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. This project also explores the mechanics and craft of animation as a kind of theatre; presenting theatre as both an extreme limit of media as well as a performance middle in order to better expose both performance and the quality of encounters between and against. In addition to an interdisciplinary approach, this project aims to inspire cinematic animator's in their attention to performance while simultaneously reminding theatre makers to attend to the animate natures of theatrical objects and technologies.

2 By exploring the role of the laboring body within cartoons and theatre I hope to expose greater ways in which our performances with technology seek to either expose or erase the human performer. I am not, however, interested in blindly assigning a value to either one, but, rather, look to performance in order to understand contemporary trends that bring the body and the screen together into social and aesthetic performances that co- constitute each other. Like the animator, I too take a stance, but the value and social issues of performance and the technology of animation fall upon different divisions than the live and the life-like. Merely revealing the body of the animator does not necessarily make for a more politically and socially efficacious piece of art that somehow lays greater claim to positive social values; it can, after all, work like the imposing signature of Disney that mark the beginning of films bearing that name. Although such efficacious art is not necessarily my goal, I do favor works that seek to expose, upend, or otherwise play with our immersion with contemporary technologies.

Our performances with technology, however, are not limited to pieces of art. I was not in the audience for the live sand animation. I watched the sand animation on my feet, walking, staring down at my own light box, moving my fingers across the surface of my phone to animate its interface in order to summon up a youtube video—with nearly twenty-five million hits—of Kseniya Simonova performing live sand animation on Ukrainian

Television's version of You Got Talent. Because of the digital and its corresponding network of telecommunications, daily, ritual, and aesthetic human performances now coincide regularly with animation. Swiping my finger over the phones luminous screen, Simonova disappears and I return to a map I had been using to find my way around Orange County.

Anaheim. Amid clean strip malls that mark the possibility of being almost anywhere in the

3 U.S., amid the clean, orderly, and cheerful back drop of suburban sprawl, I pilgrimage to the site responsible for such neotonic spread. I hold myself, a flashing blue dot, as the map and phone and my position become a time coded global position: Disneyland. Before the gates, a thief and beggar turned Prince, Aladdin, greets a few fans before retreating beyond the toonishly, lavishly curated walls of Disney's land. I, still a blue, flashing dot, I am animated to my specific destination: Main Street Cinema, where Steamboat Willie is about to be projected. Steamboat Willie is the famously first sound synched animation by Walt Disney.

The sound was recorded, post-synched, thus the animation was the script for the sound- scape. Sound and music are vital movements within the history and practice of animation.

This project, however, is interested in Mickey's tapping foot, as his animated body conjoins with the sounds and gestures that accompany his whistle and match my own tapping as I sit and let the cartoon steer.

I am interested in the human body in concert with moving figures and animate worlds, oftentimes surrounded by the sounds of landscape. In “Of Mice and Ducks,”

Miriam Hansen reminds us that writings on the importance of sound to the magic of Disney go back at least as far as Adorno. On Mickey Mouse's relationship to Americanism and jazz, and in response to the utopic embrace of Mickey by Walter Benjamin, Adorno writes of the individual power of the commodity character, “[I]t is key to the success of Mickey Mouse that he/she/it alone translates all the breaks into precise visual equivalents.”1 As Hansen's important essay makes clear, Adorno's use of the word “jazz” aligns Mickey with the

American musical invention, a common coupling in contemporary German thought.

According to Adorno, the power of animate figures and worlds stem from the synchronization of their image with sound, granting a kind of autonomy or agency to

4 Mickey. I argue that in addition to sound, performance—of the figure and its modeling and rendering—also constitute the success of Mickey.

Just as the animation of Steamboat Willie was the script for the sound-scape, performances of Walt Disney were the storyboard for animation. As Sergei Eisenstein points out in his On Disney, part of Mickey's power is achieved via performance that translates authorship from Disney to his mouse: “A dozen or so artists stand around him [Disney] in a circle, quickly capturing the hilarious expressions of their posing and performing boss. And the extremely lively and lifelike preparations for the cartoon are ready –infectious through the whole hyperbolization of the drawing only because taken from a living person.”2 Similar to the exaggerated, hyperbolization of Victor Frankenstein's scream, “It's alive!,”

Eisenstein's account of Disney as the author of Mickey is emphasized through his performance: “Disney himself acts out the 'part' or 'role' of Mickey for this or that film.”3

Rather than echo the pursuits of sound, I am interested in the ways the performing body and performing technology and the inextricable relation between the two are explored and constructed within the aesthetic realms of theatre and animation, and, oftentimes, at the sites and cites where they meet and divide, such as the live and the life-like. That is to say, although sound plays a crucial element within both fields, I leave it generally unexplored in favor of the sounds that emanate and inform the embodied aspects of theatre and animation.

Combining the disciplinary approaches of theatrical historiography with media archeology, my project questions the material distinctions between media and theatre and seeks out alternate histories within abandoned and ephemeral technologies. With the digital revolution, screens have become a contested site of sensory experience, blurring the gap between embodiment and the screen, the live and the life-like, theatre and animation. I

5 argue that inserting a theatre historiography alongside media studies will help expose entanglements arising between the laboring body and animations onscreen while offering potential new sites from which to articulate or dismantle the distinctions between theatre and media. I offer a combined theatre historiography and media archeology as an invitation to cultural studies to explore affect along lines of performance and the animation of objects and images. Similarly to archaeological critique and historiographical pursuits, affect theory also concerns itself with the forgotten and dismissed, emphasizing the body within a communicative world dominated by written and verbal language. But affect theory is also concerned with the mobility of affect, its contagion, transmission, spread and jumpiness; how it is shared and how such affective sharing might offer alternative routes to the dominant communicative generalities of society. Within this project, the transitory nature of affect is explored in the touch between animation and actor, thing and performer, matter and pulse.

I trace contemporary plays as they incorporate and question shifts in media, examining theatrical stagings of the art and labor of animation as well as cinematic animations that seek to highlight their theatrical and performance work. My objects of inquiry span the diverse realms of theatre, animation, and performance, yet maintain firm footing in all three fields. Objects of analysis circulate from Andy Serkis' motion capture performance in Lord of the Rings to contemporary phantasmagoria techniques employed in service of telecommunication's holographic technology; from Anne Washburn's post-electric play, Mr. Burns to Julie Taymor's staging of the animate Spider-man; from Ryan Larkin's short animation Walking to Chris Landreth's uncanny digital re-creation of an interview with

Larkin; from the feature animation Coraline to self-titled “famous new media artist” Jeremy

6 Bailey's interactive digital interfaces. Why focus on animation and not the screen of the digital age? I argue that animation has long been situated as a theatrical counter-media to photographically based cinema. Emerging digital animation technologies such as motion capture and interactive haptic interfaces (animated touch screens) further emphasize the embodied performance of the digital. All of this resonates within theatre as light design gains more tools and is joined by projection design. Thus my project merges theatre studies with film and media studies in order to interrogate the shared site of performance across media, the theatre.

Fields: animation, theatre, performance (and the digital)

In order to reveal the performing body of the animator, the performing body impressed by animation, and a hybrid between, I look to two disciplinary extremes, theatre and animation, and one paradigmatic field that operates in-between, as both a field and a condition of knowledge that operates across technological, organizational, and cultural categories: performance. The digital is another field that encompasses this project, as recent advances in digital technology have motivated an increase in interactions with animation.

Rather than have the digital act as some kind of teleological media culmination, a deterministic end that echoes through media history, I instead understand it as a consuming and assuming technology, generating virtual versions of all media while offering infinite manipulability and connectivity to a potentially infinite collective. This project operates within and upon the fields of animation, theatre, performance, and the digital. In addition to fields, this introduction outlines my methodology of a combined theatre historiography and media archeology as it explores and utilizes theories across various s/cites of contact that

7 span disciplines, discourses, art and consumer objects.

Animation

Animation can be understood to go back historically as far as the play of shadows on cave walls. As Thomas Lamarre writes of the term in The Anime Machine, “One might well argue that animation predates cinema, and that animation—in the sense of making images move—has always been the primary concern of cinema. Nonetheless cinema has dominated histories and theories of the moving image, generally subsuming animation while defining it as the lesser form. Only in the late 1980s and 1990s did animation start to emerge from the shadow of cinema.”4 This is how I position the field of animation: a label and practice that could be a blanket conception for moving images that nevertheless is the lesser art form to cinema until animation emerges in the late twentieth century from the shadow of a technology rooted in the medium specificity of film and the photograph. Animation rises as a crucial category for visual culture and study as electronic and digital imaging systems move into the hands of an affluent public; a public that consumes animation in non- cinematic media, as video games, computer interfaces and simulation, and effects on an ever expanding broadcast television and internet network. This is merely a starting point, and one with a non-linear historical archeology, emphasized by and through the fact that animation could be understood to predate cinema, yet does not.

Seeking out embodied performance in and around animation does not mean that this project only investigates animate figures that move with, as, or echoing humans. In addition to limiting th e field of animation, it also presents technological and theoretical problems.

As Thomas Lamarre points out, the danger in focusing on human figure movement in

8 animation is that the figures' layers become dispersed over frames instead of displaying an accumulation of layers within the frame: “If you put the emphasis on drawing the movement and not on moving the drawings, our attention becomes focused on character movement rather than on the gap between planes of the image.”5 Focusing on the gap between planes reveals the depth of the animation machine, how some layers are closer to the camera and others farther away. It also reveals a complex negotiation of movements as animators move the cells of varying depths at varying rates across the recordable frame. With this dissertation

I intend to look specifically at character movement and the animate movement of light in general, as a composition of layers both across frames and “between planes of the image,” borrowing from and constructing a theatrical extension onto Lamarre's focus on the multiplanar machine (the animation stand that stacks cells of the image into vertical planes beneath a camera). By stepping away from the screen, camera, and the drawing board,

Lamarre offers a “basic apparatus” of animation that resembles the deep space of a performance theatre, with its overhanging lights, stage boards, traps, and layers of flies, curtains, and scenery.6

As Lamarre makes clear, the selection of a “basic apparatus of animation runs the risk of assuming technological determinism and thus producing a teleological history of animation.”7 In order to avoid this pitfall, Lamarre cites Felix Guattari's notion of the machine, which extends the machinal from mechanism to “functional ensemble which associates it with man.”8 This project engages performance as a literal “ensemble” composed of technological and human actors that remain inseparable and in constant

(re)negotiation of their contact and interdependence. It is a relationship emanating from a deep modernity. The deep modernity I employ here is one generally understood to

9 culminate with the European industrial revolution, yet emanates from the Renaissance with a deployment of technology toward capital growth and the fixing of the urban landscape as the center of economic, cultural, and political power. Within these highly animate human centers, animation began as a deconstruction of the human senses toward the construction of new perceptions and spectacles. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary argues that the most pervasive means of producing realistic, life-like “effects in mass visual culture, such as the stereoscope, were in fact based on a radical abstraction and reconstruction of optical experience” within the nineteenth century.9 This “radical abstraction and reconstruction of optical experience” is the social condition, imbricated with technology, that leads to what we now recognize as the cinema. Crary's point, and one I hope to trail through this project, is that histories that can appear as technological determinism, as self-propelled progresses of simulation, are oftentimes complex abstractions of human perception and sensory re-combinations that are as much a product of society as a determining force of technology. To borrow a title from Chris Salter, performance and technology are

“entangled.”

Animation as a practice is the art of giving life-likeness. Animate things can carry as few as one quality of life, often motion, to become dead matter that simulates life. It can be seen to occur live. To animate is to give motion to and bring life to a material thought otherwise inert, without auto-motion or auto-affection, or dead –past life. This may be one of its greatest appeals, its display of life without any death in its past or future. To give motion or life to some thing often takes one on a journey through unethical sciences, madness, epiphanies of inspiration, etc., and, as a result, many writers in animation studies make declarations of animation as the super-medium, a claim that Lamarre distances himself

10 from by writing that Animation could be understood to pre-date cinema.

Animation as a product, as a thing, is simile and simulation in that it always gives itself away as not quite what it pretends to be, it is not quite life. It is life-like. We know it is only like life because some thing gives it away as not altogether alive and of life. Recent theories of animation emphasize this quality of animation that fails to disappear completely into life as essential to its recognition. In “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators, and the Avant-Garde,” Tom Gunning writes of an “aesthetics of astonishment,” whereby audiences are not tricked by the reality of the cinematic projection of an oncoming train, but take astonished pleasure in witnessing light and screen reveal something life-like. The mechanism of cinema attracts through an astonished recognition of of the genius of the mechanism itself, and this tends more toward the mechanics of animation than the magical index of the photograph. This quality of animation is also echoed by Dan North in

Performing Illusions where he writes of a “spectacular dialectic,” whereby the combination of pro-filmic (photographed) and animated materials in a special effects film are

“characterized not by the absolute undetectabilty of the mechanisms behind it, but by the interdependence of those elements.”10 Watching animation is to take pleasure in animation as a practice, and affective joy found in the animate image may be none other than animation's promise to bring to light imaginary worlds. Rather than bringing about the perfect visualization of such imaginary worlds, the revelation of the mechanism within animation may aim to inspire spectator's toward the animation of their own imaginations.

The same, perhaps, could be said of theatre. Although I explore many sites and cites where animation and theatre make contact, animation's failure to become life, its dependency upon the revelation of its mechanism, is a major locus of contact between the two disciplinary

11 fields, even if it is rarely acknowledged as such.

Theatre

The theatre I am referring to is that ritual wherein a group of individuals comprise/are constituted as an audience and sit in order to watch a stage where the labor of others is presented in space, sometimes, though not always, face-to-face. An audience, a stage, an actor. These simple ingredients, however, present many questions of quantity and proximity, and as they multiply, so too does the number of ingredients on the list as the stage absorbs pieces of the world. Like animation, theatre utilizes many ingredients from the world yet it is dependent upon the revelation that it is somehow separate as art, performance, a play. As with animation, this may also be constitutive of what makes theatre uniquely theatre. I define theatre after Nicholas Ridout, who, similarly seeking to define a modern theatre, writes, “Theatre's failure, when theatre fails, is not anomalous, but somehow, perhaps constituitive.”11 There are many ways that theatre can fail, quite visibly in the form of accidents and the failure of an actor to live up to their character or even their own reputation. As Ridout finds, there are other failures specific to the modern theatre such as the failure for an audience to find complete leisure in the work of others performing. Ridout argues “that it is precisely in theatre's failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeois past time that its political value is to be found.”

Articulated as a value, Ridout finds that “Theatre is a privileged place for the actual experience of a failure to evade or transcend capital.”12 This experience of failure is motivated by the work of those on stage and the leisure of those watching. Actor's work at play and offer play to an audience that all the while knows they are working. This

12 conundrum, for Ridout, forms a potential political value. Play is where we can fail safely, but also experience an actual failure.

According to this formulation, like animation, the modern theatre is constructively supported by the revelation of its failure to transcend its own economic mechanism of actors laboring for hire for an audience's leisure. Cartoons and theatre are often viewed as frivolous works of play constructed through immense hidden labor. And both can reveal this in uncomfortable and unsettling ways. In Before Mickey, Donald Crafton begins his historical enterprise of early cinematic animation with a claim about the potential for serious appreciation in cartoons, “This book appreciates that intelligent and mature adults could participate in a ritual wherein a pen-and-ink representation of a cat is endowed with 'real' status at least great as that of the screen images of human actors.”13 Crafton emphasizes mature and intelligent in order to claim the possibility for serious critique and rigorous labor of the historian, even of animation. Crafton argues that, “the early animated film was the location of a process found elsewhere in cinema but nowhere else in such intense concentration: self-figuration, the tendency of the filmmaker to interject himself into the film.”14 That is, the animated films before Mickey began whistling, relied upon the interjection of the animator as one way of revealing the mechanism of animation.

Theatre, like animation, may be composed of many things. Some ingredients, however, are not common to both. Even through deconstructions of presence, the strength of a gaze and the face-to-face engagement of producers and consumers is a powerful force that remains special, though not unique, to the theatre. Cartoons do not have the same power to gaze back with the force of a present actor's gaze, even if and when they acknowledge the audience. A cartoon cannot be embarrassed because we know it cannot be

13 seen being seen by us; or, at least, it already knows as such. Perhaps one reason why Donald and Daffy endure endless assaults and humiliations: they cannot demonstrate their own labor as work on display for our leisure. In their endless, violent assault on their own toonish bodies, perhaps something of animation's humiliation is revealed. Perhaps cartoons are humbled by their desire for humility. This may be why the early animators Crafton explores seek so desperately to figure themselves into their animations. Through self-figuration they sought not the power of a two-way gaze, but the revelation of their own labor and the audience's failure to transcend the capital arrangement in order to bring the animator into the leisure of consuming animation. Although we know, deep down that Mickey Mouse is not looking back at us, out of the screen, over it, across lurk the global flows of economics and the trickle of time(s), as hands trade money for admission while the other hand draws the next cell; sending a look from the animators' eye to a fleck of paint on Mickey's pupil and on into my anxious gaze. If this transaction was anything but apparent, at the very least, I caught a frazzled looking teenagers' glance as I bought my ticket to the show, missed the gaze of the one that tore my stub, and longed for eyes to peep through the blue-paned window of the projection booth; failing to see, I turned back to Mickey and put my feet up on the empty seat in front of me.

