The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater by Shannon Jackson and Marianne Weems (review)

In 1994, New York City authorities shut down The Builders Association’s first production, Master Builder, for its unauthorized use of an abandoned warehouse in Chelsea. Given three days to unload, the company presented two surreptitious, well-received performances of its technology-driven reimagining of Ibsen’s classic play for nearly four hundred audience members. In the decades since, and despite these perilous beginnings, The Builders Association has cemented its place in the international avant-garde by staging its meticulously crafted brand of new media theatre in cities all over the world.

In their new book, The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater, performance scholar Shannon Jackson and Builders co-founder and director Marianne Weems examine in colorful detail the historical, technological, and theoretical evolution of a company whose productions merge the conventional ingredients of theatre with complex systems of video monitors and cameras, CGI digital animation, real-time editing, mobile communication devices, and other media technologies. Through a detailed excavation of archival materials, interviews, written accounts, correspondence, and first-hand testimonies, Jackson and Weems uncover the extraordinary intellectual, physical, and technological labor that inspires and supports the wizardry of Builders Association productions. By elevating technology to a position of significance that is conventionally reserved for words and bodies on stage, Jackson and Weems point out how The Builders Association not only insists on technology as a vital tool for their brand of storytelling, but also reinforces it as one of the most powerful elements shaping our experiences today. Technology opens up rich theoretical and interpretive possibilities in their productions, expanding time, place, and space in ways rarely seen before in the theatre. But technology also mimics and comments on the cognitive and bodily experience of living in the contemporary world shaped by technology, globalization, virtual communication, and neoliberalism.

In much of the book, Jackson and Weems analyze the themes and issues confronted both in the theatre’s creative process and in the productions themselves, including interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the precarity of globalized labor, cultural crossing, and hybridity, and the effects of technology on perception. They also explore the relationships between mediated and live experience and virtual and material space, modernist and popular performance, as well as old and new media that characterize The Builders Association’s aesthetic. With a promise to “break down certain frames in order to expand the discourse around this type of performance,” the authors successfully mobilize an array of theoretical discourses in areas such as architecture, film, performance, spectatorship, politics, media, and law to enhance the reader’s understanding of The Builders Association’s practices. Notably, many of the theoretical discourses utilized in the book have served as the intellectual underpinnings for Weems and her collaborators’ explorations.

Each of the eight chapters is devoted to a single Builders Association production, beginning with Master Builder and ending with House/Divided. Each chapter is then separated into discrete sections, including “R&D (Research and Development),” “Storyboard,” and “Rehearsal/Assembly,” so that the structure of the book actually models the creative process for each production. For example, in chapters devoted to two of their earliest shows, Master Builder and Faust, the “Storyboard” section precedes “R&D” in order to reflect The Builders Association’s initial concern of deconstructing the source text, while their unique technological design practices used to stage the “written” material followed. But as technology became more fully integrated into both the form and content of their performances, as was the case in productions like Continuous City and Super Vision, the “R&D” of technological conceptualization provided a more urgent point of departure. Jackson and Weems continuously emphasize collaboration as a driving force for the company, as each artist and technician contributes their unique disciplinary perspective at every stage.

A profusion of high-resolution images of productions, research materials, letters, computer simulations, and other artifacts and ephemera help to illuminate descriptive passages while also speaking on their own, evoking The...