Engaging Media in Performance

David Owen

BOOKS REVIEWED: Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, David Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015; Andy Lavender, Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

In recent times, digital performance has proliferated in both practice and theory, yet few studies have provided methodologies for analyzing this ever-expanding field. While Performance and Media encourages further discussion and exposure of digital performance through a taxonomic approach, Performance in the Twenty-First Century advances the post-dramatic theatre initiated by Hans-Thies Lehmann in the 1990s through the concept of intermediality. These studies deploy a range of case studies without significant overlap, the former using mainly North American examples while the latter is European in perspective. Read together, they provide a rich and varied analysis of the field.

Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field strives to provide a rapidly evolving field with analytical tools to create malleable models rather than rigid codes of classification in digital performance. With a Foucauldian awareness that language is power and that classifications insinuate hierarchies, privilege, and biases, they remind us that all labels and categories are not fixed. The first three chapters of the book provide a valuable overview of the field. “Texts and Contexts” surveys a wide range of materials from the earliest forms of digital performance up to today. Beginning with the early animated film, Gertie The Dinosaur, the chapter then moves to consider the work of Piscator, Black Mountain College, Josef Svoboda, The Wooster Group, The Builders Association, Robert Lepage, Eduardo Kac, and the Critical Arts Ensemble. Key terms are introduced and explained, including: multimedia performance, mixed media, cyborg theatre, intermediality, digital performance, and mediated theatre. Glosses are also offered on major critical studies, including notable works by Philip Auslander, Chris Salter, Rose- mary Klich and Edward Scheer. “Mapping the Field” offers examples of existing

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_r_00401 by guest on 27 September 2021 proto-taxonomies, such as Steve Dixon’s “body, space, time, interactivity” model or Gabriella Giannachi’s “Space–Time–Interaction–Performance Roles” model, earlier attempts to organize and codify digital performance that support the need for the project of the book. Finally, “Theoretical Approaches” provides an extensive list of crucial theoretical works in conversation with digital performance.

The book offers three new taxonomies as potential models. The first is Sarah Bay- Cheng’s “Taxonomy of Distortion: Along the Media Performance Continuum,” which uses three conceptual categories: space, time, and bodies. Her taxonomy is not so much a model as a method in that she creates three axes on which digital performance may be placed: material to mediated space; linear to mediated time; and physical to mediated bodies. Bay-Cheng convincingly demonstrates how three performances—Americano Kamikaze (2009), Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope (2007), and Kris Verdonck’s Dancer #1 (a robot installation)—can be understood fin terms of these three spectrums.

The second taxonomy, “Cyborg Returns: Always-Already Subject Technologies,” is written by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. This taxonomy is an embellishment of the cyborg matrix from her book Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (2011). Parker-Starbuck focuses on the categories of abject, object, and subject, arguing that these categories “can interrelate, be put in opposition to each other, or at times signify hierarchical positionings, and they have gained theoretical purchase through philosophical unpackings around bodies, feminism, psychoanalysis, disability studies, and phenomenology.” She offers a fresh look at Kristeva’s work that has the potential to expand and enlighten our understanding of her foundational work regarding the abject.

The final taxonomy, given is by David Z. Saltz, elaborates an exhaustive catalogue of all aspects of digital performance culminating in a full-page chart featuring twelve different modes such as Virtual Scenery, Instrumental Media, Synesthesia, Diegetic Media, Virtual Puppet, Affective, and so on.

