Unseen

Abstract

A few years ago I attended a talk by an esteemed senior colleague at a major international conference. Speaking to the assembled audience, the professor presented a compelling talk on Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's Inferno, which had played at the Festival d'Avignon in 2008. I had attended the company's Purgatorio and Paradiso in Avignon but had missed Inferno and was looking forward to the talk. Despite not having seen Inferno, I knew quite a bit about it from friends who had been there. As I listened to the talk, I was struck by discrepancies in their descriptions and those of the presenting scholar. Of course, such is the joy of live performance, where different people have diverse experiences even at the very same show and sitting side by side. This may be particularly true when a performance occurs on the scale of Castellucci's opening spectacle in the Dante-inspired trilogy, which included a nearly naked man climbing the interior walls of the Palais des Papes, a Warhol-photographed car crash, children in a transparent illuminated box, and live dogs attacking Castellucci himself. But the revelation came at the end of the talk, when I approached my colleague to get more details from the performance I had missed. As I pressed for further information, he confessed that he had not actually seen the production in person.I was shocked, I tell you, shocked. Who is this person to think that a critic can talk about a performance viewed only in documentation? He had not even seen the show. Or had he?Amid the various arguments on liveness, the uniqueness of copresence, documentation, and performance, my colleague raised an important (though perhaps inadvertent) question about what it means to "see" work in the context of telematic performance and digital media. Telematics in this context has a somewhat fluid definition, referring broadly to information distributed through digital media, usually in the context of simultaneous or so-called real-time transmissions over digital networks and frequently including some kind of feedback or interactive technology.

From Author to Data Processor in Postdramatic Theatre: Crash Testing the Classics?

“…60 Sarah Bay-Cheng raises the question in her article "UNSEEN Performance Criticism and Digital Recordings," in which she convincingly argues that not only the experience of the performance's document (e.g., a video recording) is incomplete, but also "the experience of copresence is not itself a complete version" of a performance. 61 What Bay-Cheng proposes, then, is not to take video recordings of performances at face value, but "to look with a perspective learned from reality television, where the viewer questions both the accuracy of the media representation and the reality on which the documentation is based, while simultaneously attending to the affective relations developed by the screen versions." 62 In that respect, I am lucky that A Piece of Work was recorded with a fixed camera, mainly from a central point of view, showing about five rows of audience members sitting below the camera.…”

“…61 What Bay-Cheng proposes, then, is not to take video recordings of performances at face value, but "to look with a perspective learned from reality television, where the viewer questions both the accuracy of the media representation and the reality on which the documentation is based, while simultaneously attending to the affective relations developed by the screen versions." 62 In that respect, I am lucky that A Piece of Work was recorded with a fixed camera, mainly from a central point of view, showing about five rows of audience members sitting below the camera. When other camera angles are adopted (e.g., from aside, when the "ghost" is speaking), it is still able to locate the place of the camera, even in the case of the few close ups on the human performer (on the evening of the recording this was Scott Shepherd, not Joan MacIntosh).…”

“…However, I am well aware that the presence-effect even of non-human agents like the algorithm-driven lighting, sound-effects and projected text cannot be denied. 64 I therefore also count on my twelve years of experience as a dramaturge, observing the differences between rehearsals, try-outs, premieres and 'days after' as well as between performances and their recording('s camera angles and close-ups), photographs, reviews and audience accounts. All these factors help me in trying to imagine what the "live" experience of the performance in the theatre, being copresent with the audience, of performing algorithms in combination with one human actor, could have been like, without claiming that I know what they were like as if I had been there.…”