Global Screen Shots

The Harbourfront Centre World Stage opened its season with the #artlive Vogue Ball, playing the hashtag of social media, itself a form of mediated performance, against the “realness” of the New York drag world. This programming decision broadcasted questions of authenticity, identity, and representation that would emerge as the most salient links among this year’s otherwise distinct offerings, alongside a corresponding interest in the consequences of performance’s ongoing appropriation of media. In addition to a host of international performances, World Stage has also dedicated resources to cultivating original work. These concerns were apparent across a range of works, from Kyle Abraham’s dance The Radio Showto a newly commissioned audio play from Fixt Point, titled The Tale of Harbourfront Centre, as well as in the festival’s embrace of a broad-based media platform. The festival’s strength, however, came from those offerings that were more difficult to absorb, bringing questions of contemporary culture, media, and politics to the forefront.

The presence of digital technologies was certainly a key component of this focus, but even among performances lacking the overt presence of screens, computers, and other digital markers, it was clear that media technologies have refocused our cultural attention on questions of authenticity and representation, issues that for all their connection to new media remain fundamentally theatrical problems. Among the most compelling performances in this year’s series were the Canadian premiere of Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show, Major Tomby UK-based performance artist Victoria Melody, and Markus Öhrn’s problematic Conte d’amour(“Love Story”), which inspired numerous walk-outs and a vitriolic response from the Toronto press. Gathering prominent work from major international festivals, artistic director Tina Rasmussen’s World Stage series provided the opportunity to reflect upon emerging trends from the past few years and revealed just how pervasive and powerful media technologies have become onstage.

How else does one explain the video projections in Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show? Lee’s wordless and costume-less play has received many reviews since its premiere in January 2012, and yet most reviews routinely overlook its use of video projections, except for the occasional brief mention. The images often seem insignificant, more akin to large screen-savers than video art. They hover above the show mostly as visual abstractions, anomalies within a dramaturgy built on physical and gestural specificity. Yet, the staging in the Fleck Dance Theatre — a white rectangular floor echoed in a hanging white rectangle overhead — resembled nothing so much as two screens. The blankness of these dual surfaces, like the naked bodies of the performers, created a performance environment as empty canvas, a tabula rasafor our collective cultural images and projections.

Working against the backdrop of these seemingly empty fields, Lee’s staging thus relies on familiarity and recognition for meaning. Without language or costumes, and using relatively few props, the performers construct narratives (nearly every vignette has some kind of story) from a legible gestural vocabulary. The opening scene of children seduced by an evil witch in the forest, a slow-motion fight scene, and a dance of common domestic labor — cleaning, cooking, child-care — rely on our mutual understanding of physical gestures. Perhaps the most memorable example of this legibility is a series of mimed sex acts directed to specific audience members.

Performed with wicked charm by the cabaret performer Lady Rizo, the piece requires nothing other than familiarity with the male anatomy and a willingness to strain credulity. The music for the show is also drawn from familiar sources, such as the ubiquitous “Wild Thing” and excerpts from The Magnetic Fields and Mozart. The movement throughout is so familiar that the few non-narrative dances fit awkwardly within the hour-long performance. More successful were the more quotidian movements made strange only by the total absence of clothing, which rendered the unadorned female body as simultaneously...