steve dixon : absent fiends |
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Practice: Chameleons 3: Net Congestion ![]() In August 2000, I co-directed (with Paul Murphy) and performed with my performance research company, The Chameleons Group, in two separate interactive cybertheatre performances entitled Chameleons 3: Net Congestion. The Group's three core performers (Paul Murphy, Wendy Reed and I) worked with eight 'guest artists' over ten days to prepare the performance, including shooting and editing hours of video material which played on screens behind the live performers. Prior to the preparation period, the guest artists were sent a summary 'brief' to help prompt some initial ideas about creating characters and video imagery in the 'house-style' of the Group (see Performers' Brief). The performance times and web address was announced on a number of theatre, live art and cyberculture email lists. The performances took place in a black-box studio theatre with three separate stages, where the live actors performed in front of large projection screens playing pre-recorded digital video. Whilst a 'high-tech' project, the stage configuration itself harked back to the pageant wagon staging of Medieval Mystery Plays. ![]() There was no live audience present in the theatre, but a three-camera Outside Broadcast unit relayed the performance over the Internet. People logged in to the live event, their computer screen combining a video window of the performance with a chat room environment. The audience was invited to affect and help create the performance by typing in images, characters and lines of dialogue, that the performers could use and improvise with. As we performed, we also kept an eye on a screen in the stage space in order to react to the comments and suggestions the audience were typing in. Some sections of the show were pre-rehearsed, others were entirely improvisational - the performers responding 'on the fly' to the audience's suggestions. Pre-rehearsed Sections: Melding Live and Recorded Bodies ![]() Live cybertheatre problematises the whole question of the live and mediatised, virtual and real bodies. Though my theoretical perspective is akin to Philip Auslander's (1999) in challenging oppositional perspectives and hierarchical views on live and mediatised events, one must nonetheless acknowledge material and perceptual differences between the two. In Chameleons 3 we attempted a dialectical exploration of theories of liveness, at times seeking to blur distinctions between the live and mediatised and at others delighting in making the distinctions apparent. In a pre-rehearsed sequence introducing a junkie priest character, for example, the live performer spoke to and interacted with three different video recording versions of himself (symbolising the Father, Son and Holy Ghost). ![]() In the '4 Priests' scenario, we are faced with a quintessential example of real and 'virtual' bodies competing for a sense of reality. An orthodox postmodern critique of this section of the show would centre on the exploration of the destabilisation of the real, and ideas of simulacra and simulation, the synthesis of the real and the virtual, the absent and present. Yet the piece concerns a live actor acting with three separate video recordings of himself. It essentially uses the technology in a realist mode - to create a scene of dialogue between four people. The claims for a synthesis of the live and the mediatised here, as so often, is theoretically overstated. To take the opposite viewpoint, what we enjoy in this example is our own sophisticated understanding of media that allows us to differentiate between the live and the recorded. We derive pleasure from it precisely because we are in on the joke, and can share and enjoy the ingenuity and craft with which the actor develops and maintains the illusion of liveness of his virtual doubles within the scene. The piece is not primarily concerned with virtuality and mediatisation. On the contrary, it is about sheer, self-conscious 'theatricality' - the delight in presenting illusion and fantasy which goes beyond mundane, quotidian materiality. ![]() ![]() This notion is then taken further in the 'Doors' scenario, in which we pre-recorded and edited a sequence of the ten performers coming in and out of doors in different ways, and then projected the edited footage back on the same screen. We then performed coming through the doors again live, in the same visual scale as the projections, this time interacting with our 'virtual' selves or other virtual characters. ![]() This sequence melds and synchronises the corporeal bodies of the performers to their digital doubles. The composite imagery concerns the coalescence and indivisibility of the two. This process runs very much contrary to dominant assumptions within critical theory which defines the virtual body as different, separate and detached (as discussed in the 'Theory section'). Telematic Improvisations: New Performance Genres and Pavlov's Dog ![]() Comments, images and ideas generated by the chatroom audience percolated through the performance, the performers often continuing ideas as the performance progressed, or referring back to earlier contributions. A number of sections were improvised 'on the fly' solely from the audience textual chat. The performers would directly