
Art Group’s House of No More, which in one instance highlighted an effective
moment between two actors who stood at either end of a long narrow stage,
acting their individual part in front of exposed cameras that then blended
the two seamlessly into one impeccable kiss on screen. Big Art Group’s work,
hi-tech, glossy, and slick, explores the mechanics of such techniques and
HISTORY / THEORY 45
MUSINGS ON MULTIMEDIA: THE CYBORG THEATRE AND BEYOND
develops this new genre of liminal work, somewhere between what could be
called either theatre or film, and due to the quality of the work emerges as a
powerful cyborg theatrical form.
The UK-based Forkbeard Fantasy often uses cinematic techniques
to discover the depth of possibilities on stage — for example, the audience
watches as a person, projected upon a full-screen, braves a wind-swept
terrain and approaches a house only to, in the moment of entry into the
house, become a live actor on the other side of the door, entering into the
live space as the projection shifts to a sliver of outside space, glimpsed
behind a “flat” of the door on stage. Alternatively, an immersive form of
“live film” can be traced through the trajectory of the work of George Coates
Performance Works 3-D multimedia spectacles, especially throughout the
1990s, in which the layers of projection, film footage, objects, scenery, and
actors were all blended together for the audience through 3-D glasses and
the audience becomes immersed within a world in which objects “project”
over your head, or into the scene from where you sit. Akin to this work,
but without the 3-D glasses, is the trompe l’oeil composite images created
by Cyburbia Productions, which often blur the distinction between the live
and the mediated, incorporating live action with highly saturated moving
imagery that draws the spectator into a new intermedial terrain.
Within the framework of these brief categories often runs the theme
of technology itself. As practitioners shift their knowledge of technology to
a hands-on approach, questions of technology’s deployment often come into
focus within the content of the work. Beyond the examples mentioned here,
many other artists explore themes revolving around television, film, computers,
computer games, cell phones, virtual reality, military, or medical technologies.
From individual pieces created by artists whose work does not always focus
on technology, such as Miss Mobile, in which Slovenian performance artist Emil
Hrvatin performs with a cell phone and asks his audiences to call their friends
and have them call him to create the improvisatory performance, or Richard
Maxwell’s Joe tracing seven stages in a man’s life and ending with an actual
robot on stage as a projection into the future, to the ongoing interrogation of
technology by the Builders Association whose Jet Lag contemplated media and
relationships to the traveling body while Xtravaganza, and Alladeen examine
the technologization of bodies from Ziegfield Follies performers to Indian
call center workers, artists are increasingly weaving technology through their
work both conceptually and via practical application.
These practitioners are all experimenting with diverse methods to
expand, blur, and reintegrate the boundaries of theatre and film, thereby
creating new working genres of cyborg theatre. The provocation with which
I began is only half in jest. As the twenty-first century progresses technology
46 LIVE MOVIES
JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK
will become more pervasive, from technologies that continue to aid and
enhance — cures for diseases, artificial replacement parts, filtration systems
for pollutants, to those that destruct — those that do the polluting, war
machines, excess disposable machinery that will not biodegrade. While it is
not the responsibility, or most often within the power of the artist to solve
political problems, within the live space of performance some of these issues
can be addressed, entertained, explored, and ultimately, faced. The cyborg
theatre is the future.
Footnotes
1
I am currently working on a book project developing the theories and ideas of the cyborg theatre entitled, Cyborg Theatre:
Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia.
2
The human fear of being dis/re-placed by technology has a varied historical trajectory, as seen in the following few
examples: in literature, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1815/16 Der Sandmann, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel Tomorrow’s Eve, or
L’Eve future (written between 1877 and 1879), in drama, Karel Čapek’s 1923 R.U.R., and in film, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, all
stand out as key sites for the expression of human displacement.
3
Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,”
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150. Originally published as “A
Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s,” in Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-107
4
Donna Haraway, “The Actors Are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere: Postscript to ‘Cyborgs at
Large,’” Technoculture, eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 21.