Performance

Performance is a word that permeates many areas and modes of contemporary life.

In Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance, Jon McKenzie writes, “Because performance assembles such a vast network of discourses and practices, because it brings together such diverse forces, anyone trying to map its passage must navigate a long and

14 twisting flight path.”15 As McKenzie's subtitle infers, he understands performance to be a dominant force in the conditions of knowledge that shape contemporary Western society.

For McKenzie, performance is an episteme that moves beyond the Foucaltian category of discipline while maintaining some of its functions and features. In The Expediency of

Culture, George Yudice similarly claims the word “performativity” as the defining quality of a fourth episteme that extends beyond Foucault's three previous categories of “resemblance, representation, and historicity—yet combines them in a way that accounts for the constitutive force of signs.”16 McKenzie similarly finds performance as resonating with a

“force of signs”: “If performance is our mist,” he writes, “our mad atmosphere, it's also capable of becoming stratified, of leaving an historical sediment of effects that we can read in both words and actions.”17 Rather than privileging the sign, McKenzie splits the force of signs into words and actions alike that can shape current society and leave historical traces and impressions, the residue of performance. Yudice favors the term performativity to understand the contemporary condition because it also accounts for the residue, the

“'remainders' that fall short,” as he writes.18

These views of performance refuse to situate performance as solely a good object of inter-human relations. Instead, performance is an interstitial s/cite of negotiation. This aligns with Ridout's formulation of theatre in that performance is between the leisure of the audience and the work of the actors. But it is more than that. McKenzie defines three modes of performance: organizational, cultural, and technological. On stage, performance appears to be mostly cultural, but as this project seeks to reveal the hidden labors of theatre and animation, the technological and organizational performances that support and frame cultural performance are also relevant. For example, a stage employs various technologies

15 in order to shift scenes and generate effects and new worlds, while the organizational component of a theatre is working to support the creation of new works and generate audience and capital to continue the craft. Without these various lenses of performance, the labors of animation disappear between organizational and technological performance, leaving the cultural performance as an object of animate pen and ink projected as light off screen. Thus McKenzie's three modes of performance can articulate the general theory of performance as it relates back to cultural performance objects, revealing performance as a braid between all three, performance as a condition of knowledge.

Methodologies

In as much as this project seeks to reveal the performing body in conjunction with animation, it also seeks to find the ways that the matter of animation effects and affects embodied performance. This dissertation proposes to examine the ever emerging art of animation through its relationship to, across, and against theatre and performance; arguing that a historiography of theatre's relationship to media can pull the laboring body of animators into the theory of motion media. A theatre historiography primarily concerns itself with questioning the conclusions, continuities and conditions of knowledge that shape the writing of history; it seeks to examine the conditions of knowledge that inform any history of theatre. Yet in order to expose the impact of animation upon bodies, it simultaneously proposes that a theatre historiography should be paired with the same questioning approaches to the development of technology. In the field of cinema studies the method that seeks a historiography of media development is media archeology.

Seeking out forgotten media links to contemporary multimedia practice, Thomas

16 Elsasser in “Early Film History and Multi-Media,” reveals the histories of cinematic progression, the “'from...to' histories,” as he calls them, as “so inaccurate as to make one wonder what kind of intellectual sleight of hand” dispensed with technological discontinuities and forgotten discourses. Questioning the powerful lure of continuous history, he asks, “What secret wish, what mixture of belief and disavowal has been attached to the dominant teleological narrative to make it gain such wide circulation, to give credibility of a doxa and the unquestioned certainty of the commonplace?”19 Media archaeology seeks out the discarded media and technologies that create the disruptions and counter narratives to the teleological development of visual mass media into the cinematic form or the digital or any other dominant media. Although some media archaeological approaches can work to justify technological determinist models, the method of media archeology can also question a continuous history of technological development that is pulled toward a determinate end, and offer a messy, less cohesive inventive movement toward the technological present. At the very least, the engagement of media with media allows for a conversation between commodities that, in themselves, harbor the specters of bodies performing labor. Despite these counter-determinate goals of media archeology the teleological histories of media hold firm, and one answer to Elsasser's question can be located in the immense social gravity and indexical power granted to the autonomous imaging process known as photography. Although recent work by Rebecca Schneider calls into question the separation between the photographic still and the laboring, performing body, the photograph's production of the image apart from the human made of it a wonder of technological performance that overshadowed both theatre and animation for nearly a century.20

17 Theatre/performance and the cartoon are often exemplary as polar extremes of human representation. Questions about the ontology of various media concerned with the contours of the human oftentimes end up approaching a historically rooted and consistent theatre at one end and a technologically progressive animated figure at the other. Within this dichotomy, theatre is comprised of the presence of living bodies moving in depth on a single stage whereas animation is the figured absence of material bodies on a succession of surfaces; it would seem that these two forms of representing the human touch merely in their extreme dislocation from one another. What separates these forms is the realm of photography's claims to a special, indexical relationship to nature, its ability to trace and image the world without the presence of a human. The photograph was not only a medium, it conveyed the faith of evidence, a recording eye detached from man. This detachment was its greatest attribute, as it provided both an astonishing entertainment but also a scientific tool for objective imaging, allowing it to cement itself into modern society. Theatre and animation are the cousins of the cinema that seem incapable of making images without revealing the puppetry of the human. What theatre and animation reveal, however, is that although the photograph claims such an objective media position in our society, it is merely a claim, and, like its cousins, the photograph cannot avoid the technological, cultural, and organization modes of performance that permeate media.

The camera's sanctioned relationship to nature and the natural apart from man still echo off the unique, objective positioning of the camera in our society. The National Parks

–our country's greatest idea(l)—also promote photographic technology: “Leave only footprints, take only pictures,” is the slogan of the U.S. Parks in response to the “leave no trace” ethos of wilderness protection. The acceptable trace, the human remainder, is the

18 impression and outline of our upright stride, “footprints,” and the record of the experience of a place is not kept in a stone, a pressed flower, a bit of stripped bark, a leaf, a skull, a seed, memory; only the photograph is allowed to partake of these things and then offer itself to be taken away, the sanctioned commodity extracted from a wild landscape.

This positioning is anchored in scholarship in the essential, “The Ontology of the

Photographic Image,” wherein most famous of film critics, André Bazin, locates the unique attraction to photography in the absence of man, the un-human-touched relation between technology and nature:

For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. … All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty. This production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making.21

Bazin's emphasis on the powerful lure of the real that glints through and across the artifice of man is vibrant and engages part of a long tradition in aesthetic and media hermeneutics.

Despite seeming so distant from the real world, the theatre connects to reality through the live body of performers as well as other routes. Theatre historians Oscar Brockett and

Franklin Hildy, for example, place the origins of the artifice (architecture) of Western theatre both within the eye and the natural landscape beyond: “The first theatron (or 'seeing place,' as the auditorium was termed by the Greeks) of the Theatre of Dionysus was the hillside that sloped down from the southeast corner of the Acropolis.”22 A paragraph later they repeat and emphasize the freedom of the eye in nature: “The spectators, standing or seated on the

19 slope of the Acropolis, commanded a view that included not only the performers but also the panoramic landscape that extended to the sea in the distance. The eye was not restricted to the interior of the theatre but rather was situated to see the theatre as part of that larger world whose drama was symbolically played out on the stage.”23 Between the theatron,

“auditorium,” and the landscape of the larger world, remains the stage. The middle position of the stage has always made me ask, “how are the interior theatres linked to nature; beyond the matter, only, of live bodies?”

The quality of the index that became attached to the photograph was like Bazin's description of its nature as a thing of nature. Like a snowflake blown about, indicating, as an index of its wild nature, the direction and force of the wind. An index is a sign, but the quality of sign that film theorists attached to the photograph was the index from nature, like a footprint indicating the direction of prey, evidence of its having been there, though not the prey itself. Although, at first glance, both animation and theatre seem to share an evasion of the natural indexical quality of the trace (always moving beyond an impression), sites of contact between these two forms depend heavily upon tracing practices (such as rotoscoping, motion capture, live modeling, and infrared tracking used in real-time animation). Such a view, however, elides the body itself as a storehouse of traces, such as the case with memory, script, choreography, scars, and haunting. As Charles Sanders Peirce himself makes clear from his first two examples of indices (the respective walks of a sailor and a jockey), the body can act as a recording device, a substrate that captures laboring impressions.24 In the first chapter on movement, I return to the legacy and impression of the cinematic index.

What is important to note is that the cinematic apparatus, based on the photographic

20 medium, operates as a referential continuity, an impression that refers to its temporal continuity with the world apart from human intervention. It almost has the power to present itself as a form of objective history, which could be another answer for Elsasser's question about the persistence of media-teleologies that lead to and from the cinema. Such is the case argued by Philip Rosen in his revealing work on cinematic theory and historicity, Change

Mummified:

I believe the cinema has occupied a special “historical” position in this media culture. … As the first globally disseminated medium of two-dimensional moving images with synchronized sound, cinema became the terrain of a field of signifying modules and, in complicated ways, models for other, subsequent media with which it has became intertwined, such as radio, television, and the digital realm. Once established, of course, these have had and continue to have their own specific effectivities in shaping and transforming the overall “field” of images and sounds (including elements of cinema). The same could be said for the economics in which these various media participate, as well as their social and cultural functions. 25

Rosen's claim that cinema occupies a special historical position aligns it well with the need to explore its historiography; media archeology provides one avenue toward this historiography, but when coupled with theatre historiography includes social and technological laboratories of performance. That is to say, one way Rosen articulates the importance of understanding cinema as a history is in the ways the screened and theatrical image of the cinema impact the development of emergent imaging technologies. Theatre's special relationship to the divide of work and leisure, most notably in the form of the actor, provides a way for a media archaeology to further explore the “economics in which these various media participate,” as Rosen writes, by incorporating the laboring body into the technological matrix.

21 This look to the historical is not intended to re-fix the live body of theatre into cinema's past, nor to conflate the two into a general category of representation; instead this methodology borrows from Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge and “is intended to divide up their diversity into different figures.”26 Extending Foucault's archeology in the realm of media, I apply this direction of thought to various aesthetic disciplines across the academy, chasing after media archaeologist Friedrich Kittler, where he claims his university

"is fully justified in joining the disciplines of media history, art history, musicology, and theater studies into a single faculty.”27 Kittler supports his university's (re)alignment of disciplines by dividing "their diversity into different figures," these being light and the architectural frame, which, in turn, unite the disciplines in a category of optical media.

Kittler posits theatrical innovations in lighting and architectural control of luminescence, as a historical intersection between theatre and cinema; more specifically, he selects Wagner's

Gesamtkunstwerk as the perfect illustration of "how ballet, opera, and theater... evolved from elements that would later constitute the cinema.”28 With the classification of optical media,

Kittler provides a cogent starting point that not only links the screened light of animation to the lit stage but also rests within the industrial revolution that gave birth to celluloid.

Many of the media objects that I rely upon in my own archeology are often media in the sense of broadcast radio, television, and print. In many cases I examine promotional material, online videos, interviews from promotional tours, making-of documentaries, an assemblage of material that comprise a breadth of engagement and performance spaces for animate works of art and theatre. Jonathan Gray has labeled such objects, “paratexts,” as materials that generate the atmosphere between domestic space and the narrative of the theatre. In A Cinema Without Walls, Timothy Corrigan locates Hollywood's drive toward the

22 production of the blockbuster in the relation of media between “domestic performance and the public outing.”29 This opening up of cinema to performances across other spaces and media is the easiest route by which Hollywood creates the “mythical universal audience.”

On the blockbuster, Corrigan writes, “this kind of movie must always be 'made' before it is actually made, either through the promise of a particular star or group of stars, rumors of spectacular new technologies, or astonishing costs,”30 and, of course, the same, “'made' before,” can be said of adaptation. From a performance studies point of view, the blockbuster frees the cinematic experience from the confines of the film strip and opens onto alternate performance materials and spaces in ways that correspond to how the latest

Broadway success relies upon years of production “work-shopping,” various levels of premiers that reshuffle casts, and the economic support of merchandising.

I believe that many works of the performance studies tradition, and some from other fields, have already been engaged with an approach that combines media archeology with theatre historiography. Such works, in my opinion, include Philip Auslander's Liveness,

Kara Reilly's Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History, Ben Brewster and Lea

Jacob's Theatre to Cinema, Kittler's Optical Media, and Rebecca Schneider's Performing

Remains. This project stands proud yet toon-ishly a-kilter on the shoulders of such great research, archeology, and historiography.

Touching Between—

Theatre historiography and media archeology engage with a wide variety of discourses that resonate powerfully within modernity and contemporary analysis. Many have already shown up in this introduction. Much of this project deals with the role of the

23 spectator, the spectatorial place of (immobile) subjects, collected as an audience. In the instances where I read from my own spectatorial position, I often rely upon citations and theoretical advancements from works of political philosophy that engage with aesthetics and the masses, such as Jacques Rancière, and what I call new phenomenology, such as the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Bert O. States, and Alice Rayner. All four concern their investigations with the individual subject in contact with an object while utilizing or critiquing structural linguistics that aid in the sensation of a collectivity that gathers about to form an audience.

In To Act, to Do, to Perform, Rayner begins with an examination of the word “play” as a both a noun and a verb, as I do above with the term “animation.” Beginning with the phenomenal sensation of the word—the word as techne, a script for pursuit, human eyes; the word as text, as thing that is also a doing, a practice; a touch—Rayner's structural opening invites deconstruction to critique the encounter of subject and object. Alongside new phenomenologies lurk the rigorous wink of deconstruction that conducts a critique of encounters with phenomena, making of presence a temporary figure. The etymology of

“cartoon” reveals a temporary figure, sketched out before the comic strip illustrations that eventually assume the mock-up's name. Cartoon: “1. A drawing on stout paper, made as a design for a painting of the same size to be executed in fresco or oil, or for a work in tapestry, mosaic, stained glass, or the like,” is followed by, “applied to those in the comic papers relating to current events.”31 The toon is made only “to be executed” in other media, it is never complete; caught in material middles. Whether in print form, as the comic, or screened/projected, as animation, the cartoon, like theatre, often bears the weight of signaling its fakery, its toon-ishness, its playfulness –not to mention its ability to mask intensive labor and capital investments through forced frivolity. Yet the toon also offers the

24 promise of a new visual world, a promise that is also attached to notions of the digital; not surprising as the digital offers its own access to an apparatus of animation.

Animation as a practice first entered my world as an interactive digital utopia, promising to put me at the center of a manipulable universe. The second Nintendo gaming system, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, released Mario Paint and turned its interactive gaming tools into a digital artist pallet that one controlled through a television screen. A new form of interaction with digitalia promised to place me at the helm, not of the interactions of gaming, but of the creation of digital animations and worlds.

In sixth grade, my imagination was easily sparked. Armed with a stack of discarded recording devices, camcorders and VCRs, my friends and I meticulously crafted scenes in

Mario Paint, animating figures within the image, then recording the animations before setting about the next sequence. This level of youthful commitment to a seemingly simple design tool stemmed from our simple access, both of the game console and the software that allowed for interactive expression within what had otherwise been a fixed set a gaming parameters. I did not own an SNES but many of my friends did and as gaming and playing is often better in groups, I got access to this popular system. Our dedication to expanding the limitations of Mario Paint with recording devices, reveals the level at which we understood the limits of interactivity offered by the tool but were encouraged to understand them as surmountable.

The definable concept of the “interactive” is clearly present in the world all around us yet the use of the term by early prophets and promoters of the digital offered an equally grandiose promise, extending and magnifying interaction into a new public sphere. In an essay from 1997, “The Individual Within the Collective,” Jan Fernback claims that

25 cyberspace is,“sacred and profane, it is workspace and leisure space, it is a battleground and a nirvana, it is real and it is virtual, it is ontological and phenomenological. ….Cyberspace is essentially a reconceived public sphere for social, political, economic and cultural interaction.”32 The digital promise includes the possibility of changing the world, socially through mass telecommunications, but also physically, as access to the tools of animation promise the ability to construct worlds that defy our physics and visual boundaries.