address the audience and ask for characters, images, direction, and lines of dialogue, and then respond to them immediately in the same way that contemporary improvised comedy works. An example of how this process worked can be seen by cross-referencing the Improvisation 1 Video Clip with the Internet Relay Chat that stimulated it - IRC Log 1. Although prior to the performances we had agreed to consciously try to move away from the improvised comedy genre, in actuality a number of sections suffered by being too closely akin to it. As performers we couldn't resist the impulse to please, entertain and amuse. Although we had explicitly told ourselves we were not performing dogs, at certain times we ended up becoming just that. Although there were some highly creative improvisatory moments, there were also some very crass and self-conscious ones. For another example, see the Improvisation 2 Video Clip and its corresponding chat log - IRC Log 2. ![]() This was partly a result of often mischievous or deliberately banal audience suggestions and partly due to our improvisational skills and technique. There was also a strong view from the performers that we overcompensated since we were working in a theatrical vacuum unable to adequately gauge audience reaction. This is an important difference between traditional theatre and cybertheatre from a performer's perspective - the lack of presence (other than textual) from the audience, which we found adversely affected the sense of improvisational security. What was disturbing for the performers was that they did not have the same sense of control and performance judgement as in a theatre. Just as cyberspace is conceptualised as a limbo, a non-space, so too was the experience of performing in an empty theatre to a 'disembodied' audience. The experience felt anxious and cold, alien and alienating. The performers felt isolated and alone; a perception that has also been often noted in relation to cyberspatial communication. To the performers, the experience felt far closer to television than theatre, and the performers also regarded the audience as being comparatively more voyeuristic or scopophilic than within a conventional theatre experience. Absent Fiends: The Interactive Audience ![]() In this type of interactive theatre the audience role is changed, not only from consumer to interactive participant but also as a de-ritualised agent. The audience is not simply engaged in a dialogue with the performers, but with each other. Reading back through the logs it became clear that many in the chatroom barely wrote anything to the performers, preferring to interact with the others in the audience, who were able to reply more immediately to them - or commenting on the action, or making jokes at the performers' expense. The normal theatre hierarchy privileging the actors over the audience is no longer apparent and is in many ways reversed as new power and status relations are negotiated and played out within the audience and from audience to performers. The chatroom means that there are actually two performances going on, which criss-cross, overlap and feed each other. They both divert, the chat becoming cliquey and self-contained, as does the theatre, then they come together, before diverging and breaking apart once more. This engenders a new hybrid of social and aesthetic performance working simultaneously. Both the performers and a number of audience members we contacted reflected that at times the experience seemed like a genuinely new generic performance form. ![]() Audience members we spoke to or corresponded with made a number of interesting observations. Some said they went into character themselves and that they typed things they wouldn't say in a live face-to-face situation. Others suggested that the chatroom distracted from the performance, but at the same time was a parallel performance, often more interesting than the one the performers were engaged in. Some noted the dynamics of the time delay between their typing and the performers responding, a concept that Martin Jay (2001) has discussed in relation to Nietsche's notions of the breakdown of 'the present'. There was an average time delay of around twenty seconds between an interaction being sent and it appearing for the performers to read on screen within the theatre. This was felt by audience members to be at once frustrating (why aren't they responding to me?), exciting (will they respond soon?) and immensely satisfying (they used my suggestion!). However, it was generally felt that there was greater interaction between the spectators than there was between the audience and the performers. For this reason, in line with the performers' perceptions, audience members also reflected that since they were chatting and interacting between themselves as it went on, it was closer to a television experience than a theatre one. Matthew Causey has argued that due to its virtual ontology: Performance theory fails postorganic performance … [and]
postorganic performance fails performance theory ... Postorganic
performance, playing out the will to virtuality, may in fact void itself
of the capacity to realize the appearance of theater, the presence of
the fleshy other (1999: 133). Conclusion |
index | steve dixon home | introduction | section 1: theory and contexts | section 2: practice | |