A Pandemic Prototype

Home Interior, 1996, Afternoon: The family Macintosh desktop completes its boot, I pop in a CD-ROM, and a strange new computer game called Mystappears on the screen. My invisible character wanders a strange island as I click my way through landscapes, videos, and puzzles. Before long, however, I grow frustrated with the game's arcane ambiguities and walk over to our family television to catch a few music videos on MTV.

Flash forward twenty-five years, and I find myself in what is called "the clearing," the opening space of the Prototype festival's Modulation. As Carmina Escobar's ambient, wavering "Astral Gold" reverberates through my headphones, I scroll over three doors—labeled identity, fear, and isolation—each of which will lead to a collection of three-to-five filmed performances, roughly five minutes apiece, and connected by the clearing's theme of breath. The landscape is both natural and unnatural, characterized by sharply sculpted lines, illuminated portals, and the absence of humanity. It feels as though I've stumbled upon digital ruins, the legacy of theatre's end days. But the festival promises exactly the opposite; this is a prototype, an exploration of what might be, just as my adolescent bouncing between the interactive island of Mystand the packaged performances of MTV was—for those who can read from the future—a premonition of the intermedial explosion of the past twenty-five years.

Modulationwas developed for the ninth iteration of the Prototype festival, organized by Beth Morrison Projects and the HERE Arts Center. Forced to adapt to changing circumstances, the festival put aside its traditional multi-year development period and commissioned pieces from thirteen artists, asking them to respond to 2020 and the pandemic. Given the constraints upon in-person performance, Modulationcreates a virtual self-guided tour of twelve new compositions and accompanying videos, accessed in whatever order—and however many times—the digital audience member selects.

On a formal level, the experience still feels familiar, more—as promised—a modulation than a transformation. I click through the twelve videos in an intuitive order: foreground to background, left to right, following a path that (intentionally or not) has been curated in advance. Even if the path is somewhat linear, however, the medium offers possibilities often withheld from a theatre critic. Not only can I select the order of the performance, but I can also pause, rewind, and replay, letting me rethink connections between the array of styles, instrumentations, and themes.

My journey began in the identityroom with the liveliest segment in the performance being Jojo Abot's "The Divine I Am," an up-tempo celebration of the divine feminine womb in a colorful collage of dancing, drawing, and digging. The voyage concludes in the isolationroom, with Minna Choi softly exhaling peace in Daniel Bernard Roumain's equally colorful but mournful "I Have Nothing to Do but Love," a piece inspired by his mother's experience of dementia. From Abot's womb to Roumain's final peace, it feels like I've taken a pilgrimage from birth to death.

How would my experience have changed if I had ended with Jimmy López Bellido's "Where Once We Sang"? In this aria, Mark Campbell's lyrics promise "we will sing again" over a minor key piano melody, in a video that juxtaposes the masked faces of the present with the hope of a world to come. Or, rather than concluding with the insistent promise of Bellido's piece, what if I had circled back to fearto play Molly Joyce's haunting "Out of a Thought"? The composition, played on an electrified toy organ with lyrics by Marco Grosse, runs over images of a mannequin, Joyce's arm, and an empty cardboard box flickering under red hues in an otherwise empty attic. Joyce's voice eerily intones, "It's too late to take a deep breath," even if "the search for something bigger" goes on. Even a slight modulation in a sequence tells a...