Interactivity instigates forward thinking; it inspires action even beyond its limitations and opens upon the promise of a subject centered utopia. Philip Rosen explores interactivity as a crucial element in the promise of an ideal, utopic digital subject. Rosen writes,

“Interactivity is so often characterized through the form of a forecast because it is an ideal.

As an ideal, it envisions bestowing both fully realized practically infinite manipulability and fully realized convergence on the spectator. But this means that there has never been any such thing as interactivity.”33 Interactivity is only ever a promise.

In my introduction to the inter-relations between theatre, performance, and animation, I look to the phone as a cultural object indicative of how our daily, ritual, and aesthetic performances are now surrounded by animation. The new visual and touch based smart phone is an important tool within the larger framework of the digital as it renders itself mobile and connected to human touch. The advent of the digital in the performance realm has ushered in a quantitative upsurge in the contact between cinematic animation and live body performance, well cataloged and explored in books such as Susan Kozel's Closer:

Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology; Steve Dixon's Digital Performance; and Chris

Salter's Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. As the aim of so much technology can be the utilization by and centering of a single subject, like the smart

26 phone, explorations into technology and performance inevitably focus on the encounter between subject and object. Kozel's Closer places phenomenology as a critical tool entangled with performance and technology, highlighting phenomenology as a philosophical mode that insists upon a presence in the space of encounter between individual bodies; phenomena. On digital “interactivity,” Philip Rosen writes in Change Mummefied, “the emphasis on subjective immersion ends up disavowing the materiality of the digital apparatus as well as the economics that guide its development; the emphasis on conceptuality of the individual operator ends up disavowing the ideological structures and the concrete histories that generate concepts in the first place.”34 For Rosen, the subject's desires are presented in lieu of an examination of the programmed choices, the emphasis is on the freedom of choice, not what comprises the selection. In order to counter

“interactivity” as a value that marks both theatre and the digital, I present and examine works that emphasize the body as layered into a control system (even if that controlled system is a participating, playful, audience) while critiquing the economic and social structures around works that celebrate interactivity as freedom, while ignoring or hiding the programed constraints.

As all texts note, digital mobility often labels the active between of performance as

“interactivity.” This has caused some scholars to conflate “performance” with “interaction,” such as Bolter and Gromola in Windows and Mirrors, where they write that “performance” is “an even better word than interaction to describe the significance of digital design in general. As users, we enter into a performative relationship with a digital design: we perform the design....”35 Theatre and performance are also terms employed by developers of new digital design systems. Countless articles about new software systems feature titles

27 such as “Interactive Theater,” “Performance Media,” etc. In order to explore not just the between, but the opposing sides of contact, it is vital to tease performance out of such words as “interactivity” and trace the “historical sediments,” as McKenzie writes, of the between quality of performance that comprises the inter-. Through its own anthropological foundations, performance studies has laid claims to its own key term of the middle: liminality. The liminal, the space betwixt and between—what is oftentimes considered the site of performance—is not always touted as a utopic space, but it is often posited as a neutral space with a positive social charge; the digital promises connectivity in as much and through similar terms as the theatre makes similar promises.

Even apart from the digital, theatre has always promised more interaction. Theatre offers the possibility of contact, a promise of touch that stems from the knowledge that the actor could jump across the barrier at anytime and touch the audience. In Touching Feeling,

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes of theatricality as the “frontal space of performance,” where theatre displays the side of performance most given to touch.36 Theatre also promises the interactivity of the audience in and among themselves. Bringing together, even in theory, ignites the promise of interaction. In addition to a phenomenology of the spectating subject, there is also the collective audience as a site of a contact between theatre, performance, and animation. An early work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative Community, combines a phenomenology of the individual within a deconstructed collective, exploring the paradox of community, its tendencies toward exclusion and other-ing, while, paradoxically and simultaneously, collecting and uniting. In other words, Nancy's brand of touch seeks out presence in deconstruction. Such striving gestures inspired the author of deconstruction,

Jacques Derrida, to name his final book after the theorist that seeks the value of phenomenal

28 experience within an attention to deconstructed theory, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. The touch, the rub between the living body and the techne of animation is reflected in the philosophical tensions between a subject perceiving the phenomena of a social world and the interplay of technologies that guide, inform, and inflect such perceptions.

In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière points to the touch and intermixing of animate light with live bodies as a pertinent example of the strength and persistence of this belief:

Projected images can be conjoined with living bodies or substituted for them. However, as long as spectators are assembled in the theatrical space, it is as if the living, communitarian essence of theater were preserved and one could avoid the question: what exactly occurs among theatre spectators that cannot happen elsewhere? What is more interactive, more communitarian, about these spectators than a mass of individuals watching the same television show at the same hour? This something, I believe, is simply the presupposition that theatre is in and of itself communitarian.37

From a promise of presence, theatre and performance are propped up as somehow more communitarian, more interactive than other art forms. Through the interaction of projected images with live bodies, Rancière recognizes the failure of the interactive promise projected by theatre onto its audience. But he also acknowledges its persistence inside the gathering of spectators “in the theatrical space.” In an essay on the New Riga Theatre company's tactics for audience disruption (as opposed to projected unification and collectivity), Ridout describes a theatre audience in similar terms: “an audience, so often a collection of individuals keen to imagine or experience themselves in some kind of collective, or even as a community....”38 The persistent power of this theatrical collective ideal that Rancière and

Ridout critique is co-opted by conceptions of digital interaction. Rather than dismantle the

29 presupposition that theatre is somehow more interactive, the simultaneous staging of animation and live bodies—the conjunction or substitution as Rancière writes—braids the digital utopia into the presupposed communitarian fold of theatre, it feeds off of it.

Although theatre and performance studies have tackled presuppositions of both collective engagement and presence, a continued emphasis on the inter-qualities of performance, its betwixt and between-ness nevertheless continue to prop up ideas about the communitarian efficacy of performance, its special hold on interaction. I do not intend to proclaim that performance is located somewhere other than between, but am interested in exploring how this emphasis still holds theatre apart from the other arts. Many performances explore this very question by refusing to offer the audience an interactive, collective power, as Ridout's examination of the New Riga Theater company's production of

The Ice reveals. Rancière labels this type of performance as one,

that aims not to amplify effect, but to problematize the cause- effect relationship itself and the set of presuppositions that sustain the logic of stultification. Faced with hyper-theatre that wants to transform representation into presence and passivity into activity, it proposes instead to revoke the privilege of vitality and communitarian power accorded the theatrical stage, so as to restore it to an equal footing with the telling a story, the reading of a book, or the gaze focused on an image.39

Despite this route of performance that Ridout values and Rancière desires more of, it is in opposition to the lingering power of collective assemblage and promise of theatrical interaction which, I argue, is propped up nonetheless by arguments that (might) eschew such communitarian logic in favor of an emphasis on the inter-quality of theatre and performance.

In the field of performance studies, the term “liminality” functions similarly to the term “interactive” and each may be constituitive of the other. It is important to investigate

30 this not only because liminality is a key term in the field, but because it has a legacy that construes performance as socially efficacious by leaving out the inter-related space between performer and thing through privileging the relationship between performer and self and performer and other people. If digital interactivity still promises to be a tool for social change, amelioration, and betterment, then the ways performance inter-relates to such a thing as the digital in its own inter-space, its own liminality, is crucial to the exploration of staged animations. Liminality may even be structured in ways that resist the between-ness of people and things, making of theatre and performance a good laboratory for media, but a poor stable home. That is to say, the theatre may make a great testing ground for the sociality of things, but it is not the space for such things to operate on a regular basis.

In the field of performance studies liminality signifies a social “betwixt and between” that anthropologist and founding father of performance studies, Victor Turner, locates as the social space that comprises ritualized rites of passage. Liminality has also enjoyed incursions into other fields. In “Liminality in Media Studies,” Mihai Coman writes,

“Of all the concepts configured by cultural anthropologists in the analysis of ritual/ceremonial events, one in particular has enjoyed special attention in the analysis of mass media processes: liminality.”40 I would argue that this occurs because new media is often focused on the rapid transition from old to new technologies. As for theater and performance, as Marvin Carlson points out, liminality has, since Turner, become central to the image of performance: “Turner, looking to van Gennep’s rites of passage, emphasizes not so much the 'set apartness' of performance, but its 'in-betweenness,' its function as transition between two states of more settled or more conventional cultural activity. This image of performance as a border, a margin, a site of negotiation, has become extremely

31 important in subsequent thinking about such activity.”41 Thus liminality has not only become a central image for performance, but has extended to the field of performance studies itself as it commends its own liminal positioning in academia. Jon McKenzie makes this argument in his 2001 book Perform or Else:

Drawing upon the reflexivity found in rites of passage, cultural performance scholars have also theorized our own activities in terms of liminality, arguing that we operate in the interstices of academia as well as the margins of social structures and seek to reflect upon and transform both the academy and society at large. Performance scholars have been interested, in other words, in the efficacy of our own performance, and we have used liminal rites of passage as a metamodel of the very formation of Performance Studies.42

By referencing “efficacy,” Jon McKenzie is pointing to one of the most distinguishing features of liminality as a model for performance. Liminality is not only a quality of performance, it is often used to situate performance as a good object –good for the social order, the individual, good perhaps against the bad objects of mechanically and digitally reproducible media. The liminal space is assumed to be a socially efficacious space and

McKenzie argues that by “focusing on liminal activities, on transgressive or resistant practices, or, more generally, on socially efficacious performances, we have overlooked the importance of other performances….”43

Liminality is approached, deployed, and emphasized within performance toward the constitution of a communal audience of people. By always thinking of performance as a liminality of bodies, it obscures the force of objects and structures that performance space presents with the communal, liminal engagement of bodies. In other words, liminality has the tendency to forget or erase the stage, apparatus, and other technological layers in the

32 theatre, from costume to makeup, in favor of social interactions that forget the inflections of things upon our daily performances. The interactions of animate light with performers, across stage and screen, reveal the liminality of human and object, performer and thing, and allows for the easy slippage of performer as thing and thing as performer. This, however, can be useful when considering the phantasmagoria of the commodity, how labor of the body becomes manifest in the value of the commodity. Live performance alongside animation has the potential to reveal the economic frameworks that distinguish the live and the life-like and the ways in which affect operates across presence, absence, the collective audience, and the individual spectator, squared in the theatre, touching the line between work and play.

In the pursuit of revealing what is hidden and exposing it as already there, this project frequently employs modern discourses in order to theorize the unseen performer behind animation's screen. Most importantly is the discourse of the unconscious, the unseen, non-spatial revelation of Sigmund Freud; psychoanalysis. I employ psychoanalysis for a variety of reasons, the least of which is its ability to reveal (and, perhaps more so, psychoanalysis' desire to reveal is actually what I employ). Freudian psychoanalysis arises alongside the birth and ascent of cinema and hopes to deal with the effects and affects of the modern mind. Freud sought to reveal the unseen apparatus of the mind as an archaeologist reveals the unseen yet affectively present histories underground. After Freud, Lacanian psychoanalysis relies heavily upon objects of reflection, mirrors, as well as optical structures of perception that mirror the construction of such theatrical spaces as the phantasmagoria.

Lacan's technical specificity and attention to optics make him a favorite of Kittler. In addition to these deployments of psychoanalytic discourse, I hold out that the goals of

33 feminist film theory that deployed psychoanalysis in a vein of hope—to expose the male gaze, to expose the anxiety of the seen of difference—I hold that this approach is not only valid, but that social operations, such as identification, are still in operation within performance, therefore making psychoanalysis a relevant theoretical tool and rich discourse of thought on the mater and immaterial matters of what makes humans so uniquely alive.

The psychosis of the modern condition leads to another revelation as the talking cure, like theatre, presents a special place for thinking the division of leisure and labor. The doctor is at work listening and guiding and the patient is paying to talk and find a cure or some equilibrium of health. Psychoanalysis is a useful tool to bring issues of performance, even curative, palliative performances, toward an “experience of our actual failure to transcend capital,” as Ridout writes. In addition to offering useful critiques for the seen/scene of difference across gender and race, psychoanalysis is also useful in summoning performance toward other theories that address the divisions of economics, class, race, gender, sexuality, and ecology. These issues are most apparent in the third chapter on theatrical risk and capital risk, explored through Julie Taymor's Spider-man: Turn Off the

Dark.

exit, pursued by cartoons

So let us march ahead! … Before one thing and another there hangs a curtain: let us draw it up! —Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre”44

The Live and the Life-like presents four chapters that pursue the subtle distinctions between claims of the living, present, performing body and the life-like manifestations of

34 visual technologies. Although intended to be extractable as individual sections, chapters are organized through the kind of layers that multiply on top of the human form as it translates across bodies and material substrates. Broadly these distinctions are titled movement, light, animality, and world. The first chapter, “Diectic Feet: performance as the index of animation,” investigates recent promotional campaigns launched by Hollywood to generate a sense of believability, identification, and connection between audiences and digitally animated characters, exploring why and how theatricality is summoned to lend respectability to the cartoon. The concept, technology, and branding of motion-capture is interrogated through aesthetic and theoretical instances of the step and walking to reveal a theatrical historiography both rooted and reborn in a digital animation practice. The second chapter,

“The Lightest Distinction” looks beyond the invention of the photograph to the spread of the electric grid as a focal point for the modern disciplinary distinction between cinema and theatre. I focus on two transitions in luminous media –the transition from gas to electric light and the change from real to digital light—exploring how the modern turn to electricity and the digital revolution extend and mirror each other in theatre and animation. These themes and historical moments are analyzed through Anne Washburn's Mr Burns: a post- electric play (2012) and its many media inspirations, such as the popular television series

The Simpsons. The third chapter “Part Pest: the un/hemleich animal” argues that embodying animation characters both reveals a long legacy of labor often collapsed within the screen and hides the actor behind the veil of the icon. I argue that both actions feed off theatrical failure. I use Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark and the many accidents surrounding the production to explore how the potential for accident reveals the many bodies at work to make Spider-man a superhero as well as an icon that collapses all the performers into one,

35 web-slinging pest. The final chapter, “Promises of the Inter-; or, How to Stage Animation,” traces financial and technological support for theatres by telecommunication companies that seek to replace flat screen video conferencing with “presence” boxes that seek to replicate the face to face experience. As a counter, it also looks to works of interaction that reveal their apparatus and explore the full inter(in)animation of the digital and the performing body.

36 movement 1 Diectic Feet: performance as the index of animation

Physical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday's or today's “superstitions.” —Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City.”45

Steps

The final image of Peter Jackson's second installment of The Lord of the Rings, The

Two Towers (2002), concentrates the epic narrative tapestries of Tolkein's moral fantasy into one haunting, animate painting; an ashen landscape circled by winged dragons, dark under sooty clouds that lift from an explosive volcano rising alongside an equally threatening tower of industry, all framed by the sculpted crags of perilous mountains. Orange lightning flashes from the close right and echos off to the fading horizon, pulling attention to the center of the image: the volcano and the tower, nature and the man-made, side by side in ecological destruction. The tower belongs to the mostly invisible villain, a vaporous being masked behind human technology: a ring, armor, cities, armies, and, atop his tower, a singular eye, bathed in flame, keeping careful watch, a fiery panopticon. The final image is

37 destructive nature (volcano) and destructive mankind (tower) together, acting in violent harmony, threatening doom before the return to order and the free reign of nature in the final installment of the franchise: The Return of the King (2003). This image makes you come back to the theater and pay to see the conclusion. This image prepares the franchise to be crowned with eleven golden Oscars. The animate parts of the image (dragons, clouds, volcano fire and spume) read as digitally constructed yet the framing mountains work hard to stand out as beautifully sculpted miniatures. The two textures emerge as two towering image media, the digital and the photographic, working in harmony to render various visions of the world and imaginations of new ones into animate realities. The digital moves the photographic under a larger framework of animation.