Performance and Media concludes with an application of these three taxonomies being applied to The Builders Association’s production of Continuous City. The taxonomy of distortion describes Continuous City as having “high space and body distortion, but relative low temporal distortion.” The writers conclude that “When we put multiple taxonomies into play, we allow their different, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives to intersect with, inform, elucidate, and complicate one another.” But while applying all three taxonomies to the same production is a logical strategy, the example does not seem to effectively elucidate the taxonomies any further. Compared to the detailed and careful explanations given in the previous chapters, this final chapter seems brief and more concerned

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Andy Lavender’s Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement is a compelling and detailed book, rich with illustrative examples that elucidate complex theoretical frameworks. The book continues the groundwork established by Lehmann’s Post-Dramatic Theatre and Elinor Fuchs’s The Death of Character, while incorporating intermedial and new media theory. Lavender convincingly argues that theatre in a media-saturated world is quickly becoming a site of audience engagement rather than one of audience reception. He offers extensive descrip- tions of European performances to illuminate his study, such as the ground- breaking work at the 1st Fast Forward Festival, in Athens; Dries Verhoeven’s No Man’s Land; and dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep. But he also includes more well-known examples such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and Rimini Protokol’s Situation Rooms. Lavender’s explanation of these pieces is impressive and fresh, and he seems equally comfortable writing about performances happening in real space as he is with those happening in virtual spaces, organized through game structures or following more traditional notions of narrative.

This book is an attempt to close the gap between performance and theatre studies and the equally rigorous work in new media and game studies. Lavender writes, “The incursion of games and gaming, enabled by computers, provides . . . intensely affective play that will be familiar to many (and the parents of many). In their most pervasive form, games offer a ‘blur of the real and the fictive,’ and provide encounters that may be social as well as virtual.” Further on, Lavender elaborates on engagement, noting how, as immersants within a Punchdrunk show, gamers in a Blast Theory piece, or interactants at a residency by Marina Abramovíc;, we experience the event differently from traditional live theatre in that we make a greater range of choices, find ourselves performing a larger array of actions, and have our senses pressed in a wider variety of ways. The engaged participant experiences (or embodies) the performance and her relation to it rather than simply receiving it. Thus the experience is not dependent on being real or virtual, but on what affect it creates in the participant/audience.

Lavender argues that experience is a key feature of contemporary performance culture. He takes us on a conceptual journey from the familiar mise-en-scène (arrangement of all the scenic elements) through mise-en-événement (arrangement of the event and happenings) and culminates in mise-en-sensibilité (arrangement of the experience). He writes, “The event is not just watched or received, but encountered. And the encounter is one of bodily engagement. . . . This is the case

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Lavender takes this through-line of performance events as encounters into the third part of the book on the non-actor. Examples of people performing as themselves on YouTube and performances by robots are used to demonstrate the changing expectations placed on actors today and the altered intentions of their performances. The result is a major shift in the configuration of the actor- spectator relationship; the work of the twenty-first actor is to be “a technician of expression,” becoming subject to anyone else’s emotional engagement. He articu- lates a complete overhaul of the traditional notion of suspension of disbelief as engagement creates a continual negotiation between performance and reception. Moving from acting to spectating, Lavender discusses the feedback loop afforded us through the proliferation of media, highlighting our awareness of our partici- pation and role in these experiences as an everyday reality. One of Lavender’s strongest discoveries is the view that the dual experience of being both subject and object frees the spectator from the traditional consumptive relationship to performance. He states, “Perhaps in the face of these objects and events we are released into a sensus communis that is the antidote to consumerism even while it depends on consumption.” Performance that engages the participant artistically can also open possible avenues of engagement for the participant in the larger sense of politics, culture, and self-discovery.

Performance and Media and Theatres of Engagement are excellent companion pieces, considering the onslaught of the digital impacting our most basic the- atrical instincts. Lavender’s book is comprehensive in its aim to continue the post-dramatic thrust in contemporary performance scholarship while also incorporating the reality of ubiquitous digital media on both audiences and artists alike. His work attempts to map the paradigm shift from consuming a performance to encountering and engaging with it, and is a tremendous step forward in the field of performance studies. Likewise,Performance and Media strengthens the field of digital performance studies through its succinct survey of previous scholarship and its attempt to bolster the field through viable taxonomies and useful clarification of broad terms and concepts.

DAVID OWEN holds a PhD in performance and theatre studies from York University and is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. He is an instructor at the University of Alberta and the author of Player and Avatar: The Affective Potential of Videogames.

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