The Live and the Life-Like: Theatre, Performance, Animation By Hans R. Vermy B.A., Cornell University, 2003 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre and Performance Studies in the department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University Providence, RI May 2014 © Copyright 2014 by Hans R. Vermy This dissertation by Hans Vermy is accepted in its present form by the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date______________ ______________________________ Spencer Golub, Adviser Recommended to the Graduate Council Date______________ ______________________________ Rebecca Schneider, Reader Date______________ ______________________________ Todd Winkler, Reader Date______________ ______________________________ Gertrud Koch, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date______________ __________________________________ Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Hans R. Vermy was born in Santa Cruz, California in 1981. He spent his childhood near the Pacific Ocean, amidst the redwoods, and in the Rocky Mountains. He completed High School in Watsonville, California at Monte Vista Christian Academy. He first attended the University of California, Riverside, where he focused on the practice side of theater and performance. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater Arts from Cornell University in 2003. From 2003 to 2004, Hans worked at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island under the direction of production director Ruth E. Sternberg. Hans returned to California where he worked as a free lance film editor and outdoor adventure film production director for Moving Over Stone Llc., working on location in Yosemite Valley and in and around Las Vegas, NV. In 2007, Hans was honored with the Susan Petit Memorial Award in Film Editing from the Santa Fe Film Festival for his work on Justin Lerner's Tbe Replacement Child. While enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University he has participated actively in both the scholarly and artistic activities offered by the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium and the greater Providence community. His article “The Lightest Distinction” was published in Invisible Culture, an electronic journal of visual culture, and his article “Diectic Feet: Performance as the Index of Animation” was published in the Italian Mimesis Journal in a monograph issue on 21st century acting practice, both in Spring 2014. He has presented conference papers at the annual meetings of Performance Studies International, and was an instigator and coordinator for a conference at Brown University entitled: Performing Under Pressure: Life, Labor, and Art in the Academy, wherein he also chaired a long-table presentation and discussion on artist/scholar labor markets. Hans continues to be active as a teacher, filmmaker, and performing artist. While in graduate school, he taught courses in Theatre History, Persuasive Communication, Media and Performance. As a practicing artist within theatre, Hans has worked as a dramaturg on several new plays, designed video and projections for interactive and live spaces, and devised a number of works that explore the intersections of technology and the body. He has written several plays and been honored with a playwright award from the Santa Cruz Actor's Theater. iv Acknowledgments I was so very fortunate to begin, grow, and share this project with the incredibly supportive people within the program of Theatre and Performance Studies as well as the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Brown University as a whole. Although acknowledging the support for this project summons a past tense, what I have gained is a committed presence of allies, inspirations, and friends. Spencer Golub is a steadfast and fiercely attentive advisor, with an immense capacity to turn any idea over and discover something new, even after coming full circle. As ever, Rebecca Schneider remains a performance inspiration and a lifelong mentor whose sly wit and pointed editorial eye turns scholarship into an engaging, playful, rigorous, and worthwhile life-long endeavor. Patricia Ybarra is a teaching marvel and her commitment to not only the work, but the life of a scholar is awe inspiring. Outside committee members, Todd Winkler and Gertrud Koch, proved exceptional teachers and readers, thank you for your influence on my work and your tremendous support for my project. A tear-jerking number of departmental friends made this project possible including but not limited to: Nick Ridout, Emily Bruce, Elizabeth Moloney, B, John Emigh, Erik Ehn, Nancy Safian, and Barbara Tannenbaum. To the undergraduates who passed by in the halls and to those I had the privilege of teaching, thank you for thoughtful attention and energetic inspiration. Many graduate students sculpted this piece, and to those that not only helped chip away but also sweep up the mess, I