Over this composite image echos the final words, uttered ominously by a cartoon,

“Follow me.” The animate creature Gollum, generated through the process of motion- capture, calls out to two pro-filmic actors, the film's protagonist duo, Samwise and Frodo,

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood. The final image is directly linked to this performative hail. A cartoon begs that we fall after, even following its charm to certain doom. Virtual and fleshly realities touch as the cartoon guides the way and we, the audience, follow. The image invites this reading as it is a composite of various image textures that span from virtual to photographic to intimately handled, stop-motion rendered landscapes. A pro-filmic camera rises off of Gollum's words, up through real trees, merging a pro-filmic forest with a miniature mountainside, the photo feels cut out against the stop motion mountain, which acts to frame another texture of effect (an afect of effect) the virtual cinematic painting of the tower and volcano... “follow me.” Something about our relationship to animate images feels different. New. Gollum secretly plans doom. Nevertheless, they follow, we follow. Credits

38 roll as former spectators walk out. Already awaiting the final installment, I walk out of the theater only to see everyone following after cartoons of their own. I see a lot of people walking about while looking at animation; whether on phones or touch pads, playing games or music, texting or reading off animate screens, people walk with cartoons. There are also many people sitting before screens, consuming animation, but what I see more now is our walking about while (par)taking in animation. No longer solely the domain of kids clutching palm-sized game consoles, carted along errands, dragging feet blindly behind gaurdians, heads bowed in mobile fantasy; now grown and, as is to be expected, doing the same—trailing their own animations. I see all age groups walking around with animations in hand, on feet, holding cartoons, watching, playing; phones framing Roger Rabbit, hand in hand, side by side, animating our walks. In one way this pedestrian status quo articulates why, according to Samuel Weber, as digital life continues to spread across our social and physical spheres, “Theatrical practices, attitudes, even organizations seem to proliferate, in conjunction with if not in response to the new media.”46 Ever expanding towards touch, the digital employs performance to test cultural forces of embodiment, and walking with animation demonstrates a virtual world that does not erase the body, but instead, like theater, stages human steps that chase after prompts instigated by desire. Bipedal movement is a defining characteristic of the human form in action and as a practice it is a good contender for the evolutionary trend that freed up our hands to generate new technologies and ways of grasping the world, all of which, arguably, led to the expansion of the homo-sapien brain and mind. I will return to theses regarding walking and the brain, but what is important now, more than ever, is that we write or dial or play or read animations as we step out and move from outlet to outlet (electrical outlets, electronic stores, and general out-lets). Even if the

39 walking world is not the dominant virtual performance space and the office and cubicle remain the domains of both virtual and laminate desktops, the emergence of animation in mobile telecommunications as well as the ever shrinking interface of digitalia points to a change between the pointing, touching, tracing digit on the one hand and the stride and print of toes on the foot.

This chapter layers Weber's finding in Theatricality as Medium—his assertion of the growing importance of theatricality and performance in tandem with digitalia—with critical theories of film spectatorship as cinema grapples with its own digital transformation in order to explore animation on its feet. Through investigating promotional campaigns (TV spots, interviews, books, making of featurettes, what Jonathan Gray calls “paratexts”) launched by

Hollywood to generate a sense of believability, identification, and connection between audiences and animate characters, this chapter interrogates the ways theatricality is summoned to lend a sense of reality to the cartoon, where performance becomes the indexical site of contact with reality as film analysis moves beyond semiotics into studies of affect. I interrogate the concept, technology, and branding of motion-capture through aesthetic and theoretical instances of the step and walking, footprints and strides, and entrances and exits, to reveal a theatrical historiography both rooted and reborn in a digital animation practice. Beyond the specifics of motion capture, I will touch upon works of art that focus upon a foot impressing a print between present and past sign, offering pedantic touch as the theatrical promise of presence. A final touchstone will be the aesthetic celebrity of psychoanalytic theory and surrealist art, Gradiva. A bas-relief carved out of stone, the figure of a Roman woman stepping down, her heel high and her toes dipped to the floor; the name Gradiva means “the girl splendid in walking.”47

40 Motion-Capture

In 2006 the actor attributed with performing the motion-capture avatar of Gollum,

Andy Serkis, was honored by the German EDIT9 Film Festival in recognition of his contributions to advancements in film-making, particularly involving technologies of motion-capture. This honor has primarily been bestowed upon innovative directors, special effects artists, and inventors of film technology. Serkis' recognition marks the first time an actor has joined the innovative ranks of Kubrick, Greenaway, and Harryhausen by doing what he has always done, performing. In addition to performance, Serkis' innovations include working in perfect concert with a giant orchestration of laboring bodies and technologies that employ digital motion-capture techniques in order to re-map captured performances onto animate bodies. Although an encompassing term, “motion-capture” today has come to signify a particular set of technologies and practices that combine animation and performance aided by a computer. Motion-capture can use a variety of different inputs, alternate ways of reading and capturing motion; from tracing field polarity moving through a magnetized studio to the image based capture of dots placed on a performer within a green screen or blank studio space. In Closer, Susan Kozel breaks the complex process of motion-capture into three distinct parts: the first being the tracing of movement (digital motion-capture), the second is the application of captured movement to an avatar or parts awaiting animation (digital animation), and third, the application of computer time to couple the trace of motion capture with the animate parts (rendering).48

Combined, this multi-layered process assumes the mantle (once donned by photography) of motion-capture. The body that stands in for, indeed, stands as this complex process is the performer Andy Serkis, who has made a career out of animating this brand of motion-

41 capture. The summation of Serkis’ award by the festival committee reads: “Andy Serkis has utilized his years of experience as a theater trained actor to provide the human character blueprint for the visual effects artists to bring to life…. Andy has clearly demonstrated how the mixture of humanity and technology can truly create incredible and believable characters.”49 Through the dual acts of pulling on a body sock covered in tiny dots over his five foot eight inch frame that assists in the computer capture of his movement and through the employment of his “years of experience as a theater trained actor,” Serkis is heralded as inserting humanity into the mathematical abstraction that is digital animation. He is the

“human character blueprint,” the translation of humanity for the digital world; in essence,

Serkis is recognized as the index of humanity, less a star than a proto-star. And his fame, his status as proto-star, came off stage from years of theater training to insert a human into a machine. In addition to being heralded as the human character blueprint, Serkis has been cast in many animation-based roles in feature films, from Gollum in Peter Jackson's The

Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003) to primate stars in King Kong (Jackson, 2005) and

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Directed by Rupert Wyatt, 2011). He is paraded in front of cameras whenever motion capture or digital Hollywood is mentioned; consulted on whether or not computer generated actors need a special award category; has his own autobiographical book –Gollum: How We Made Movie Magic; all because of theater training and his deployment of that training onto motion capture technologies.50

Serkis's background accompanies an ontological quality of the digital, which seeks to foreground a procedural historicity linked to the laboring body. As media theorist Mark

Hansen points to in his “Seeing with the Body,” “We might do better to describe digital photography as 'synthetic,' since digitization has the potential to redefine what photography

42 is, both by displacing the centrality accorded the status of the photographic image (i.e., analog or digital) and by foregrounding the procedures” by which the image is produced.51

The digital foregrounds the procedures that go into the making of the image. The digital calls out the cultural, organizational, and technological performances behind the avatar and highlights them as a part of its media. The procedure that Serkis enacts is called “motion- capture” but this term fails to describe the totality of the process. As Kozel points out,

“Motion capture is an unfortunate term because it implies that the motion is contained once it is captured, like a bee in a net, but this sophisticated and poetic slice of human-computer interaction is about flow, patterns, and shapes of movement, about the way life can be breathed into that which seemed inanimate.”52 The more one hears about motion-capture the more it appears as a way life steps into the inanimate.

Motion-capture is only one way that life affects inanimate material but emphasizes the journey, the process, as if it is a style of performance and mode of living that is all its own. In her examination of the work and process of South African animator, William

Kentridge, Rosalind Krauss finds his animation process to be a pacing back and forth: “Now it is just this walking back and forth, this constant shuttling between the movie camera on one side of the studio and the drawing tacked to the wall on the other, that constitutes the field of Kentridge's own operation.”53 Kentridge's style is to work with one image and slowly add and erase bits of the image as he shuttles back and forth to his bolex to snap a single frame of his animation. Krauss describes this as being mechanical and meditational, like the in-between space of performance and the strides of a walk: “Working with no overall plan in mind, without the filmmaker's scenario or the animator's storyboard, he is instead dependent on this strange space of back-and-forth, at once mechanical and

43 meditational, for the conception of his work: the individual images, their development, their interconnection, which becomes, in the end, the 'plot.'”54 He animates motion and captures a plot through his walk.

By its use of digital image making, motion-capture technology foregrounds its process, always revealing or indicating a procedure, like Kentridge's walk. But motion- capture delivers little else beyond this foregrounding of technological and human process.

In fact, motion-capture neither cuts down on labor time nor reduces costs in feature animation practice and, as Rob Henderson, an animator at Dreamworks Studios points out, motion-capture is “often only used to generate believable crowd movement.”55 These positions assume that in addition to the motion-capture process, the campaign of Serkis' performance (located in promotional and featurette paratexts) is also necessary to bring animation into pro-filmic scenes without generating a comic or response of revulsion in the spectator, a serious concern for filmmakers working at the cutting edge of digital effects and virtual bodies. Notice how in this promotional interview on television's Discovery Channel, for the blockbuster Avatar (2009), filmmaker James Cameron emphasizes the importance of motion-capture to generating a digital character within a photographic image:

we don't have to necessarily believe that it's 100 percent photo-real, and we don't have to necessarily believe that they actually exist, but we do have to believe in them as emotional creatures, and so we came up with the... um... the head rig... there is a carbon fiber boom that comes out with a little camera on the front of it, and that camera shoots the face in a nulled out close-up. So, even though the actor is moving all around... we're getting that facial performance, absolutely locked off. ... And that proved to exactly be the sorta holy grail approach to how to do CG faces. ... We got the best animators in the world, to take all this data coming out of our performance captures, and then we limited their options to things that were valued added: like the ears and the tails. So they took a human performance, with no diminishment whatsoever, and then added to it. So when people ask me, what percentage of the actor's

44 performance came through in the final character I say 110% because you actually had an increase in whatever the emotionality of the moment was.56

The reality of the image is less important than the details of human performance that we are accustomed to with pro-filmic cinema. For film-makers of digitally animate worlds, motion-capture is not only the technical tool and process but the “holy grail” by which cartoon characters take on the blueprint of humanity. Cameron focuses in on the facial performance, but this emphasis follows after the action, where the actor is “moving all around.” Like Jackson's composite image at the end of The Two Towers, Cameron uses this interview spot to re-enforce the composite nature of motion-capture, by foregrounding its procedures in performance.

Celebrity

Certainly, building celebrity or purchase power around the actor behind the cartoon generates a connection between spectator and the animate body onscreen. Even beyond the icon of recognition, character animation has long depended upon celebrities stepping into performance to model animate liveliness. On a tour of the Disney studios and animation process, the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein witnessed Walt's own transformation into his star mouse: “Disney himself acts out the 'part' or 'role' of Mickey for this or that film. A dozen or so artists stand around him in a circle, quickly capturing the hilarious expressions of their posing and performing boss. And the extremely lively and lifelike preparations for the cartoon are ready—infectious through the whole hyperbolization of the drawing only because taken from a living person.”57 Attached to celebrity is the idea of embodiment, a proper name attached to a body in space, somewhere fixed to a name that endures. In addition to Mickey, the name that endures is that of the performing boss, Disney. Indeed, as

45 Joseph Roach has argued about power and entertainment celebrity, “Celebrities, then, like kings, have two bodies, the body natural which decays and dies, and the body cinematic, which does neither.”58 Disney is, if not in fact, famously frozen, awaiting re-animation. But even in this state, time still moves on, and, like the cinematic body, decays slowly on the shelves of archives. If the cinematic body is not quite immortal it decays, at any rate, apart from the time of the human body.

In any duration of decay, the dual body of the celebrity marks out space both inside and outside of his medium. In “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau has found that proper names link signifying practices with spatial ones, such as in the case with filmmaking, where, for instance, the name Disney opens the screen onto animate worlds.

De Certeau finds within the kernels of a proper name “three distinct (but connected) functions of the relations between spatial and signifying practices are indicated (and perhaps founded): the believable, the memorable and the primitive. They designate what 'authorizes'

(or makes possible or credible) spatial appropriations.”59 One could think of Disneyland as aspiring to all three: the believable three-dimensional recreation of a magical (screened) world, the memorable experience of rides and immersion, and the primitive joy of childhood celebrated on every beautifully fake street corner. The proper name of a performer also makes the space of a character believable, replete with memorable touches of human contingency, and an essence of an underlying primitive human origin. This primitive quality associates beyond the character of Gollum to the promotional campaign surrounding Serkis and his blueprint performance. Serkis was not a “star” in Hollywood before his appearance as Gollum. Serkis was constructed into a celebrity after the film's release and he was made into a particular kind of star, one who plays behind the motion-captured masks of digital

46 animation. What he authorizes is a primitive form of the human at work at play. Serkis is not the star. He is a happenstance star, ignited alongside the luminous celebrity of motion- capture itself, the holy grail of the alchemical combination of digital technologies with pro- filmic techniques, the present and future of the cinematic blockbuster. The animating force of this star is performance.

Theater

The real star here is not only performance but the theatrical, that texture of human touch even in the void of real contact, always an embodied promise of the theater. The live actor of the theater, known to be live and present through some promise that one could touch her if only the orchestra pit and proscenium did not gape so, separating standing actor and seated spectator. A central component of Serkis' achievement is his combination of years of theater training with motion-capture technologies, but why the theater? Animation, afterall, is a cinematic medium; what special purchase does the theater have in uniting animation with pro-filmic cinema? What does theatrical mean and what does it have to do with animation? It indicates the theater, of course, composed of well known but still peculiar ingredients; stage-boards, script, actor. Yet it also signifies the thinking of theater, how theater has been thought about by philosophers and critics of art and culture, and to what place theater is subjected, often a negative space. Weber, for example, reads the theater through the negative Western projection of mimesis from Plato onward, concluding in one definition that the theater “marks the spot where the spot reveals itself to be an ineradicable macula, a stigma or stain that cannot be cleansed or otherwise rendered transparent, diaphanous.”60 Weber writes about both the moments where one is aware that one is watching a play and the falsehood, the unperformative action of theatrical performance.

47 Theater has an unavoidable materiality set in duration that bleeds through, like a walking body. Tripping on theater's etymological relation to theory, Weber continues to define something of the medium of theater apart from a stained materiality and describes something very much like a walk or an entrance onstage:

This irreducible opacity defines the quality of theater as medium. When an event or series of events take place without reducing the place “taken” to a purely neutral site, then that place reveals itself to be a “stage,” and those events become theatrical happenings. As the gerund here suggests... such happenings never take place once and for all but are ongoing. This in turn suggests that they can neither be contained within the place where they unfold nor entirely separated from it. They can be said, then, in a quite literal sense, to come to pass.61

Theatrical happenings pass like the sweat of an actor passes through costume and soaks the stage-boards. Theatrical happenings come to pass, like passersby strolling on, delivering brief words, before walking off again. Although the audience is altered, we come and go from the theater which remains ready, the space unchanged for the next series of passes.

Theater as medium is difficult to define and theatricality is even more diaphanous, not only because of its slippage with performance. Right before one pins theatricality down, it slips out from neat taxonomies and chaotic deconstructions to pass before one's eyes as almost the real thing. Theatricality passes at, passes on, passes for. In theater there are also moments of what Rebecca Schneider might call “the hard labor of the live,” where what we pay for is the proximity to the smell of sweat.62 Yet that sweat can also signal the play of the players. The theatrical is about effects and affects on space but it is also about play as somehow ineffective, unperformative, fake and phony, an uncleansable human stain passing off actions as less than impressive if not more than meaningful. Importantly, the cartoon animation shares in this theatrical revelation of fakery. The cartoon is often the stain upon

48 cinema. The cartoon always calls out its artifice, foregrounding its connection to the human through shadows of movement. Ironically, the cartoon impersonates the human stain in action, acting.

Contrary to a trajectory of perfect human mimesis, special effects and animate characters in pro-filmic cinema also rely upon a revelation of their constructedness.

Similarly to Hansen's assertion that the digital foregrounds its procedures of image creation,

Dan North finds that the special “effect is characterized not by the absolute undetectability of the mechanism behind it, but by the interdependence of those elements.”63 Special effects and animation rely upon a theatrical revelation, a stain that marks their mechanism at work, or perhaps even at play.