5
Although this list excludes many voices, it is an attempt to trace what I feel has been an important chronology to my
own work. It is a guide and a suggestion; there are many other examples in theory, science, and fiction that enhance this
brief trajectory and make it possible. In alphabetical order see: Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized
Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996), Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New
York: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983), Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1995), Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1996), Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), William Gibson, Neuromancer, (London:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1984), Chris Hables Gray, ed. The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1995), Elizabeth Grosz,
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Brenda Laurel, Computers as
Theatre (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st MIT
Press ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), Marshall McLuhan, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage (New York:
Random House, 1967), Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998), Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991),
Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).6 See also:
HISTORY / THEORY 47
MUSINGS ON MULTIMEDIA: THE CYBORG THEATRE AND BEYOND
Günter Berghaus’s Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillian, 2005),
Johannes Birringer’s Media & Performance: Along the Border (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), Gabriella
Giannachi’s Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004), Michael Rush’s New Media in Late 20th Century
Art (Thames & Hudson, 1999), David Saltz’s “Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre,” Theatre Topics, 11, no.
2 (September 2001), as well as the forthcoming work of Matthew Causey, Theatre, Performance, and Technology, London:
Routledge, and Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance: New Technologies in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art and Installation (with
Barry Smith), MIT Press, 2006.
7
For more information on these companies and in some cases examples of their work, see: <http://www.georgecoates.org>,
<http://www.forkbeardfantasy.co.uk/>, and <http://www.bigartgroup.com/>.
8
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), 287.
9
See my chapter on Cathy Weis, “Shifting Strengths: The Cyborg Theatre of Cathy Weis,” in Bodies in Commotion, eds. Philip
Auslander and Carrie Sandahl (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
10
I have written about this production more extensively in, “Global Friends: Alladeen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,”
PAJ: A Journal of Art and Technology 77 (May 2004), and the forthcoming, “Disembodied Sites: The Builders’ Association
and the Performance of Globalization,” for Performance and Place, eds. Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, Palgrave Macmillan,
April 2006. Also see their web site at: <http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/flash/flash.html?homepage>.
11
See my chapter, “Framing the Fragments: The Wooster Group’s Use of Technology,” in The Wooster Group and its Traditions,
ed., Johan Callens, Peter Lang/Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes, in series “Dramaturgies: Texts, Cultures, and
Performances,” edited by Marc Maufort, 2005, for an in-depth analysis of these issues.
12
See: <http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/> and <http://www.orlan.net/> for more information on these two artists.
13
This is an ongoing project that has also included locations in different countries. See: <http://www.stationhouseopera.com/>
for information on their current work.
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HISTORY / THEORY 49
SIX IS NINE, NOW WHAT? NEW MEDIA. NEW MINDS. NEW BEINGS.
arts or even serving as the basis for new modes of expression. At its best, the
whole thrust of artistic activity can be seen as a sophisticated exploration of
possible worlds, a virtual mapping of Sun Ra’s omniverse.
My medium is sound and music — music not as a particular habitus
constraining the organization of sonic events, but music as a particular
phenomenological stance in relation to auditory experience. Music is usually
thought of as a special instance of sound. We may argue about what separates
the good from the bad, but we are usually pretty sure when we are listening
to music. Sound, likewise, is easy enough to talk about at its most generic
and physical level. Pretty displays of sine waves with their microscopic fuzz
of overtones, and demonstrations with vibrating strings, make for good
classroom presentation. Over time, however, my attention has been less
focused on what sound is, than the more obscure question of what a sound is
and how this definitional chess game might be relevant to the meaning of the
music of my time and its role in the evolution of human consciousness.
Just what is a single sound? From the vantage point of perceptual
psychology a sound is a discrete compressed air event that falls between 20Hz
and 20kHz above a certain energy threshold. Within the performance practice
of western music, single musical tones are usually construed as individual
sounds, but no orchestral instrument sounds a pure tone, an unadorned sound
wave, each, even when sustaining a single note is actually presenting the ear
with a complex of fundamental and secondary tones. Is this really one sound?
Would a semiotician regard an anthem or a hymn as a single sound? It’s not an
easy question, and of course its answer hinges on whether the ear you are using
to make the distinction is a social-historical one or a physical-perceptual one.
