The Spectatorial Body in Multimedia Performance

Over the course of three days at the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) 2010, I played electric guitar, competed in an all-audience video game on a controller at my seat, and, as warm water rose to my ankles at the end of my online conversation with a young Indonesian man, I got my feet wet—my body became a part of each of these performances. LIFT is a festival that, since its establishment in 1981 by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, has variously engaged with questions of internationalism, of childhood, and of the city itself. The festival, which has run intermittently, in 2010 returned to a full festival after years of other smaller projects (see their “living archive” at www.liftlivingarchive.com/lla/). The festival had previously featured productions by The Wooster Group, Romeo Castellucci and Sociètas Raffaello Sanzio, Lemi Ponifasio’s company MAU, and in 2010 presented companies from Israel, Tunisia, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Amidst the eighty or so productions featured in this year’s LIFT festival, I specifically tried to narrow down the choices and attend ones that were media-based.

What I found unusual in much of my performance selection was that in three of the four media-based works I attended in a row, Gob Squad’s Revolution Now!, Rimini Protokoll’s Best Before, and Dries Verhoeven’s Life Streaming, my body was somehow engaged explicitly within the work—not something I have come to expect in viewing multimedia performance. This physical engagement was in contrast to the experience of seeing the Builders Association’s Continuous City, also at the festival, which was a more typical front-facing audience positioning. However, here too the production explicitly addressed issues of materiality within contemporary social networking and connective technologies. Much media-based performance does position the audience apart from the media, in what have come to be predictable viewing patterns of TV, computer screens, and projected media, so why, I wondered, this noticeable change in spectatorial positioning, why this engagement with the spectator’s body in three pieces in a row?

In recent years, there is a sense that technology has grown closer to the body—an “embeddedness,” as Matthew Causey puts it, or indeed a human-technological cyborgian integration, as I propose in my book Cyborg Theatre.¹ In contemporary media-based performance there is a growing sense that this closeness between bodies and media has to be marked, and indeed I have noticed a number of pieces in which headsets are given to the audience to bring the soundscape closer, or to offer instructions to the spectator. I wondered, as I maneuvered through these works, whether this shift in relationship between media and materiality was a return to earlier media experiments of Fluxus artists like Nam June Paik, whose works with Charlotte Moorman such as TV Cello were hands-on explorations between her (often topless) body and a cello made of televisions, or of the intermedia engagements with (especially sound) technologies in sixties Happenings, or whether instead it is a more recent challenge to cinematic modes of frontal, visual perception, or a challenge to notions of disembodiment? In an age when the cinematic landscape is so dominated by post-Tron portrayals of a “virtual” reality (The Matrix, Avatar, Inception) in which bodies plug in and drop out to be replaced by projections and avatars, a physical model like theatre might reinvest in the role of the spectator, not by asking us to suspend disbelief and “plug in,” but to participate more actively. We are so used to media being the place where bodies disappear that those pieces in the LIFT festival that insist upon the spectator’s bodily engagement now challenge our cinematic sensibilities.

As practitioner-theorists begin to publish more about their experiences with media, such as Susan Kozel’s recent book, Closer, or Chris Salter’s Entangled (in which he asks: “How have technical objects or beings historically come to have been entangled with artistic performance practices?”), and as...