The same stain need not be the fake quality of theater but the real human actor at serious work in play, the texture of living performance, the stain of the actor bleeding through the character. Tom Gunning recognizes both performance and publicity as a texture, a touch of humanity in Serkis' portrayal of Gollum: “Yet one senses (or publicity for the film cues us to notice) the physical tremors, bodily textures, and careful emotional intonations

Serkis as a human actor manages to bring to Gollum's voice. Serkis's performance therefore provides a human texture and even a degree of physical presence to an inhuman creature more effectively than sounds smacking of mechanical or electronic generation could.”64 It is crucial that the real human that provides “physical tremors” be relatively unknown, a non- celebrity, but talented, theatrically, toonishly talented. It is important, therefore, that Serkis be not famous before he assumes the role of Gollum as his work is not to provide an icon for the cartoon—he is not supposed to look like his character—but to provide the texture, the touch, the blueprint of a generic humanity at work under the digital animation as captured

49 motion. The inhuman void of animation is filled by the human stain, the un(a)voidable body of the theatrical actor as a blueprint, a texture, a theatrical medium. Serkis' is not costumed as Gollum, but he is in costume. He wears a skintight suit with tiny traceable dots, and for close-up work, his face is adorned with a kind of appended mask of Gollum. What Serkis wears is a costume that is itself only an indexical mark. His performance as index is costumed as such.

Performance

Performance is something more than the theatrical, although it certainly entails the theater. Although performance as a term lingers around modes of play, it also attaches itself to non-aesthetic labor across various societal paradigms. In Perform or Else: from discipline to performance Jon McKenzie writes that, “performance must be understood as an emergent stratum of power and knowledge.”65 Projecting “performance” across Foucault's

Discipline and Punish, McKenzie writes, “performance will be to the twentieth and twenty- first centuries what discipline was the eighteenth and nineteenth, that is, an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge.”66 McKenzie traces performance across three paradigms: organizational, technological, and cultural. Organizational performance is evaluated in terms of profits, stock prices, efficiency, and labor management; cultural performance includes theatricality, aesthetics, and rituals; and “The most profound enactments of technological performance... are those cast and produced within the computer, electronics, and telecommunication industries.”67 Gollum straddles all three paradigms as

Serkis's theater training provides cultural performance, managing a digital avatar (among other performance duties) reveals an organizational performance, and, by nature as a digital character, shares an undeniable link to technological performance through the computer.

50 Serkis's performance, then, reveals the power of performance in this historical and technological moment.

Index

Despite constant change regarding the proliferation of images in the world and the

(supposed) democratization of image making technologies, digital cultures can still be perceived to be in a time of transition: surrounded by images but shifting perception and apprehension of them. Cinema studies has been approaching this primarily through change in media, examining transitions from celluloid to video and the digital. In his article,

“Moving Away from the Index,” Tom Gunning looks to movement as a way to correct the egregious refusal of animation within the field of film scholarship by privileging the index of the photograph: “animation has always been part of cinema and… only the over-emphasis given to the photographic basis of cinema in recent decades can explain the neglect this historical and technological fact has encountered.”68 Gunning hopes to achieve a supplementation of indexical and movement theories of cinema so as to reverse the negative rhetoric and outright dismissal of the animated film and to throw out theories about cinema's demise in the face of the digital revolution. What Gunning is pushing against is not so much the photographic base of cinema but the specific nature ascribed to photography that privileges the photograph's referential or indexical relationship to its object. Taken from

Charles Sanders Peirce's taxonomy of signs, the index is a sign that bears a contact, but not necessarily a resemblance, to its object; like a footprint in horizontal sand without the vertical flesh of an upright leg. The index also calls attention to itself, it hails, marks, and points (“look! Here” This footprint signifies what once stood) and, as such, has been used by theorists to account for the attraction and power of the cinema including cinema's

51 connection with realism. As spectators we seek out a touch with reality, impressed through indexical contact with a prior (real) object (footprint, foot).

This indexical lineage stems from classical film theory, which finds its roots in

André Bazin's essay, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." In it, Bazin famously writes, "The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint.”69 Peter Wollen then solidified the place of the index in film theory by grafting Peirce's definition onto Bazin's positing of realism as the ontological, aesthetic value of cinema. With the emergence of the digital, these semiotic theories come under threat. In “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Mary Ann Doane writes,

“The index makes that claim [verification of existence] by virtue of its privileging of contact, of touch, of a physical connection. The digital can make no such claim and, in fact, is defined as its negation.” Doane continues, however, to trouble this simple binary, claiming that,

The transition from the digit [finger] to the digital is effected, first, by defining the most pertinent characteristic of the finger as its discreteness, its differentiation from the other fingers, and second, by emphasizing the way in which the fingers lend themselves to counting, enumeration. Yet what is elided here is the finger’s preeminent status as the organ of touch, of contact, of sensation, of connection with the concrete. It could be said that the unconscious of the digital, that most abstract of logics/forms of representation, is touch.70

That the digital cannot claim any contact makes it yearn for it all the more, hence the paratexts and promotional material surrounding motion-capture, which emphasize the texture of performance as the touch of the performer. The unconscious of the digital image, the hidden operative force buried behind the image, is, as Doane points out, touch. The digital admits that it cannot be an index proper but then resists and insists on its ability to

52 make contact by “foregrounding procedures,” as Hansen finds, or proliferating theatrical practice as Weber finds, all moving toward touch and presence. The digital hails itself.

To challenge the narrow definition of the index as trace, Gunning turns to cinematic theories rooted in motion, not to erase indexical theories of the photograph but with the intention to supplement them in order to broaden the theoretical base that underlies cinema.71

Like many others he looks to the generation of what has been termed the affective turn in critical theory, espoused through Eisenstein's montage, to trace how movement can evoke emotion and maybe even empathy. This broadening, it would seem, should include careful analysis of performance paradigms as they manifest within the digital transformation of cinema. The index, however, is a broad sign, and already relies upon motion and movement as well as an interpretation of its affective motivations. The index hails with movement, points, and is also a trace of passing movement, where contact implies movement in the print, in its impression. The index does not draw a strict line between trace (thing) and tracing (action) and this is why Doane describes the index as “the form of sign that comes closest to this ideal limit,” of instant as unrepresentable to itself.72 In other words, the confusion of trace (as frozen instant) and tracing (as movement) within the concept of the index is too entangled and, like theatricality, points to the stain of this entanglement instead.

In this confusion, Zeno's paradox looms large: the instant threatens to swallow movement just as movement, of course, passes the frozen instant by. What looms over the trace, the frozen instant of indexical contact, is the absence of the movement that made the impression. Absence is not only key to the past but also the attraction of reality located within the indexical photograph as an index can also be made apart from humans and this absence has mattered more to classical film theory, and is threatened more by the digital,

53 than any notion of the index. The digital hails itself and in doing so both reveals the living presence but also implies their inseparable condition. The digital hails itself as a living cyborg.

Absence

Although the diectic point of a weather-vane in action, an example of an index for

Peirce, can be captured as digital data or on celluloid, this touch with nature that seems to operate without man, leaving only the machine, is an attraction absent in both theater and animation; both mark the stain, and also the truth, of the human sign in and upon nature.

This quality unites theater and animation in distinction to classical theories of cinema.

Bazin's insistence on our obsession with realism as a fundamental aesthetic lure of the cinema focuses on the camera as a fly on the wall and without a human operator in the studio. He writes, “All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.”73 Bazin is aware that this lure, this promise of absent man, always recoils back on itself to reveal mankind larger than ever, gazing back through the glowing red lens of a cyborg eye. In his “Theater and Cinema—Part Two,” Bazin writes,

“On the screen man is no longer the focus of the drama but will become eventually the center of the universe.”74 What is at stake between cinema and theater for Bazin is the actor and the camera. The theater, for Bazin, cannot pretend away a human subject as the cinema can by offering a place of substitution for the viewer. In the theater the actor remains undeniable, full of the potential to gaze over the footlights. The camera, on the other hand, promises a substitution, offering itself and its place to the viewer, offering the subject the position at the center of the universe. The advantage is undeniable as lure but it is also undermined by the digital image, which, as Doane makes clear, can only aspire to making

54 contact, being present. We now see images as made by our devices, an image no longer holds the lure of realism, “without the creative intervention of man,” as Bazin writes, and this crisis has forced film studies to scramble after new theories to explain cinema's attraction as its light shifts to the digital.75 What is essential about the fingerprint that Bazin describes is that it be discovered after a human's passing, it remains after. Rather than moving away from the index, perhaps a way to understand the shift in conceptions of the index around the digital revolution is to replace Bazin's fingerprint with Mickey's footprint, and find in Walt's passing performance a walking mouse.

Presence

Animation that makes its way into pro-filmic worlds –as one sees in such films as

Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and The Lord of the

Rings—has to contend with both the evidentiary glare of the photographic lens and the constructedness of the animator's pen in relation to each other. Something of the real impinges itself upon animation and something of the construct builds itself onto the real.

The revelation of the mechanism, as North would have it, or the “foregrounding of procedures,” as Hansen writes, arrives as an astonishing moment of realizing an absence in harmony with a presence. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis, 1988) we take pleasure in the details of shadow across Roger's animated body but as a spectator I am astonished, amazed at Bob Hoskins' performance opposite... nothing... a cartoon to be added later on.

Films that do not want to call out the toonishness of their animate characters, such as the case with The Lord of the Rings, depend upon another moment of recognized absence in the face of presence –the recognition of the camera operator.

Gollum makes his performance debut in the second installment of the Rings trilogy,

55 The Two Towers. The second to last shot is a nearly two-minute long, single-take following

Gollum's split personalities as they negotiate how to kill the traveling Hobbits he has promised to guide. It is a captivating performance and seals the narrative sense of the movie before the final shot rises above Gollum's lowly crawl to the top of the mountains, granting a view of the enemy's tower and the towering volcano side by side. The performance that prompts this image is certainly about betrayal, but it is also a play between a hand-held film, shot on location in the woods, and an animate creature's tormented crawl through dead pine needles. It is the play between absent man and captured nature that Bazin locates as a lure of realism. Two things stand out on tip-toe in this scene: 1) Gollum's feet are frequently cropped out of frame and 2) we are witnessing a camera-operator's lonely steps, following a performance that had been before and will be remade again, but is not (then) now.

Gollum's feet are cropped out of the frame for a practical reason. As a cartoon, his feet and hands do not actually disturb the grass and pine needles underfoot; he fails to make an impression, no footprints. To make the ground move in response to a body would require additional animation or pro-filmic tricks –such as bursts of air under the bed of forest loam.

Instead, the camera crops out his feet and focuses instead on Gollum's enormous eyes and the texture of Serkis's schizophrenic facial and vocal performance. This fact is a theatrical reversal, where theatrical practices once effected cinematic framing, now the cinematic framing effects the theatrical. In the early days of cinema, “cutting off the feet” of a performer, cropping part of her body, aroused anxiety in spectators. In Theater to Cinema,

Brewster and Jacobs find that for early cinematic audiences, “if larger-than-life-size figures are interpreted as closer to the audience than the screen, their lack of feet is a problem when there is no stage edge or footlight float to mask them.”76 No longer accustomed to such

56 devices as footlight floats, cutting off this theatrical performer's feet causes no alarm.

Perhaps this is why James Cameron found the facial performance and capture to be the locus of the holy grail in combining pro-filmic and digital animation.

The film follows Gollum's face and Serkis' facial performance, but our movement through the woods follow absent steps. We are astonished once we realize we are watching a camera-operator follow nothing in the woods but a previously marked out performance script, first laid down by Serkis, and then filmed without him. Once the charm of performance has worn off, there is the sense of the foregrounding of procedure and the lonely dance of the camera-operator, following a performance that will be. The camera frames an absent performance marked by the operator's presence as an index, both trace and diexis, tracing the past performance and pointing to the framed animate future of Gollum's final scene.

Walking

Movement, of course, lurks on the borders of such grand terms as absence and presence. But movement—and specifically human movement—is also always lurking in the index, whether in its hail, trace, or perception. To highlight this, Peirce lays out his descriptive definition of indexical signs in “The Theory of Signs,” with two examples of walking: “I see a man with a rolling gait. This is a probable indication that he is a sailor. I see a bowlegged man in corduroys, gaiters, and a jacket. These are probable indications that he is a jockey or something of the sort.”77 It is striking that his first example of an index is a type of walk, and furthermore, that his interpretation of the man’s profession from the gait demonstrates both indexical qualities of trace and deixis. The man’s rolling gait acts as a trace, a remnant from his time aboard a ship, but it is also deictic in so far as it hails

57 attention, as Peirce notes, “Anything which focuses the attention is an index,” and causes the onlooker to “use his powers of observation, and so establish a real connection between his mind and the object.”78 Peirce uses walking as his first two examples in order to demonstrate the dialectic between trace and deixis, diectic footprints. This indexical connection between humans marks a particularly useful object in studying both the lure and the signification of the cinema.

Peirce is not alone in employing the trope of walking in a theory of signs. Michel de

Certeau draws a comparison between walking and the speech act, concluding, “It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.”79 For de

Certeau, “there is a rhetoric of walking,” where turns and detours become “turns of phrase” and “stylistic figures.”80 What is important for de Certeau is that walking cannot be reduced to its “graphic trail,” its line of trajectory between points, because walking is expressive and singular. No matter how much control an urban space exerts upon human trajectories, the act of walking remains a potential “space of enunciation” for a unique, singular subject even as it follows worn scripts.

In Agency and Embodiment Carrie Noland similarly chases after the spirit of free agency that is birthed through scripted movement, or, in her own words, “through cultural frames.”81 Her larger project revolves around inscription and her exemplary object is the irreverent signature of a graffiti artist, a trace inscribed in spray paint. Between painted trace and performing body Noland looks to “gesture,” “as a reminder that movement is not purely expressive but is culturally shaped at every turn. That such a reminder is necessary is made evident by the increasingly abstract use of the term 'movement' in works that study new media and embodied perception in technological environments.”82 The “abstract use” Noland

58 is referring to is the materialist approach articulated by technologically minded theorists such as Friedrich Kittler, who focus on technological paradigms of performance, privileging the movement of the machine. Noland's own project, by contrast, seeks to articulate and map ways bodies negotiate their entanglement with technological materialities. What is striking are the succinct ways she links up movement with power and the agency of motions that define the human through our affects and gestures and steps: “The moving body of the graffiti writer suggested to me that innovation is more than mere chance, but also that agency cannot spring from an autonomous, undisciplined source. What I saw as I watched was that gestures, learned techniques of the body, are the means by which cultural conditioning is simultaneously embodied and put to the test.”83 Often obscured by its utilitarian use and its lack of a constant substrate for inscription, walking is often a forgotten gesture of inscription, a fact that de Certeau makes clear, “If it is true that forests of gestures are manifest in the streets, their movement cannot be captured in a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be circumscribed in a text.”84 None of this attention to walking is surprising when one considers that the human gait is a primary distinguishing feature of humanity and has been linked in evolutionary biology to the formation of the human mind. In 1977 Mary

Leakey and her team uncovered footprints formed by a pair of walkers that were 3.7 million years old, definitively ending a major debate in palaeo-anthropology by proving that bipedalism developed in hominids nearly one million years before the development of stone tools and a larger brain. In “Footprints in the Ashes of Time,” Leakey writes:

One cannot overemphasize the role of bipedalism in hominid development. It stands as perhaps the salient point that differentiates the forebears of man from other primates. This unique ability freed the hands for myriad possibilities –carrying, tool-making, intricate manipulation. From this single development, in fact, stems all

59 modern technology. Somewhat oversimplified, the formula holds that this new freedom of forelimbs posed a challenge. The brain expanded to meet it. And mankind was formed.85

Walking can be understood to function as an index of humanity, a person’s past and present and it can also be a space of enunciation through which a subject may express their individuality. As Noland similarly finds in the larger framework of gesture, walking is both scripted and provides the space for improvised enunciation and expression. This is why walking is so important to the world of animation which seeks to transform the nonhuman (animals, objects, the inanimate drawing of a human) into believable, humanlike characters.