am humbled by your grace: Peter Bussigel, Michelle Carriger, Michelle Castañeda, Lindsay Goss, Ioana Jucan, Elise Morrison, Matt Noble-Olsen, Coleman Nye, Eleanor Skimin, Dan Rupel, Andrew Starner, Tim Syme. v The department of Modern Culture and Media brought the theory, spectatorship, and practice of animation to life, and I would like to thank Elaine Freedgood, Mary Ann Doane, Jeremy Powell, Maggie Hennefeld, Michael Litwack, Mauro Resmini, Wendy Chun, Gertrud Koch, and Michelle Cho. Tyler Dobrowsky, Mark Turek, Ruth E. Sternberg, Mallery Avidon, Beth Milles, Justin Lerner and many more friends throughout theatre, performance, and film lent their practical insight and steered me toward works and artists that reflected my project. A constant voice of encouragement and challenge within MCM and without, Hunter Hargraves you are a fierce partner. Hunter, Rancho Enbody, my family, and Gary Roberts provided a yearly sanctuary wherein I not only relaxed but found renewed inspiration and a productive zone from which to write; thank you for your love. Much of the support for this project arrived as silent, coy, and hidden gestures of care and love; the immensity of which I am only now beginning to realize. For all those unacknowledged: thank you for your curiosity, questions, nudges and winks. vi Table of Contents Media Introductions 1 movement 1 Diectic Feet: performance as the index of animation 37 light 2 The Lightest Distinction 73 animality 3 Part Pest: the un/heimlich animal 114 world 4 Promising Inter-; or, How to Stage Animation 169 Bibliography 203 vii Media Introductions She steps onstage and rides the whelming tide of applause to a sand box. It is a light box and a sand box, both at once, screen and the infinitesimal matter of sand. The applause fades as she assumes an animator's stance above the luminous screen with its harmonious opposition of sand, its contrasting inanimate matter. Already worn by eons of crashing tides, the sand awaits another animate force. Rather than shaping and shaving away at the individual particles, she re-figures the totality and singularity of grains into stars twinkling in a night sky. She taps the luminous sand box with her fingertips, following the tempo of the music that accompanies her, and constellations burst into view. The image she animates in the sand is projected above and behind her. She stands near and reaches out over the box, gravity dictating a vertical animation process. From the top down there is: the camera that feeds to the projector, the animator, then the inanimate material she seeks to animate, then the luminous screen, and finally a light source, intermingled with a projector, screen, and audience(s), encompassing a theatre experience. In this scenario, the animator in action is an actor as much as a playwright, a director, a stage manager, and so on. Below the twinkling stars her fingers trace an orthodox Christian church on the rise of a horizon. One thick hand swipe makes a road that leads from the foreground to the religious house on the hill. The image moves and comes alive with her hands, visible as animate action. She reaches across the screen and her head and shoulders, hair and back, come into view of the projection. Her body and feet enter the process as she is pulled from the center of her stance to the far edge of the screen. Again, animating the stars, now twinkling above a house devoted to a creator and animator. The sand as stars, the stars as sand, scale becomes time in twinkling grains above a house of God, traced in a live theatre, 1 in concert with projection; a performing body breathing life into the stuff of the oceans and earth. This is sand animation. Live sand animation. Sand animation can also refer to cinematic animations that use a light box and sand as a medium, but by employing a more traditional frame by frame image capture, erasing the body of the animator in the apparatus of animation, displaying a cartoon where the sand moves seemingly of and by itself. The live and the life-like merely present one way of understanding the divisions between theatre and cinematic animations, both disciplinary and from the seat of the spectator. Sand animation reveals that animation can be live and alive as much as it can only be life-like. The theatre can equally present life-likeness without the live, such as the case with automata, the phantasmagoria, and holographic projections. Within the theatre, the live sand animator's stance echoes the more traditional mechanical animation stand that features a light source on one end, a camera on the other, and stacks of illustrated cells, moved frame by frame by an invisible crew, in-between. From light to camera, this project seeks to expose and explore the matter and maters of the animator in the performance middle between light and camera or imaging apparatus, whether in obvious terms, as with the case with sand animation, or through hybrid, masked engagements.