Sounds in this singular way are the atomic units of sampling. And sampling
is one of a very small number of major developments in musical performance
that separates today’s musical culture from most of prior musical history.
Whether we’re talking about DJs biting records or synthesists reshaping waves
through digital processors, sampling is about postulating possible worlds
through a sonic code and subjecting them to a kind of reality testing that is
visceral and intellectual, aesthetic and critical. If we are to speak cogently about
a contemporary musical stratagem that is based in the reorganization of pre-
existing sounds, then we should probably have some idea of what a sound is.
50 LIVE MOVIES
THOMAS STANLEY
most sticky arenas — that of modal logic. Modal logic is in play whenever
we are asked to speculatively consider scenarios that differ from things as
they actually are, which, if you think about it, it is our nature as a species to
do almost constantly. Human will is metered out by the careful and not so
careful parsing of counterfactuals. Statements of the if…then variety are our
navigational equipment for translation through the complex interstices of
individual and collective will, time and space.
Sampling as a modus assemblage for mass musical culture started out in
a highly localized context driven by the functional necessities of youth dance
culture. Innovations sketched out with phonograph records in the Bronx
during the seventies collided with digital information technology a decade
later to yield an entirely new idea about the how and what of music. The first
objective of pioneers like Clive Campbell (Kool Herc) and Joseph Saddler
(Grandmaster Flash) was to technologically isolate and extract the “break”
from soul records. That is to sample from recorded performances (both popular
and obscure) a particularly beat-heavy, funky-sweaty section, often just a few
bars in length and release it from its original context to serve in repetition as the
basis for a fresh musical experience. The breakbeat represented a distillation
and recovery of black musical essence at a time when disco (i.e., integration)
and other changes in the political economy of African-American music were
seen by many as diluting this essence. By alternately backspinning and re-cuing
each of two identical records containing the break, a DJ with a pair of turntables
could extend the funky apex of black diasporan musical realization, in theory,
forever. Out of the protean skills of the first generation of turntablists, a new
way of thinking about musical creation and musical time emerged alongside a
new awareness of recorded music as a random access historical archive.
No sooner had hip hop escaped its birthplace in New York’s uptown slums
than some artists began expanding sampling’s plunderphonic methodology
while at the same time buffering and subverting the nationalistic and nostalgic
goals that had spawned the approach. The Bomb Squad — Norman Rogers,
Hank Boxley, Bill Stephany, Keith Shocklee, and Eric Sadler, the production team
for political hip hop unit Public Enemy — found early success in using the basic
model of sampling not simply to rehear the musical past, but to disturb the sonic
present. In the mid-eighties, they set PE’s black power rap against apocalyptic
soundscapes that roared with the discontent and doom that characterized black
urban experience of the Reagan era. Their bed of samples was rich in the sources
it appropriated from, adding sound effects and environmental sound to thick
beats mined from the grooves of old soul records.
But no other artist has been as influential in defining the avant-garde
horizons of sampling as Paul D. Miller a/k/a DJ Spooky. Miller a critical
theorist and media artist whose sonic constructions in the mid-nineties
HISTORY / THEORY 51
SIX IS NINE, NOW WHAT? NEW MEDIA. NEW MINDS. NEW BEINGS.
52 LIVE MOVIES
THOMAS STANLEY
HISTORY / THEORY 53
SIX IS NINE, NOW WHAT? NEW MEDIA. NEW MINDS. NEW BEINGS.
54 LIVE MOVIES
LIVE MOVIES
WHIT MacLAUGHLIN
TOWARDS A
COMPREHENSIVE
MEDIA METEOROLOGY
HISTORY / THEORY 55
TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE MEDIA METEOROLOGY
56 LIVE MOVIES
WHIT MacLAUGHLIN
perceive and notice we do, sometimes with a sense of awe. We feel swept up
and fascinated, when we pay attention, impressed with our smallness, but also
with our agency — minute, but significant — within the complexity and scale
of the forces which surround us.