Dreams

Alongside, in addition, or in opposition to semiotic formations of walking lie the spacelessness of dreams and journeys of the mind. De Certeau himself moves from linguistic constructions of walking to the immaterial world of dreams, a world often aligned with the cinema: “After having compared pedestrian processes to linguistic formations, we can bring them back down in the direction of oneiric figuration, or at least discover on that other side what, in a spatial practice, is inseparable from the dreamed place. To walk is to lack a place.”86

Alongside the lure of cinema is the curiosity, the fascination, the love for and belief that it can do some good, call out some utopic vision. I do not simply mean cinephilia, but the hope that a technology of communicative power such as cinema, could use the paradigms of performance to help form a vision of a place that is not yet, communities of the future. In his writings on photography, Walter Benjamin sought these moments and qualities, the aura of art that is tangible during shifts in

60 technological innovation. In two essays he famously isolates an instant of walking within a snapshot photograph. The section below is pulled from his “A Short History of Photography,” although a similar passage also appears in his more famous essay,

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Aller Kunstfertigkeit des Photographen und aller Planmäßigkeit in der Haltung seines Modells zum Trotz fühlt der Beschauer unwiderstehlich den Zwang, in solchem Bild das winzige Fünkchen Zufall, Hier und Jetzt, zu suchen, mit dem die Wirklichkeit den Bildcharakter gleichsam durchgesengt hat, die unscheinbare Stelle zu finden, in welcher. Im Sosein jener längstvergangenen Minute das Künftige noch heut und so beredt nistet, daß wir, rückblickend, es entdecken können. Es ist ja eine andere Natur, welche zur Kamera als welche zum Auge spricht; anders vor allem so, daß an die Stelle eines vom Menschen mit Bewußtsein durchwirkten Raums ein unbewußt durchwirkter tritt. Ist es schon üblich, daß einer, beispielsweise, vom Gang der Leute, sei es auch nu rim groben, sich Rechenschaft gibt, so weiß er bestimmt nichts mehr von ihrer Haltung im Sekundenbruchteil des >>Ausschreitens<<. Die Photographie mit ihren Hilfsmitteln: Zeitlupen, Vergrößerungen erschließt sie ihm. Von diesem Optisch-Unbewußten erfährt er erst durch sie, wie von dem Triebhaft-Unbewußten durch diePsychoanalyse.

In spite of all artistic skill of the photographer and of all the planning in the attitude of his model, the viewer feels an irresistible compulsion to look for, in such a picture, the small spark of chance, the here and now with which reality scorches the nature of the picture to find the unimpressive place. In the essence of that long ago minute the future so eloquently nests in the present that with hindsight we are able to discover it. It is a different nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye, so different most of all, that in the space that is interlaced with the consciousness of man enters one that is unconscious. It is already common practice, for example, that one holds himself accountable by the walk of people, if only vaguely, one knows nothing more of a person’s attitude in the split second of “striding- out.” Photography with its tools of slow motion and enlargement reveals it. One experiences this optical-unconscious through them as one experiences the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. (my translation)

In comparing a camera to the cure promised by psychoanalysis, Benjamin locates our

61 desires to manipulate time and space as animations afforded through slow motion and enlargement. These tools reveal a timeless optical space, one that operates apart from our own and it is akin to the timeless unconscious of psychoanalysis. Doane writes, “The unconscious stores all, relinquishes nothing, and is, most insistently, outside of time... it is perhaps not surprising that Freud nowhere expounds a full- fledged theory of temporality.”87 The optical unconscious is also outside of time and, as such, constructs an altered movement and space. But the still erupts into movement as Benjamin finds in old, long exposure pictures a reality so stirring it brings about the “unimpressive place,” the unimpressed space of theater, the live

“here and now,” which scorches through the absent past of the object to exist now, passing almost as the real thing. Couched inside all these observations about photography is a human step, a “striding-out,” separated by quotes, cut out, outside of time, crossing borders, neither exiting nor entering, simply <>.

I want to draw attention to the out, the outing, and the striding-out, as models for thinking beyond the lure of cinema to a coupling with its promise. Calling something out is to both hail it and to carve out a space for it. In an article on cinematic identification and its place in affect studies in recent film theory, Scott C.

Richmond begins with an animating question: “what is the relation between bodies in an audience and bodies onscreen?” And although he does not seek out a categorical answer he does insist that to think about the affective responses of the audience assumes or should re-assume questions of identitification via something like catharsis or empathy.88 Richmond finds that how we identify with and to affective movements can still be fruitfully explored through recourse to

62 psychoanalysis. I agree with Richmond's analysis but also find promise in the long forgotten questions of empathy and catharsis that once surrounded the stage.

Richmond's qualification of “screen” at the end of his opening query attaches at the end as an aesthetic qualifier that means almost specifically “not theater.” As cinematic spectator's we often assume that behind the screen, in historical time, lie theatrical stages. But the stage is often in front of the screen, between the audience and reflective surface. As film studies looks to affective responses in the audience, seeking out how movement generates impressions of reality, we should return to the physical relation between the seated audience and the free to move across the whole stage, the standing, the gesticulating, the entering, exiting, walking actor. But the actor is not alone in this script; she walks alongside the mobile camera-operator, walking after actors, framing steps. To replace Richmond's salvo: the question that animates this chapter, yet expects no definitive answer is: what is the relation between bodies in an audience and bodies “on”; on stage, on screen, on the phone, moving on? In other words, what is the relation between bodies performing and bodies consuming performance?

In addition to the actor and the camera operator, the animator can also occupy various sites and roles of performances. In 1968, Ryan Larkin completed his critically celebrated, Academy Award nominated cartoon, Walking. With his acute observations of human bipedal motion and his subsequent recreation of that movement through hand-drawn animation, Walking demonstrates how the animator’s eye can capture and deliver cinematic movement, perhaps revealing that cinematic vision is now the way we all see and perceive human movement. Although Larkin

63 employs a variety of animation techniques to compose his walking figures, the form of the film is composed of only two types of moving images: still images of people standing that are slowly moved into or enlarged and moving images of people walking, making hundreds of entrances and exits across the frame. The still images feature people standing still and looking out, as if they are staring at a passerby, and indeed they are, for as the camera moves into the image we realize that the passerby they stare at becomes the spectator or the audience. When the film cuts to images of solitary people walking, it is notable that many striding figures never advance in the frame, as each cell of animation rolls like a treadmill under their steps; although each footfall is unique (as the entire cartoon was drawn frame by frame), the steps themselves seem to compose the limits of the frame. Walking in Walking, then, becomes a technique for composing the limits of the cinematic frame while at the same time pointing to it. Walking is about cinematic motion that does not point to the frame so much as it steps up to it with the intention of (not) crossing over. It also posits the animator as being as adept at motion-capture as any camera or computer motion-capture system.

Delusions

Since Walking promotes the technical skill of the animator's eye, it is little surprise that the biographic film of Larkin's life should be a digital animation, as both Larkin's skill as animator and the digital share in a void of contact with their object but promise an unconscious hope nonetheless. This lack of contact with an object can bring about an uncanny response as new animation forms struggle to find their way towards impressing reality or towards new ways to disturb. The perfect-

64 but-not-quite-right look that registers as uncanny is often found in digital renderings of humans and is known among animators as “the uncanny valley.” The hypothesis was introduced in 1970 by Japanese robot maker Masahiro Mori and it contends that as automatons, robots, or animated human figures more closely resemble reality spectators have increased responses of revulsion.89 The “valley” refers to the spectrum of revulsion that corresponds to life-likeness. As an automaton approaches life-likeness (x-axis) the level of spectatorial acceptance (y-axis) dips into an uncanny valley, beyond acceptance into revulsion. The figuration of an iconic, celebrity face can easily lead to such responses, as the once human now assumes the mask of digital effigy. For example, Tom Hanks in the all digitally animate and motion-capture based film The Polar Express, evokes waves of uncanny responses as we adjust to this smooth animate version of a familiar face. The revulsion is an eruption of the unconscious, what Freud classifies as “the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”90 By something “long known”

Freud means what is known to the unconscious, such as “repressed infantile complexes.”91 What is terrifying for the subject is not the object itself, but the return, the rising of the unconscious, its movement into consciousness. In encounters with the uncanny, an unconscious aspect from the subject becomes grafted onto an object and that object then becomes, for the viewer, uncanny. According to Freud, the potential to create the uncanny sensation is already inherent in certain objects, objects that have the power to efface “the distinction between imagination and reality” and by any symbol that takes “over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes.”92

65 Whereas most animators seek to avoid the uncanny valley, Chris Landreth embraces it fully in his 2004 digital cartoon Ryan, which tells the story of Ryan

Larkin and his subsequent spiral into drug and alcohol addiction following the success of Walking. Landreth uses a collage of styles, composited in the digital realm, to pull the unconscious out, merging it with the optical-unconscious, animating the inside as the outside. The figures look like motion-captured digital avatars, but follow no actual motion trace. Without motion-capture, Landreth's figures fall quickly into the uncanny valley, right where he wants them. Ryan features uncanny digital recreations of Landreth interviewing Larkin about his life, his animations and his addictions. Landreth has described his animation style as

“psychological realism,”painting the emotional world on the outside. 93 With emotional scars made visible, Landreth's characters assume an almost zombie-like appearance, with emotional loss manifesting itself as holes in flesh, and monstrous, spikey neon cancers blooming out of scars. During one particularly striking moment in the film, Landreth shows Ryan one of his cherished possessions, an original still from Walking, a drawing Ryan has not seen since the day he drew it thirty-six years prior. In the film, Ryan Larkin’s digital, uncanny finger reaches out toward the drawn still and the two mediums of animation meet each other. The uncanny finger touches the still and caresses it. By calling out the still, Landreth’s film shatters the power of Walking –perhaps indicating the lack of motion in Ryan Larkin’s career.

Once the uncanny finger lifts up, however, the still figure suddenly jumps to life and it again begins to walk. Cinematic, cartoon motion is born out of a touch between the uncanny deixis and the cartoon still. Like dreams, these animations are

66 spaceless, remaining in constant circulation like two sides of a moebius strip, coming into contact only through form. At the conclusion of Landreth’s Ryan we see the digital version of Ryan Larkin panhandling on the streets of Montreal. A few years after the release of Walking the man behind it became homeless. For Larkin, walking transformed from a practice into a condition, the state of homelessness. Even if an animator can aspire to elegant motion-capture, the optical unconscious, like the psychical unconscious, remains fugitive, sought after, and often left out. Yet its repressions can erupt as either dreams or delusions, oftentimes both, turning the dreams of the animator in the delusions of the animated. Ryan Larkin crafted his animations with such precision, a precision that both benefited and suffered from his drug use. The drugs eventually took over as animator, forcing Ryan to wander, homeless, placeless, an animation deluded into believing himself an animator.

Gradiva

Similar to Benjamin's isolating the instant of the “striding-out,” Freud, notorious for avoiding comparisons between psychoanalytic discourse and film media, calls out another stilled step to illustrate various routes of the unconscious, its movements apart from and through time. In Delusion and Dream, Freud sets out to psychoanalyze a novel, claiming that, “Storytellers are valuable allies, and their testimony is to be rated high, for they usually know many things between heaven and earth that our academic wisdom does not even dream of.”94 Freud's discourse, however, dreams along the same routes as these storytellers and he aligns himself with artisans and the superstitious “ancients” in order to rally against the scientific claim that dreams are “purely a physiological process,” and “not expressive

67 movements.”95 For Freud, dreams are expressive movements, but so, too, are delusions that can animate a subject just as much as dreams fulfill a wish. What

Freud is seeking are those human movements that seem to occur apart from the body and to find meaning in them. Not simply an act of hermeneutics but an attempt to capture and set down into the great discourse of the unconscious. He seeks out the animating force in the frozen still of the unconscious realm. This is one reason why, perhaps, Freud not only set out to psychoanalyze Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva but placed the bas-relief of its titular character above his own desk. The story of

Gradiva, as summarized by Freud, revolves around a repressed archeologist and his delusional love for the stone figure of Gradiva, who, in turn, is a placeholder for his repressed childhood love. The young archaeologist follows his dreams to Pompeii where he believes he will be able to spot her singular footprint on the excavated ash.

In a reading of Gradiva at the end of Archive Fever, Derrida points out that the desire is also for the moment of presence, where the foot is still making the print, the leg still standing in ash.96 Derrida claims that this is Freud's desire as well, to time travel in search of that past, repressed moment. At the very end of Delusion and Dream

Freud articulates this wish most emphatically: “This was the wish, comprehensible to every archaeologist, to have been an eyewitness of that catastrophe of 79. What sacrifice would be too great, for an antiquarian, to realize this wish otherwise than through dreams!”97 Derrida writes that this is to suffer from archive fever, the exhaustion of science to preserve the past as for an eyewitness. Archive fever is as much a dream as a delusion: the archive depends as much upon destruction as a preservation and this realization fuels the fever to archive.

68 As a creature of motion-capture, Gollum, too, articulates a kind of archive fever, which also circulates around the catastrophic forces of volcanic nature. The ring of power that compels Gollum can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount

Doom, and despite his wish to save the precious ring for himself, his love and desire for the ring becomes the vehicle for its destruction as his final grasping movements take he and the ring down into the fiery magma. Without moving, Gradiva articulates the movement of a step out, just as Serkis' performance points to, as well as traces, movement beyond the frozen still of archival capture.

In an article questioning the role of the archive in the face of growing multi- media, Wolfgang Ernst aligns the digital ease of archival access as an overwhelming drama that threatens the archive: “While the stability of memory and tradition was formerly guaranteed by the printed text, dynamic hypertexts—the textual form of the internet—will turn memory itself into an ephemeral, passing drama.”98 Ernst's fear is that the promise of digital accessibility will threaten a particular concept of the archive by theatricalizing it, turning it into performed space. What Ernst encounters is an archival crisis because he grants a particular stability to textual archives that the digital threatens to cast into theater and performance, forgetting that dramas always already pass from and through archives, repeatedly. Rebecca Schneider has argued for attending to the fact that an archive “is a house of and for performative repetition, not stasis,” and this attention to the ritual of access to archives, and the performative gestures of admittance and dismissal, readily refute such notions of a static archive.

Schneider presents the idea that alongside the project of submitting performance to the archive we should also be “situating the archive as another kind of

69 performance.”99 The theater can be imagined as a place for preserving both the space and the pass through time as it moves both along, step by step. Situating performance as the blueprint of humanity, motion-capture makes similar claims, preserving and moving along, enunciating an archival space for multi-media and performance. And like Gradiva, the captured-motion gives rise to cinematic delusions and dreams.

The crisis Ernst locates in the archive is not in its becoming theatrical but that the archive faces so many users as to obliterate it with pure access, but, then, if it were purely accessible it would not require preservation. Performance of access is always also apart of the destructive nature of the archive, which is why it remains important to think archives as

“another kind of performance.” Converting the archive into the audience brings Plato's concern over the place of tragedy in his day into vivid contrast with our contemporary distrust of the dominate communication media. This is exactly why confusing archive and performance is so productive, as it demonstrates the need to balance access and preservation, which, to borrow a term from Chris Salter, is entangled with both performance and technology. Schneider notes that Derrida relies upon theatrical language and a favorite reference to Hamlet's father in order to substantiate “his argument about the archive's reliance on repetition and its promise for the future.”100 Despite the archival promise of preservation, nothing lasts forever and not everything is preserved, everything passes eventually. In this vein, Schneider beautifully sums up Jacques Derrida's theatrical view of archives as “theatres for repertoires of preservation.”101 Archives stage the many ways to preserve media beyond the human lifespan even in light of the inevitable destruction that preservation demands. In other words, theater supports the archive's promise for the future:

70 without it, there is no preservation. Set in stone, Gradiva's step is preserved but it still points to some moving matter and in this act of pointing, moves a little.

The tip of Gradiva's foot both touches down on and returns to the very stone from which it is called out. In her frozen step, carved out, relieved from yet still connected to the backing stone, the light step of Gradiva illustrates the tensions between that which preserves and that which transforms, the life-like and the live, the archive and the repertoire. Called out of the stone is more than a figure of a

Roman woman and her elegant step, her striding out; her relief points out many psychoanalytic theories: from the fetish of the high heeled foot which connects to the sexuality of pert buttocks, to the archeological process that Freud so loved to compare to his field, to the violent, contingent eruption of Vesuvius as a traumatic event that repressed Pompeii. Despite her seeming distance from performance,

Gradiva illustrates the layers and sometimes hidden layers of movement that erupt around inert matter, being both animated by and animating people. Rebecca

Schneider has shown how statuary and the still not only contain but magnify the live.

In her reading of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian director whose method would greatly impact Hollywood, Schneider locates his position that “a 'living art' is, perhaps ironically, based on the performer's ability to articulate and hold a still –to hold the still live.”102 In delusions and dreams, the still Gradiva moves without seeming to move, points to so many theories and illustrates so many tensions, capturing the dynamics of motion inside a stone step.

Motion-capture illustrates how the digital shift in cinema has refocused attention toward the theater and the theatrical. Yet Gradiva illustrates how these

71 theatrical tensions of movement in the archive are ancient entanglements that have stayed with us from the theaters of Athens through the printing, recording, and capturing fever of the Western archive. Although the digital seems a new step for the cinema, it is that old familiar step out of theater.

