Video and Stage Space: Some European Perspectives

Video and Stage Space: Some European Perspectiyes MARVIN CARLSON The utilization of moving pictures in live performances dates almost from the beginning of the filmic medium itself, but at the end of the twentieth century the rapidly evolving world of digital technology has provided a seemingly almost limitless range of possible interrelationships and interactions between the live body of traditional theatre and performance and the reproduced body of film and digital technology. Just as this work has radically altered (and continues to alter) the concept of the performing body itself, so it has radically altered (and continues to alter) the concept of the space in which that body operates. In the lead essay to the special issue of Theatre Journal devoted to "Theatre and Technology" Johannes Birringer looked to contemporary experimental work in dance, suggesting how the use of technology, especially digital technology, was opening new possibilities for the seeing and the experiencing of this form. "In the '9905," he proposed, "working digitally and being digital evoke a new futurism of virtual performance possibilities; its new technological catchword is 'interactivity'" ("Contemporary Performance! Technology" 368).1 Diana Theodores has coined the term "technography" to refer to this major new development in dance, reinforcing the mutually informing new interrelationships of technology and choreography (qtd. in Birringer , "Contemporary PerformancelTechnology" 37r).' In all of the works he discusses, Birringer comments that "the familiar integrity of [...1 space, time, and mass" is disappearing ("Contemporary PerformancelTechnology " 38,), and although he does not specifically elaborate this point, it is clear that in his examples, the traditional idea of performance space is disappearing as well, to be replaced by a wide range of interactive real and digital spaces, some controlled by the viewers, some by the producers of the images, and some by the interactivity of viewers and producers. It is not surprising that Birringer's examples are drawn almost entirely from contemporary dance, or from that area where performance art and dance overlap, ModernDrama, 46:4 (Winter 2003) 6[4 Video and Stage Space since this is where the kind of experimentation that concerns him has so far been most fully developed. Another article in Ihis same special issue of Theall'e Journal, by the media artist Matthew Causey, does mention, at least in passing, two experimental theatre groups, the Wooster Group and the Desperate Optimists, along with Ihe cyber-performance activities of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, and refers to "the space of technology," but, unlike Birringer, Causey is not centrally concerned with spatial matters. His interest, like that of much recent work on cyber-performance, is rather upon how the material body and its subjectivity is extended, challenged, and reconfigured through technology.3 Certainly the recent work of the Wooster Group and the Desperate Optimists - to which one could add the work of the Builders Association, the Big Art Group, and a number of other contemporary experimental theatre organizations in America and abroad - can be seen as pursuing interactive projects similar to those charted by Birringer in contemporary dance and performance art. For the most part, however, these groups, like most dance and unlike most traditional theatre, begin with a space that is already neutral, or at least not mimetic in the traditional theatrical sense. [0 many cases the space is also, unlike traditional theatre space, not in actual bur only in virtual existence, as in the examples and artistic statements collccted in the important anthology edited by Mary Anne Moser, lmmersed in Technology, which provides Birringer with some of his examples ("Contemporary Performancerrechnology" 369; see also Gromala and Sharir). The conventional mimetic stage, the central modem example of which is the traditional illusionistic stage of realism, has been given comparatively little attention by theorists of the new interactivity like Birringer and Causey. This is especially true in America, where the tradition of illusionistic staging and illusionistic stage space is particularly strong and the kinds of destabilization of this space described by Birringer would be almost unthinkable. In Europe, however, the situation is very different, and there have developed, especially in Germany, new interactions of theatre and technology that are quite unlike the sort of dance/performance work that has occupied the attention of...