"Always in the Likeness": The Virtual Presences of Helmut Kajzaris Gw'azda in the Lothe Lachmann Theatre

In the 1970s, Helmut Kajzar formulated his manifesto, in which he defined theatre as "a place in between – such as stairs, a hallway, such as the Earth" (Manifest); yet, he never stopped asking where theatre begins and where it ends (Teatr Meta-codzienny).¹ Nearly thirty years later, the participants of the International Theatre Festival, Dialog, were trying to answer, "What can the theatre offer […] in the time of the expeditious development of audiovisual arts? Does the theatre try to compete with the tools of contemporary pop-culture […] how does it use them?" ("Dialog"). After he had written his manifesto for Teatr Metacodzienno_ci [the Theatre of Meta-everydayness], Kajzar bought one of the first tape recorders available in Poland and, delighted with the new opportunities, treated it as an element of his theatre. Over the years, technological inventions have become not only tools or instruments in theatre but the meaningful elements of the theatrical space; similarly, digital transmission not only has enabled theatre to stage events, now, using solutions familiar from television or film but also poses basic questions as to the status of materiality and presence in theatre. Trying not to compete with the tools of contemporary electronic culture but rather to use them, theatre has developed various hybrids, extending the range of its already multiform configurations with multimedia performance. Equipped with technology much more advanced than Kajzar's tape recorder and questing after the body as "the primary means of theatrical display" (Kunst, "Impossible"), the Videoteatr "Poza" [Lothe Lachmann Theatre] actively pursues one of the lines of inquiry into this marriage of diverse forms.

Theatre is the area of human artistic activity that combines the real and the virtual, the material and the immaterial, the non-physical and the corporeal modalities in a temporal and spatial appropriation of meaning. Various stage experiments have, in one way or another, attempted to use technology to reexamine these correlations. In the network of wires, cameras, projectors, and screens, the most obvious and approachable tool for artistic creation – the body – has faced the danger of becoming redundant, or at least insufficient as the essential instrument of the theatrical medium. Thus, media, accused of creating surrogates for the reality that aspires to be conceived as the "only" reality, have been regarded as a threat to so-called real art. Challenged with such an accusation, diverse modes of multimedia performance, usually flourishing outside the structures of the theatre, have taken the concept of the body as the most "representative" sign of their alternative form of expression, raising awareness of what N. Katherine Hayles describes as a "technological development [that] can no longer be meaningfully separated from the human subject" (xiii).

As an umbrella term, "multimedia performance" includes various practices that explore and extend performance through the combined use of animated projections, virtual images, and computer networks, which operate within the performance. In such computer-driven artistic ventures, the physical body struggles to mark its presence using zeros and ones. As a projected, simulated, or in some other way actuated "image," the body intricately combines the opposing rules of physicality and immateriality, of the actual and the virtual, reality and fiction. At the same time, it seems to evince the climactic point of the changing relations among text, representation, stage, actors, and audience in the modern theatre.

Not without reason, Lachmann's play with electronic media, with embodied subject and mechanized object, can be understood as an attempt to unravel "the mystery of the real artificiality" (B»o½ski 9), to find out what an electronic mask or prosthesis, and this unnatural "pose" of the body, may stand for in theatre. Piotr Lachmann, a poet, essayist and translator, enacts these concepts in the theatre he has been producing with the actress Jolanta Lothe since 1985.² Their Videoteatr "Poza," called by Marian GrzeÑczak the LLT (Lothe Lachmann Theatre), provocatively combines live acting with visual and audio recordings, producing, as some would say, inorganic surrogates of the human body. The LLT creates a theatrical space overloaded with technological equipment, in...