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WHOSE SHOW IS IT, ANYWAY?
20.01.2012 / Dea Birkett / 0 Comments
Dea Birkett is confused by the increasing reliance on audiences to make the play
"NNow we need to introduce someone. So you need to clap". This cold direction was given to rows of onlookers, includ- ing me, at Live at the Gilded Balloon, a variety and chat show at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe. The daily event was held in front of a live audience, then made into a podcast which over one million people listened to. We were given this instruction for the purpose of the recording; a new act was being introduced on line. We
didn't even know who it was. The arrival of new technologies in the theatre has
transformed the relationship between the audience and the performance. Being passively entertained is passé. Increasingly we aren't watching the performance but part of it, to be directed as much as the actors. The stage no longer sits in front of us, but becomes the whole world around.
"Normally you go to a theatre and just sit there and watch it, then leave" says Mimi Poskitt, artistic director of theatre company Look Left Look Right which uses new technologies in its shows."These new performances ask you to get involved. The onus is on the audience to help make the story. The actors just guide it."
But rather than serving the story, does technology sim- ply swamp it? Guardian theatre critic Lyn Gardner has disparaged the use of too much high tech on the stage. "Often it seems to be a case of boys just getting over-excit- ed about their new toys. The technology has become the show, rather than being in service of the show. Back in the 80s I remember once joking with a colleague that the growth of computer technologies would eventually led to a situation where actors become redundant and we would simply go to the theatre to watch the set."
It's wrong to presume that introducing and encourag- ing more intimacy and interactivity between audience
and artist leads to less artifice. Technologies can be used to create fictions as well as reveal truths. Those watching, or rather participating in You Wouldn't Know Him, He Lives in Texas, Poskitt's latest production, presumed the breaks in the Skype transmissions in the play were caused by the technology faltering. In fact, they had been plotted in. And Poskitt says improvisation is actually more difficult when new technologies are involved. "To improvise well, you need to be in the same space as each other and see the chemistry" she says.
Poskitt admits there were often unintended results. For example, they hadn't factored in the difference in time zones that gives a very different feel to a performance. When they were playing to an evening Edinburgh audi- ence, it was 11am in Austin. You Wouldn't Know Him, He Lives in Texas also experienced the problem of being mono conversational threads. In a regular play, the actors can interrupt and talk over each other. But Skype doesn't allow you to do that. It just jams. The actors had to give each other visual signals that they were about to speak, without letting the audience see, so they didn't continu- ally cut each other off.
But does technology really involve audiences more deeply - or does it distance them? National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) recently evaluated NT Live - an ongoing series of National Theatre productions broadcast live to cinemas through- out the country. In June 2009 NT Live drew a staggering 50,000 viewers to the live cinema broadcast of Raciné's Phèdre starring Helen Mirren. The researchers said, "One thing we found with the National Theatre project was that cinema audiences were seeing value that even the live theatre audiences weren't - they were getting things out of it that they wouldn't have got if they'd been at the the- atre itself. The audience's proximity to the screen in the cinema, for example, resulted in cinema-goers feeling like they had a more intense and personal relationship with the cast than many of the audience in the theatre. We called this result Beyond Live."
So is techno theatre just a trend? Or has the way we watch a play been transformed forever? "Lots of people have asked that" says Poskitt. "I don't think it's just a fashion. It's not the only way to make theatre; not all per- formances should go this way. But theatre reflects the world we live in. Technology is now embedded in that world."
www.deabirkett.com
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