Digital Diva: Opera on Video

What is it about video recording that brings out the purist in theater practitioners and theorists? Time and again they reinforce a hierarchy that relegates the recording of theater to a derivative and debased status in relation to the unique and inimitable condition of a live performance. Whether produced for archival, documentary, or research purposes, recordings are seen to offer only the faintest trace of something now lost, something now properly preserved only in the ever-fading record of human memory. "Performance," writes Peggy Phelan, "cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance."¹ For director Peter Brook, theater "is an event for that moment in time, for that [audience] in that place—and it's gone. Gone without a trace . . . the only record is what they retained, which is how it should be in theater."² An investment in this essential yet ephemeral quality of the live event—what Phelan calls the "ontology of performance"³—is a recurring theme in theater and performance studies, standing at times like theater's line in the sand, beyond which media technology holds no sway.

The extent of these reservations—not to say opposition—is documented and explored in a series of articles in New Theatre Quarterly by Gay McAuley, Annabelle Melzer, and Denise Varney and Rachel Fensham.⁴ Video recordings, Varney and Fensham show, are derided for robbing the spectator of a choice of perspective and imposing the camera's gaze for their selective representation of the mise-en-scène, for the loss of a variable and unknowable temporality of the live to a congealed representation of the past, and of course for the lack of the presence of the performer. In part, these characteristics are presented as an absence or failure inherent to video. They can also be attributed, as Melzer points out, to its successes, in the sense that the well-honed techniques of film and video may be understood to sit uncomfortably with theater. Melzer cites Jonathan Miller's take on this problem:

After years of trial and error, film editors have evolved practical rules of assembly so that when the eye is directed unaccountably towards one group of characters, excluding all the others, the viewer's sense of narrative continuity is left undisturbed. It is the very success of this surreptitious technique that irreversibly changes the dramatic identity of the stage work.⁵

Either way—as an inherent loss in the medium or as the successful refinement of idiomatic techniques—the result, Melzer concludes, is the same: a fundamental incompatibility between video and theater.

Not that these concerns represent a monolithic, unyielding opposition to video. Melzer points out, for example, that Brook's observation on the irretrievable present of performance was made in 1969; by 1977 he was expressing enthusiasm for what he called the "filmed document."⁶ Yet Brook's use of the term "document" says much about the perceived relationship of video to theater. As Varney and Fensham point out, video became increasingly accepted by Brook and others, but only as a tool for practitioners to study the craft of theater or to facilitate the revival of a production. McAuley considers another possibility: that theater on video may be a valuable teaching and research tool. However, here too, the function of video is perceived in documentary terms. Offering practical advice for academics seeking to record productions in university settings, McAuley stresses the need for medial "transparency" so as to avoid interfering with the "theatrical experience."⁷

Only when the focus shifts to the wider dissemination of theater on video do other priorities emerge. In her discussion of theater on television, for example, Melzer cites director Richard Kalisz, who argues that television should adopt a very different approach to theater from the kind recommended by McAuley:

One cannot stress enough to the TV producer that, contrary to the cinema, theater distrusts realism. Its strength, beauty, and justification lie precisely in its theatricality. If you want to make a movie out of it or a TV production, you...