Combining these effects, we might imagine that, metaphorically, the
“weather” of a human situation is the sum total of particularities surrounding
the life of a community. Such a thing might also function on the stage as a way
of imagining how the particularities of sight, sound, and story interact to create
a performance experience. I like the way this allows both subtle, subconscious
phenomena and grand, very conscious phenomena into consideration.
HISTORY / THEORY 57
TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE MEDIA METEOROLOGY
A Glimmer of Insight
It was after the Stone Circle Poets concert that something clicked. The effect of
that night could be described as a compendium of sight, sound, thought,
and action; included in the glossary of necessary elements were serendipity
and the unpredictability of nature, the formalized word-craft of the poems,
along with the personalities of the speakers. Most important, though, was
the comprehensive nature of what was expressed, the layering, the rhythm,
the onslaught of words, words, words. It was the rock and roll of the event
that swayed me. Everything conjoined to create a sort of compelling weather
system — a meteorology of meaning that was, in that particular moment,
generating an aesthetic thunderstorm. I could describe the effect as ecstatic,
or, if not ecstatic, at least pleasantly stupor-making.
I got something about the Greeks. It was the way the Greeks
constructed constellations of thought in the presence of “nature” that gave
the plays some of their mysterious cultural power. They were born out
of a physical dramaturgy that brought organized thought systems into
contact with the unpredictability of a reverberant natural world and then
introduced the result into the public sphere. They operated in a sizable and
comprehensive phenomenological grid that was appropriate and stimulating
to a kind of reverberating cultural feedback that gave tragedy, say, a psychic
boost and rendered its effect personal and pertinent in a kind of symphonic
and transporting way.
Over time it became clearer to me why the modern day theatre seemed
wan and thin in comparison to that night in Michigan and what I imagined for
the Greek theatre. Conversation, monologue, traditional story-line, and even
non-linear narration, static lighting systems, music playing before and during
the show — all of this together did not comprise “a sizable and comprehensive
phenomenological grid.” We hadn’t conceived of the right spontaneous
weather system — we had not assembled a meteorology of meaning for our
era. And so, there wasn’t sufficient cultural reverberation in our compendium
of sight, sound, and action to manufacture aesthetic ecstasy.
Which brings us to a point where we can discuss media in general, and
approach a full media meteorology.
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HISTORY / THEORY 59
TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE MEDIA METEOROLOGY
All of these elements form the raw materials out of which the metaphoric
weather system of a piece begins to form; the effects, signifiers, conceits,
metaphor generators, narrative strands are the expressive tools that comprise
the understanding of media I wish to refer to here.
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Please note that, traditionally, theatre begins with the word. I’ve
subverted this hierarchy by way of a concept I call physical dramaturgy. It is
the ever-present, but oft ignored physical subtext to every text. It is the anchor
for all discourse that emanates from the stage. It is the soup we all simmer in,
but often ignore because we’ve gotten used to its temperature.
HISTORY / THEORY 61
TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE MEDIA METEOROLOGY
• Much like the Greek dramas which they posit as antecedents, these
pieces start with figures which pre-exist in the audience’s imagination.
They trade on images that have a history and currency in each
individual viewer. The pieces assume that these reference points will
reverberate differently in each viewer, in accordance with his/her
personal associations. The pieces leave wide open a latitude of potential
interpretation. They purposely create meaning and then dissolve it.
And pop figure subjects, whether emanating from a fictional or non-
fictional source, are carefully constructed systems of sign and symbol.
Thus, each piece starts with a figure whose primary features are
allusive in addition to being actual.
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Rene Hartl (Ringo), Aaron Mumaw (George), Matt Saunders (Paul), Jeb Kreager (John),
New Paradise Laboratories’ The FAB 4 Reach the Pearly Gates, directed by Whit MacLaughlin,
the Southern Theatre, Minneapolis, The Walker Art Center “Out There” Series, 2003.