72 Light 2 The Lightest Distinction

“The theatre,” says Baudelaire, “is a crystal chandelier.” If one were called upon to offer in comparison a symbol other than this artificial crystal-like object, brilliant, intricate, and circular, which refracts the light which plays around its center and holds us prisoners of its aureole, we might say of the cinema that it is the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen. —André Bazin, What is Cinema?103

How we see is crucial to a Western understanding of theater. In the theatre –from the

Greek theatron or “seeing place”—light's granting of sight to the spectator is often a given tautology; it goes without saying that light allows us to see. As the above epigraph illustrates, however, the conditions of illumination allow us to distinguish between both modes of performance that cross from the real to the aesthetic as well as to distinguish between the arts themselves, as light and its reflective materials generate classifications between media to separate theater, film, television, and the digital. This essay challenges assumptions that alight between moving image media and theater by examining, indeed looking into the common light sources that unite them. Focusing on differences between the

73 live and the life-like, such as theater and animation, often ends up obscuring what they

emphatically share: architecture to shade the sun and a love for the glow and projection of

electric light. This essay also traces a small, theatrical historiography of lighting tools and

techniques in order to rearrange media distinctions based on light and the power that brings

it to vision. I focus on two transitions in luminous media within the theater –the shift from

gas to electric light and the shift from real to digital light—exploring how the modern turn

to electricity and the contemporary digital revolution extend and mirror each other. By

putting pressure on the assumptions we have about light and its actuality and considering

light as an assemblage of beings and things with dispersed levels of connected agency as

well as an aesthetic ensemble that includes human labor, I challenge the distinctions that

arise between the live and the life-like. To look into the lights is to see them as they are

rather than what they project or pretend to be. In order to re-examine distinctions between

the stage and the screen, I offer the commands the actors in Peter Handke's Offending the

Audience speak in order to disavow their performance as a performance: “You don't see

brightness pretending to be other brightness. You don't see any light that pretends to be

another light.”104

This is more than a playful phenomenological approach to performance media; it is one of (new) material and ecological concern. One need only view an electrically luminous earth from a nightly orbit to see the material impact of the electrical assemblage, a projection that also maps onto nations and shines brightest within imperial borders. This global array of light resonates within theatrical practice as contemporary theater adds more light sources to the scenic designer's toolbox. Running parallel to these explorations is the proposition that the theater persists in the face of competing media due to its ability to guarantee their

74 futures through a repertoire of theatrical light sources, design, and the space of multi-media.

These themes and historical moments are explored through Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns: a post-electric play (2012) and its many media inspirations. Developed with the Civilians, a

New York based documentary theater company, Mr. Burns stages these questions, while extending the specificity of electric light to the very narratives that flicker on our television screens. Washburn's play re-stages television's most enduring (if not endearing) American family, The Simpsons, beyond the collapse of the grid and nuclear catastrophe. As the longest running animated television show in history (first aired in December, 1989 – present), The Simpsons claims canonical status through sheer perseverance. Matt Groening presented The Simpsons as a classic family sitcom narrative featuring an ill-tempered father,

Homer Simpson, a weak-willed but firmly protective mother, Marge, and a cadre of children that initiate various misadventures. In the years since their 1989 premiere, The Simpsons have undergone narrative and media evolutions (crossed into film with critical aplomb) while remaining, essentially the same animate icons, unchanging, ageless. In the first act of

Washburn's play, survivors of the electric Apocalypse gather around a fire, comforting themselves and contemplating the catastrophe that has reigned down around them. As they share information, we surmise that an extended blackout led to an eventual shut down and subsequent meltdown of our power grid's radioactive cooling towers. We witness in the post-electric how the memory of a certain episode of The Simpsons is gathered together, performed, cared for, and moved through time in a theatrical game of telephone that is inflected by the horrors of the electric Apocalypse. Under the glow of electric lights pretending to be other forms of light, Mr. Burns presents the theater as a scrappy protagonist, surviving and extending electronic media via adaptations in lighting.

75 In the first act of Washburn's play, survivors of the electric Apocalypse comfort themselves with memories of The Simpsons and the glow of false fire; simple reflection transforms into the soothing theatrical enterprise of storytelling. The second act of Mr.

Burns moves seven years into the post-electric where re-enacting lost television episodes has become a favorite pastime and a central practice within an emerging entertainment economy.

Seven years on, the survivors around the fire now comprise a post-Apocalyptic theater troupe. Trying to stage The Simpsons “just right,” leads to theatrical competition as different companies seek to rekindle memories of television through authentic re-enactment of the bygone flicker. Fleshly humans, embodying the cartoons of The Simpsons, certainly distracts from the electric glow that hovers around Washburn's play, but as the audience watches the theater troupe rehearse the cartoon, the real lights of the theater move to the periphery, highlighting the electric present. Drawing attention to the reality of light often reveals a theatrical double waiting in the wings. Within theater(s), light is always pretending. Outside of the theater, in the home, the television shines as a window onto alternate horizons, obliterating distance. It appears as if electric light is always pretending to be another form of light, too. Does steady electric light pretend to be fire, a lightning bolt, the sun, or synaptic connections? In its unceasing flow, electric light eclipses the cycles of the sun and burns on into twilight, usurping the role once granted to fire. With the flip of a switch, the light also pretends not to emanate from a vast network of mining operations, power plants, electrical lines, and fixtures.

I will return to Mr. Burns momentarily, but because it is a play that troubles the distinction between theater and television, it is important first to explore the luminous distinctions between bodies onstage and those onscreen. The differences between moving

76 images and theater each pivot upon the matter, or rather the undecidable immateriality, of light. Both matter and energy, material photon and waveform pulse, the uncertain nature of light is the limit whereby we distinguish real matters and plays of light. In recent film scholarship that looks to motion as the new index of cinematic impressions, words such as real and actual come to align themselves with movement. This emphasis on cinematic motion springs from Christian Metz, for whom the movement of light is real, whereas the play of light is light pretending to matter. But isolating and extracting movement from the play of light is not a seamless operation. What Metz reveals is less the reality of movement than light's status as both a matter of reality and a virtual impression: “In the cinema the impression of reality is also the reality of the impression, the real presence of motion.”105

The question of what moves, the reflective surface or light itself, is often the decisive point upon which we assume the distinctions between the life-like animate image and live theater.

Duration is crucial to this distinction, as cinematic movement is born out of the quick interplay of instants strung together. In the theater, light can maintain a consistent luminosity as the reflective materials (bodies, costumes, props, scenery, etc.) provide movement, whereas the moving image relies upon shifting instants of light over the fixed surface of the screen. This is an aesthetic distinction that scholars of both media and theater studies often agree upon. In “Moving Away from the Index,” film scholar Tom Gunning labels this a crucial disciplinary divide: “Theater, for instance, makes use of real materials, actual people and things, to create a fiction world. Cinema works with images that possess an impression of reality, not its materiality. This distinction is crucial.”106 In his phenomenological study of theater, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Bert O. States names the virtuality of images an “elementary fact,” which distinguishes theater from the other arts

77 through the use of actual materials, where theater “consist[s] to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be,” as opposed to cinema's luminous pretense to matter.107

Theatrical things, curiously, are “what they seem to be,” as States writes, but similarly to the cinema, the light of theater also appears as another brightness.

Light pretending to be other matter is the very definition of virtuality that Anne Friedberg traces from Latin to the digital in The Virtual Window, her expansive study of screen and light: “the term 'virtual' serves to distinguish between any representation or appearance... that appears 'functionally or effectively but not formally' of the same materiality as what it represents.” Friedberg acknowledges the materiality of light but, similarly to Gunning and

States, she emphasizes its pretense to materiality as the dividing factor, where the virtual maintains “a second-order materiality, liminally immaterial.”108 Even if one emphasizes the material side of light (its need for a reflective surface in order to enter visibility or the palpable, striking radiation of its rays), it remains a distinguishing limit between how things really are and a virtual impression due to its existence at the very threshold of matter and pulse. The very undecidability of such distinctions also, curiously, reveals and maintains them.

As moving images venture beyond the walls of the cinema, this luminous distinction between the real and the virtual is heightened in theater and performance. Mr. Burns playfully stages this “crucial distinction,” as electric light maintains constant luminosity while pretending to be other forms of light over the course of the play's three acts. To emphasize the luminous distinction between stage and screen, Washburn's notes request lighting schemes that do not shift (in act 1, a fire; in act 2, daylight; and in act 3, interior after nightfall lit with ostensibly non-electric sources), all staged with electric light

78 pretending, in some way or another, to be another brightness.109 The trick of light then, is to disappear into the fact that it brings visibility, a trick achieved through its speed and association with the instantaneous. For example, light is most noticeable when it unexpectedly bursts into view and when it suddenly goes out. Washburn draws attention to the lights by narrating an apocalyptic, radioactive blackout and an eventual rekindling of the electric flame. For these reasons I focus my analysis on Washburn's opening notes and the

'book' ends of the first production of her self-described post-electric play. That both the theater and electronic media rely upon “brightness pretending to be other brightness” points to the luminous connections between theater and electronic images. In Washburn's play, theater winks not from the wings but from the electric grid, revealing what must come next as well as what has already happened in the surrounding glow. Washburn's play hides the light source as ostensibly other yet also hails it, forcing the audience's gaze up into the grid to prove that the electric glow is still with us despite the play’s premise, while what is seen onstage and onscreen is also a projection of light.

Traditional distinctions between stage and screen have held within delineations of labor for over a century, with cinematic projection emphasizing a non-moving, non-active screen whereas theatrical light projection illuminates an active play space. Yet in 2008, projection design was incorporated as a trial membership position into the theatrical United Scenic

Artists labor union. This trial (which has been extended through July 2013) seems prompted by the affordability and flexibility of digital cameras, editing and animating software, and digital projectors, as well as the desire of designers to present a digital, mobile life surrounded by the moving image. A century after it dramatically altered the economic dominance of theater, projection returns (or did it ever leave?) for safekeeping as another

79 light source among many; no longer the cinematic wonder, the moving image joins the theater grid, not only as one more instrument to light the stage, but also as an instrument that maintains a certain divide in theatrical design. It is important to note that theatrical projection design includes the use of monitors, which, unlike projection, aim the light source and moving image directly at the viewer. The confusion of projector and monitor, an often- crucial distinction between cinema and television in media studies, points toward a tendency in theater to collapse the moving image into a comprehensive virtual category, regardless of the apparatus that produces and/or supports the image. In this way, Washburn allows the light source to speak for itself. If one considers the electric glow of television a light source

–or as Jacques Rancière describes it, “The set with in-built light”—then the re-staging of

The Simpsons also allows the source to speak, uttering the hum of electric and ecological doom.110 In The Future of the Image, Rancière offers a warning not to place too much emphasis on the light source of television, “The nature of the amusement television offers us, and of the affects it produces in us, is independent of the fact that the light derives from the apparatus,” but Washburn's narrative raises its eyebrows at such a warning as she presents the amusement of television as the story of its light source, beginning with its destruction.111

Electric Ensemble

In Mr Burns: a post-electric play, all moving, animated images lose their mediated

form, transmission, and archive in the collapse of the electric grid. One of the most

influential media scholars, Marshal McLuhan, similarly collapses moving images into one

immense medium: electricity, writing, “When electric speed further takes over from

80 mechanical movie sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media become loud and clear.”112 With these words from Understanding Media, McLuhan proclaimed the electrical as the inheritor of industrialization's mechanical logos. In order to illuminate his proclamation that “the medium is the message,” McLuhan reads electric light as pure information, capable of replacing human associations in time and space with the promise of the instant delivered at the speed of light.113 According to McLuhan, new digital media are simply re-articulations of an old electric message: to deliver information at or as the speed of light. To give voice to information as the speed of light, McLuhan famously re-imagines

Shakespeare's Romeo before a television set as he ponders, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? … She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?” (Romeo and

Juliet, 2.2.1-12)114

Considering what Washburn's post-electric play reveals about media and performance, we first have to approach media through the ubiquitous lens of electricity, the spread of materials that form electricity as an assemblage of matter (animate and inert) as well as what might be called electricity's “ontology” of speed, instantanaeity, and mathematical precision. The latter is what Philip Auslander relates to disappearance and the ephemerality of performance in Liveness, his essential exploration of electronic media's effects upon theater and performance. Auslander also places his “electronic ontology” within quotes, but follows immediately with a qualification about the material distinction, parenthetically asserting: “these initial observations will not pertain to film, of course, whose ontology is photographic rather than electronic.”115 As the digital revolution advances, however, the cinematic shifts from chemical to electronic image capture. The electronically produced image is the point of convergence between the materials that deliver

81 instantaneity and its reflection, where the light speaks for itself as matter of fact, or as the fact of matter. Auslander explores how media appropriates and recasts the ephemerality of theater and performance. As Rebecca Schneider makes clear, however, this dismisses what remains of the body and performance, missing what bodies themselves record.116 The electronic image proposes that as we think past disappearance into what remains of performance, such thinking might also be accompanied by thinking about electrical remains beyond (before, after, and out of reach of) electrical disappearance. The electronic image arrives through screens, threatening disappearance as it flows on the currents of electricity, yet behind that threat of disappearance is a vast assemblage of remains that also shape the image, including human bodies in service of the electric grid.

Washburn's play begins after the fate of the electronic image is realized and when its electric form reveals itself as ecological destruction. This in turn births a sort of electric nostalgia, which quickly motivates the play, turning the theater into a scrappy protagonist that seeks to rekindle the lost electric flame. In addition to theater itself, light could be considered the play's star, since the movement across acts does not rely upon continuous characters. Instead the play focuses on the progression of light; “All illumination is from ostensibly non-electric sources,” instructs Washburn. This leaves the matter of the light source undetermined, whereas its effects, its illusions, are outlined by act: “The first act takes place by firelight, outdoors. / The second act takes place in an interior under a skylight in the afternoon. / The third act takes place after nightfall, in an interior stage, lit with non- electric instrumentation: candles and oil lamps, probably, or gas.”117 Washburn's description of her play is found above a chalkboard in the lobby of Washington D.C.'s Woolly

Mammoth Theater, (upon which audience members scrawl apocalyptic epigraphs, like Bart

82 in the opening credits of each episode of The Simpsons): “Mr. Burns is about the evolution of a particular species of nostalgia from a form of self-soothing...to a commodity... to a vehicle for digesting the really enormous change from a pre- to a post-apocalyptic society.”118 Although the program notes focus on Washburn's interest in the survival and progression of narrative, the vague labeling of the play's central figure, “a particular species of nostalgia,” offers additional candidates from the television to the resources of electric power to the lifestyle of an illuminated America.

The “thing” that is lost or longed for, electricity, is so complex an entity it can only be conceived of in relation to its parts. Some of the fragments are the media that depend upon electricity for every stage of its existence across production, distribution and transmission, and reception, such as the animation, video transfer, television broadcast, and domestic viewing of The Simpsons. Those parts, then, come to stand in for the whole without being able to describe or form that totality. The failure to comprehend this totality stems from the gigantic nature of the electric assemblage: its countless parts and processes; its unweighable mass of transformers, wires, and poles; and its unfathomable consumption and circulation of energy. In On Longing, Susan Stewart similarly locates this metaphorical gap in the gigantic, “What often happens in the depiction of the gigantic is a severing of the synecdoche from its referent or whole.”119 Electricity, then, and the nostalgia for it in post- apocalyptic times, belongs to a realm of longing linked to the giant, the sublime, and environmental surroundings, as if in competition (or alignment) with Nature. The particularity of the species that interest Washburn are these great giants of human creation, from the network of narrative (such as the lost electric archives and fragmented memories of

The Simpsons) to the ubiquitous spread of electricity, and Mr. Burns traces all of their

83 survival, together, in the face of eradication.

Yet despite its potential death, the gigantic quality of the electric grid grants a kind of life to its component parts, challenging both human and subject-centered ways of thinking about agency. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett explores how agency is dispersed across synechdotal parts as she places the gigantic electrical grid under her vital materialist lens.

Building from Deleuze's theory of the assemblage, Bennett elucidates an assemblage’s dispersed agency and materiality:

Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. … And precisely because each member actant maintains an energetic pulse slightly 'off' from that of the assemblage, an assemblage is never a stolid block but an open- ended collective, 'a non-totalizable sum.' An assemblage thus not only has a distinctive history of formation but a finite life span.120

Right at the point of mortality, where things have a finite life, Bennett writes, “The electrical power grid offers a good example of an assemblage.”121 Like Washburn, Bennett begins at the point of electrical collapse. Less extreme than the projected future of

Washburn's apocalyptic play, Bennett’s example of the 2003 Northeastern U.S. blackout is illustrative of the complex relationship between people and things, technology and politics, that construct an assemblage such as electric light and power.

