Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall

John Jesurun has been working in New York for more than two decades as a playwright, director, and media artist, in Deep Sleep, Snow, and Slight Return creating theatre productions that incorporate video and film in live performance, and, in Faust and Philoctetes, revisioning classics. At the same time he has written and staged more than sixty episodes of his long-running Chang in a Void Moon, which he calls a “living film serial.” A pioneer in the use of media in theatrical performance, Jesurun has explored theatrical styles that extend from storytelling to drama to music theatre and computer-based theatre through his ongoing challenge to the “reality” of performance space.

His recent production of Firefall, produced in February 2009 at Dance Theater Workshop in New York, is a ground-breaking example of a work that lends itself to what I call “mediaturgy.” This term refers to a particular focus on methods of composition in media works that I hope will suggest new critical modes of comprehending and writing about them. In the present context, I have moved away from the familiar use of “dramaturgy” because of its historical ties to drama, and now prefer “mediaturgy,” which situates media as the center of study, though I am acutely aware of the tension between these two terms. I first proposed the concept of mediaturgy in a 2006 interview with Marianne Weems, the artistic director of The Builders Association, in reference to her use of text and image, live and virtual performers, in Super Vision, a work that embeds media in the performance rather than simply using it as illustration or decoration.¹

Likewise, Firefall is a play that is completely activated through the live use of the Internet for the entire length of the performance. It is a rare example of a playwright’s creating computer-generated work using a dramatic text as a starting point rather than the collage or fragmented collection of scenes that many other artists working with media frequently rely on in theatre. In its idiosyncratic poetics, Jesurun’s writing points to a new contemporary theatre language—media-saturated—that reflects the way ordinary people now think and speak in a form of disassociated circuitry. Firefall is a depiction of that very world, one where characters draw from a vast body of information—literature, science, geography, painting, religion, film, and business intermingled with their own attempts to design a narrative—that reaches the point of absurdity (or pathos) in its inability to make any sense for them. Where are they? Who are they?

Here is the setup of Firefall. There are eight characters, one of whom appears only on video. Some of them have names, others are distinguished merely by letters, such as “K” or “F.” They have certain instructions for their behavior, which can be to spread chaos or to change the perceived reality of what is happening in the performance. The performers sit at several tables in the performance space in front of individual laptops equipped with an Internet connection. Apple computers are used, with the exception of a Dell which was altered to work with the others.

There are two video projectors and one live camera. Behind and above the performers is a big wall screen approximately thirty feet long and fifteen feet high, which from the start displays a “body” of sites larger than the human body in terms of scale. Each projection is split into four separate images by means of a “quad splitter.” Thus, four separate and different images from any of the four different performers’ laptops are projected at the same time. The eight images are from pre-recorded and live camera sources. It is a completely automatic process in which computer, live camera, and pre-recorded images interact and overlap.

A Website was set up during the run of the performance and rehearsals as an archive consisting of the play text, rehearsal notes, documents, images, e-mail, video and music clips, and miscellaneous files. Each character has his or her own Website to which new material can be added. Any of the...