HISTORY / THEORY 63
TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE MEDIA METEOROLOGY
No attempt is made to submerge the personae of the actors into their roles. In
many ways they evince their own personalities accurately while still referencing
the signs and symbols of their characters. For instance, Matt Saunders was the
actor in the company most McCartney-like in his overall affect — he played
Matt Saunders playing Paul McCartney. The effect was both distancing and
intimate. We see Matt, with his gently sympathetic personality, peering out
from inside the elaborate semiotic mask of his portrayal. In this way, the mode
of characterization mimics the effect of literal masking.
In no sense is the text of these pieces deathless prose. On the contrary, the
text provides continuity and connective tissue to the body of the work. The
text functions very much like screenplay, where the visual component of
the film supercedes the meaning and structure of language.
64 LIVE MOVIES
WHIT MacLAUGHLIN
wrestling mat to hear a bedtime story — it’s Christmas Eve and Bing
Crosby is repeatedly singing the looped phrase “Do you hear what I
hear?” from the “Little Shepherd Boy” Christmas boy. This musical
scoring is intermingled with riffs from Miles Davis. The bedtime story
tells of a man who preserves a strange masochistic propensity for public
voyeurism by burying himself in a concrete sidewalk in order that he
might feel public footsteps on his body forever. As the story draws to a
close, the seven Hefners are tucked into bed by a professional eunuch
in a blue monkey head — he covers each Hefner completely with the
grey wrestling mat. It is a very tender image combining memories
of childhood with suffocation and mortality. Then, a nude actress in
a Santa hat and beard enters the space through a fifteen-foot-high
fireplace in order to place little wrapped gifts/headstones on the
individual lumps of the bodies under the large mat.
Mary McCool (The Pink Angel) and Aaron Mumaw (George), New Paradise Laboratories’ The FAB 4 Reach the Pearly Gates,
directed by Whit MacLaughlin, the Southern Theatre, Minneapolis, The Walker Art Center “Out There” Series, 2003.
HISTORY / THEORY 65
TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE MEDIA METEOROLOGY
The overall experience of each piece, I think, is greater than the sum
of its described elements. The pieces work best with an audience when
the image density of the work reaches a critical mass and the elaborate
distancing techniques in the piece unite into an effect that is very strongly
experiential. The overall effect is not cool and ironic, but supercharged
and involving. It verges, in some viewers, on the spiritual. It’s not just that
questions are evoked, but a questing spirit is engendered in the viewer;
a sensation that answers are just around the corner, but that fulfilling
interpretability is dangling just out of reach. Viewers feel drawn forward
into the piece not by traditional narrative suspense, but by a desire to
resolve ontological mystery in general. The sensation and experience of the
pieces is exotic, erotically charged, and ravishing.
The cast of New Paradise Laboratories’ The FAB 4 Reach the Pearly Gates, 2003.
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Finally.
It is important to note, for our purposes here, that each of these pieces brings
forth strategies that are drawn from a variety of contemporary media — and
we come to why this is critical. Remember that we started with a discussion of
a potential relationship between weather, geography, and image. We wanted
to seek an elusive “proper phenomenological grid” that would somehow
unlock a full spectrum of meaning so reverberant that it would engender a
kind of intellectual and spiritual feedback in the viewer.
There is much more to be explored in understanding the relationship
of bodies in space and time to grid in general. It has been noted that we
function in a series of metaphor-laden grids: for instance, “up” into the
space overhead generally signals aspiration. We move “up” in the world.
Important thoughts hover overhead. “Up” is equated with goodness, and
light. It is the source of emanations from God. “Moving forward” signals
having somewhere to go. “Going” is equated with vitality and purpose.
And on and on.
But in this study, suffice it to say that there is a grid formed by
the sum total of communicative tools that hover, like weather, around
the body in space. We can’t invite the winds of the Arkadian mountains
around Epidaurus to blow across our stage, but we can simulate that sense
of natural grandeur with a media equivalent. In a sense, the scale of our
media environment simulates nature. We cannot conceive of our current
phenomenological grid without including the metaphoric weather system of
our media environment.
New Paradise Laboratories sees the body as a nexus where structures
of meaning converge. The body represents an intersection, an accretion
of metaphoric and perceptual effects. The body stands upright, alive and
vibrant, but vulnerable in the face of a buffeting media storm.
HISTORY / THEORY 67