Staging the Image: Video in Contemporary Performance

At a post-show Talkback at P.S. 122 in New York City’s East Village in February 2009, director Peter Born addressed the short video sequence that was used in Pent Up:A Revenge Dance, a show written and performed by his wife, Okwui Okpokwasili. He said, “A lot of theatre uses it, but I think, if you can express it another way, then why use video?” It’s a simple rhetorical question, one that betrays Born’s minimalist theory in terms of the medium. But the answers, exposed through a survey of video’s wider use in contemporary live performance, are actually quite deep and varied. In our technology-saturated visual environment, the question is not whether video will be used in performance (it will), or whether this is a trend that may pass (like ever-expanding online culture, it won’t), but rather, how savvy performers and directors can use moving images to create powerful, visually interesting, critical, or otherwise fresh and authentic works on stage. Several recent New York City performances shed light on the positively exploited potential of video in performance, while others serve to reveal common missteps and abuses of the ubiquitous medium.

Pent Up is a rich example of a performance that successfully incorporates technical image projection. The artists’ well-designed and powerfully involved use of video in the opening scene is informed by the qualities they bring to the rest of the show, especially Okpokwasili’s attention to full yet terse movement phrasing and Born’s knack for arranging visual spaces. As the audience enters the small black box theatre from its Ninth Street entrance, two performers and a limited set are frozen in a stunning tableau. A dancefloor-like white rectangle with jagged, intentionally torn ends sets a frame on the ground for the scene in the otherwise all black room. A young woman, fair-skinned but clearly of mixed ethnic background, lays on her back, eyes closed, with her left knee bent out to the side. Her head rests in the remnants of a cracked television screen; exposed red, yellow, and blue wires create a colorful, broken, technology-inspired pillow or headdress. She wears the plaid skirt and white collared shirt of a school uniform; her hair is braided in neat, tight cornrows. Standing behind this, Okpokwasili hangs her head, her back to the audience. Her dress is untied and pulled down to her waist so that her entire broad, dark and muscular back is exposed. On it, video images that she and Born shot while visiting Nigeria

Kalup Linzy, Comedy Tragedy, Sketches of Me, The Kitchen. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy Blake Zidell.

Okui Okpokwasili, Pent Up: A Revenge Dance, Performance Space 122. Photo: Yi Zhao. Courtesy Richard Kornberg.

are projected: elusive scenes that recall Africa: young children’s faces, adorned women, and bare feet dancing in the dust.

Immediately, before people are finished being seated and before any real movement occurs on stage, the audience is transported into an exotic, ethereal, otherworldly space. Because the images are being literally written on the performer’s skin, there becomes, even without movement, a real sense of the black female body as receiver, one that even mirrors the black box of the theatre itself. Content that is later revealed through spoken text and movement is already literalized on the stage through this simple, finely crafted first visual sentence. Even if the audience doesn’t quite understand in the beginning what they are seeing, the dream feeling created through the strange but lovely tableau—including, necessarily in this case, the video—holds great promise.

The story behind the movements that subsequently unfolds was initially inspired by the myth of Medea and its various versions that explore a woman alternately mad or distressed and vengeful. Many of the movements themselves are evocative of Maya Deren’s videos of trance dances in Haiti, or Nina Simone’s hypnotic live performances. But at its core Pent Up is about emotional and psychological inheritance, the immigrant experience...