Bennett's reading of the blackout, locates within the electric grid a cascade of overloads caused by an imbalance between two intertwined forms of energy: the proper purchasable flow of electrons and the unmarketable reactive power crucial to maintaining the pressure of electric current. The key to Bennett's argument is the difficulty in commodifying reactive power, which allows the market to throw the balance of voltage and reactive power off to the dangerous point of power failure: “Reactive power, vital to the

84 whole grid, proved a commodity without profit and thus came in short supply.”122 The maintenance of this balance reveals the grid as a lengthy list of parts that only partially expresses the “particular species of nostalgia” within Washburn's play as it fails to include the mundane ways electricity affects our lives. Bennett writes, “the electric grid is better understood as a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood,” a list that neglects even the endless appliances and fixtures that exist solely in relation to electric power.123 Similarly,

Washburn's play comprises an assemblage of theatrical materials that construct not only new places and times, but lights that pretend to emanate from assemblages apart from the electric grid, imaging a volatile mix of wood, revery and memory, the sun, oil, wick, lamp, all illuminated by fire.

Alongside the concept of the assemblage is that of the aesthetic ensemble. In addition to the giant assemblage of the electrical grid, the play and the production highlight musical, theatrical, and authorial ensembles,. In the lobby of Mr Burns, the call that “the house is now open” is followed by the first sounds of music. A string quartet covers Daft

Punk's electronic musical masterpiece, “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger,” adapting the singular robotic mantra into a classical ensemble. The house music flows from the lobby into the theater. The pre-show set of Steven Cosson's 2012 production presents no dividing curtain, revealing a dark and empty stage. The props and set of the post-electric play appear lifeless as gray inanimate objects. The audience opens their programs. On the origins of Mr

Burns, or “How it Got Here,” Washburn writes,

This play was developed with the investigative theater group The

85 Civilians. Much of the material in the first act is arranged from a number of generative sessions with the actors: Quincy Bernstine, Maria Dizzia, Gibson Frazier, Matt Maher, Jenny Morris, Sam Wright, and Colleen Werthmann. This play also contains material approximated from the Simpson's episode “Cape Feare,” itself a parody of the Martin Scorsese movie Cape Fear, itself a remake of the original movie Cape Fear. Night of the Hunter is a mild influence on everything.124

In order to highlight narrative's movement across time, Washburn's play focuses upon an ensemble of actors (including textual actors), rather than a collection of characters. The ensemble is also echoed in the layers of narrative and media diversity that trace adaptations from Night of the Hunter to The Simpsons, dispersing authorship beyond a single individual to an assemblage of humans and things and an ensemble of authors and texts. The mounting aesthetic ensembles allow electricity to emerge as an enveloping assemblage among many ecologies that form the “particular species of nostalgia.” As the aesthetic ensembles multiply, their dependence and relation to the greater electrical assemblage is revealed as the post-electric world yearns to keep the record and spark of electricity alive.

The lights dim to the beat of Britney Spears' pop song “Toxic,” signaling the start of the show through an interplay of electric sound and light. The audience hums along, “With a taste of a poison paradise, I’m addicted to you, Don’t you know that you’re toxic, And I love what you do,” before its accompaniment falters as the song crashes into electronic distortion, noise. Then, finally there is silence as the speakers die in the electric apocalypse. Darkness floods the auditorium.

The lights rise first inside a barrel, the unmistakable slow electric fade-in transforms into a staged fire. A group of bodies gather around the glow, some distant and thoughtful, and others huddling close to the fake flames. We thus begin with attraction, like moths

86 drawn to flames. The flames animate the closest bodies, sparking conversation and memory, giving way to the first line: One character, Matt, utters the first line: “It starts... the episode starts with Bart getting letters saying 'I'm going to kill you Bart.”125 The characters struggle to piece the episode together from memory. The drama, the story surrounding this scene, is the only way to access The Simpsons. Recounting the episode becomes a distraction for a group of people much more preoccupied with friends and family, many of whom were lost along with television in the electric apocalypse. This episode becomes the central narrative, the central “species of nostalgia” that Washburn's play enacts across time as it evolves from

“a form of self-soothing...to a commodity... to a vehicle for digesting the really enormous change from a pre- to a post-apocalyptic society.”126 Recorded improvisations provide the foundation for the play's construction and the choice of episode was, for Washburn and the

Civilians, obvious based on greatest familiarity or “greatest recall.”127 As an audience member, I too found this choice “obvious,” as the same episode shines in my memory, unforgettable, particularly theatrical and, as it turns out, related to the history of electric light in theater. Although the play highlights these theatrical qualities, this parodic episode presents a tale of adaptation and television’s reflection on its theatrical histories and legacies of light, told through the ensemble of the yellow-hued (yet seen as white, like the yellow incandescent glow of electric light bulbs), American family.

“Cape Feare,” from The Simpsons' fifth season, is a slick, complex twenty-two minutes of U.S. television, offering many narrative analogies that assist Washburn's project to follow a particular species of nostalgia as it moves onstage and across a traumatic catastrophe. Something of the theater surrounds this episode; its attempt at parodying and adapting is inherently theatrical. As in every opening segment, The Simpsons' daily routine

87 end with each colliding in front of the TV only to be the target of another animated prank.

The family collisions at the start of “Cape Feare” unwind into a chorus kick-line framed by circus rings, with an ever-growing number of performers joining the animated family in theatrical spectacle. Scattered throughout “Cape Feare,” is the work of Gilbert and Sullivan,

London's most lucrative theatrical writing duo when electric light entered the theater in

1881.. The characters’ memory of the episode, as it veers into theatrical topsy-turvydom with Gilbert and Sullivan, becomes central to Washburn's play:

MATT: That's right, they [the Simpsons] drive through a cactus field singing Gilbert and Sullivan 'three little something something school girls we! 'Three Little Maids from school are we! Something something something something! They're singing Gilbert and Sullivan JENNY: Because doesn't... doesn't, at the end MATT: Because at the end, at the very end, Sideshow Bob performs HMS Pinafore. The entire, the entire Gilbert and Sullivan opera.128

Through Gilbert and Sullivan, The Simpsons claim the first electric theater, the Savoy –the contracted home of the musical pair—as an historical predecessor. The musical, episodic, short-segment based vaudeville show is often understood to have been surmounted by television, but the popular appeal of the fully produced musicals of Gilbert and Sullivan as well as the Savoy's early adoption of electricity offer television a popular, electric, theatrical predecessor rooted as a writer's medium. As Washburn's play illustrates, the theater also provides a luminous present and future for electronic images, as the legacy of the electric

Savoy remains visible in the electric grids that replaced gas chandeliers.

Many of these theatrical nods within the “Cape Feare” episode circle around a recurrent guest character, the killer clown, Sideshow Bob, whose murderous rage is born out of distinctions in both aesthetics and media. He loathes the popular chum of television and

88 yearns for the gravitas of theatrical tragedy and comedy. For Sideshow Bob, Bart Simpson epitomizes not only the viewer, but also the champion of television. Under the crash of lightning and in a cramped jail cell, Sideshow Bob scribbles death threats to Bart, inked in his own blood. That is both how the episode and Washburn's play begins, with the clown’s threats to Bart:

MATT: It starts... the episode starts with Bart getting letters saying 'I'm going to kill you Bart.'129

A recurring guest within the narrative universe of The Simpsons, we first meet

Sideshow Bob as a dejected artist, cast into the role of sideshow clown by an uncultured

American audience. He speaks with classical diction as he grumbles about his work under the shadow of one of television's most popular clowns, Krusty. Sideshow Bob is also a clown, but his ridiculous, vaulting hair and oversized feet are no wig and costume. His physical features remind us of a classic circus clown, whereas television's Krusty clearly wears a colorful wig and makeup to become a clown. It is as if Sideshow, like the theater, claimed the real in the face of television's appropriation of the live. His desire to emerge from the shadow of Krusty is fueled by his more authentic clown-ness; born like a clown, his vengeance is also spurned by the idea of inheritance. As he naturally looks clownish,

Bob wants to inherit the spotlight, not the sideshow. Bob wants to be the star, but his love of authenticity and history cast him into the role of sideshow, and this shift from the spotlight offers the justification for his attempts to murder. The generic American scamp, Bart, who again becomes the target of his vengeance in “Cape Feare”, frequently spoils Bob’s evil antics. As a substitute for Krusty in the killer clown's eyes, Bart comes to represent television (itself generically American).

89 Sideshow Bob's narrative offers one mode for thinking about the relationship of and competition between media: fatal contests for applause and audience shares. Indeed both jockey reality and illusion by traversing the aesthetic spheres of entertainment and art.

Auslander writes of the usurpation of theater by electronic media in just such fatal terms:

“Television, as parasite, strangled its host by offering itself not as extension of the theatrical experience but as an equivalent replacement for that experience.”130 Schneider recognizes a similar trope when she writes about “medial leaps,” from theater to photography being read as a break in loyalty, “One medium recalls another medium by means, in fact, of betrayal.”131 Although theater keeps on, what is strangled out of it is the mass popularity that Bart Simpson now enjoys. But in Mr. Burns the theater isn't strangled, it is rather relegated to the Sideshow, and it grows murderous as the televised Bart and his millions of fans keep it there. Bob’s fatalistic language expresses the murderous and festering rage that results from the disloyalty surrounding distinctions between media.

The Flame and the Spark

In the television episode, the theater is also the reason for Sideshow Bob's failure to kill Bart, as he performs the entire HMS Pinafore as Bart's final request, allowing the houseboat to float from Terror Lake right into the arms of the Springfield Police. In addition to his ego, it is because of Gilbert and Sullivan that Sideshow Bob fails. From 1871 to 1896 they were the most popular theatrical writing team in London when the electric light came to save the theater from gaslight and the dangers of fire. In addition to light operas, the Savoy

Theater was the first English theater to work with the new medium of the electric light paving the way for the electrically-lit television studio. If television claims Gilbert and

90 Sullivan's electric Savoy Theater as forebear, then what sideshow route did theater take, if any? Although interior theaters are electric today, this old art form can be slow to change, which makes it especially good at archiving its lighting techniques and practices. In opposition to the electric Savoy stood Henry Irving's gas lit Lyceum Theater. Offering dramatic texts instead of light operas, Irving not only pioneered lighting design but also refused electricity as anything other than one more tool in a light and property designer's tool box. Called “the first English producer to make an art of stage lighting,” Irving's resistance to the electric light may not simply have been a Luddite's response to the latest fashion, insisting as he did, upon the virtues of gaslight and his own use of electricity as a novelty.132 Irving's preferences for gas and his insistence upon its place in theatrical illumination present another route by which the theater historically distinguishes itself from electronic media. .

Literally an actor's theater, Irving was a producer as well as a star actor and innovative designer, known for his exceptionally crafted, if overly sentimental, lighting designs. Irving was an accessible socialite, straddling Victorian distrust of the stage with a social grace that made him the first actor to receive the honor of knighthood. Sir Henry

Irving's success paralleled the Savoy Theater’s success. However, Irving never followed suit in installing electric lighting, instead persisting in using gas lighting till his death, itself a curiosity noted in theater history texts.133 Despite his rapacious gift for correspondence, very little in the way of a descriptive defense justifies his commitment to gaslight. A biography written by Irving's grandson, Lawrence, mentions subtlety and control as the primary reasons for Irving's attachment to gas illumination. His grandson hints at Irving’s attraction to fire, recounting how a near-mad Irving throws out the imposing electric light to

91 restore the subtle flame (all of this occurs some nine years after the Savoy first flicks on the electric light): “Daly, when he took the theatre, had installed electric stage lighting. Irving had observed its effect, and as soon as Daly had departed he threw it out; for the subtleties of lighting of which was such a master, gas was the only medium.”134 Irving's manager at the

Lyceum, Bram Stoker, finds illumination split among various departments. In his Personal

Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker writes, “A gas light or an electric light is to be arranged by the engineer of that cult, whilst an oil lamp or a candle belongs to properties.

The traditional laws which govern these things are deep seated in trade rights and customs and are grave matters to interfere with.”135 At the time, both light sources had their advantages and disadvantages: the electric light made the instantaneous transition possible in the theatre, flooding the stage or darkening the house at the flick of a switch, whereas gas lighting required a tremendous team of lighters and, like theater's distinction to electronic media, required more subtle shifts in light design. Gas lighting, in other words, favored the steady light that distinguishes theatre from the luminous flow of electronic images, and

Irving seemed to know this before electricity began to dominate the production, distribution, and reception of moving images.

Constant, controlled flame inspires a healthy reverie, as anyone captivated before a campfire can attest. Washburn's play begins before an open flame that sparks soothing nostalgic recollection. Unlike the dreamscape attributed to the cinematic screen, the stage commands a conscious reverie that is supported by fire. In his lectures on the gaze, Jacques

Lacan writes of fire as intimately linked to our reflection upon the distance between what we see and what is: “The essence of the relation between appearance and being, which the philosopher, conquering the field of vision, so easily masters, lies... in the point of light –the

92 point of irradiation, the play of light, fire, the source from which reflections pour forth.”136

Fire not only radiates light and heat, it is also a source for inspiring reverie and reflection, conscious thinking upon both the past and puzzles of the future. Forty years before Lacan, in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard sought to replace the study of dreams with the study of reverie, turning psychoanalysis upon the pursuits of the conscious intellect in relation to the material world.137 Bachelard writes of the reverie in galactic, luminous terms:

“The dream proceeds on its way in linear fashion, forgetting its original path as it hastens along. The reverie works in a star pattern. It returns to its center to shoot out new beams.

And, as it happens, the reverie in front of the fire, the gentle reverie that is conscious of its well-being, is the most naturally centered reverie.”138 With these reflections on flame in mind, it is little wonder that Irving sought to maintain a gas lit stage and sparks the televisual reveries of Mr. Burns' opening act. Although Mr. Burns does not deliver the subtle play of fire, rather mimicking it and the reflection is precipitates, by presenting scenes that are ostensibly lit with non-electric sources, the electric light emerges as a pervasive medium that has vanquished the gas flame.

Washburn stages the distinction between the reverie and the dream under the haunting light of the theater, as one of the survivors, Maria, reveals the details of the electric apocalypse through a dream within a reverie within their reverie around the fire.

Interrupting the recollection of The Simpsons, Maria proffers her point of the reverie's star pattern, unwinding a tale told through many bodies and modes of thinking. Shedding light on their hopeless state, Maria speaks of a guy she met at Wal-Mart scavenging for duct tape, who had a cousin that worked at a Nuclear Power Plant. This guy at Walk-Mart knows that gas-powered generators will only cool the radioactive towers of a nearby nuclear power

93 plant for so long:

MARIA: So he formulates this plan, where he's going to stock up on fuel and he's going to go to the plant, and find the generator shed, and he says the shed is going to be locked.... And he told me that he had gone to do it, he had, he was at the gas station, siphoning off one of the tanks. He had containers. He had a dolly, or.... And then he had a, he had a. A flash? A very vivid –just one of those fantasies you have all of a sudden. He said he saw himself walking towards the plant and there's this reactor right above him, and up the little service roadway and he's at the shed, the the the service shed and he busts the lock, until he busts it open. And he's maneuvering the dolly inside when he realizes, that it's quiet. It's so quiet. He touches it the generator, it's cold, dead. He's too late.139

The Wal-Mart guy's reverie leads to a good plan of action whereas the daydream hits like a flash and is filled with dread, covering the spread of the plan with the shadow of a single linear trajectory of fate.

Irving's commitment to gas lighting was further emphasized by his use of electricity as a novelty and special effect. Stoker highlights Irving's use of sparks as “ingenious” effects, years into London's conversion to electric lighting. I quote at length to highlight

Stoker's emphasis on how electricity is to be employed:

As an instance of how scientific progress can be marked even on the stage, the use of electricity might be given. The fight between Faust and Valentine –with Mephistopheles in his supposed invisible quality interfering—was the first time when electric flashes were used in a play. This effect was arranged by Colonel Gouraud, Edison's partner, who kindly interested himself in the matter. Twenty years ago electric energy, in its playful aspect, was in its infancy; and the way in which the electricity was carries so as to produce the full effects without the possibility of danger to the combatants was then considered very ingenious.140

Here, Stoker aligns electricity with progress, while also demonstrating how the invisible becomes visible as Mephistopheles manifests in the “electric flashes.” Stoker emphasizes the novelty of electricity and highlights Irving's “ingenious” use, hinting that to simply use

94 electricity to light a scene is as pedestrian as a street lamp. Following this, Stoker proceeds to describe Faust's other moments of pyrotechnics, placing electricity in the same category as visual and special effects. By discussing electricity in terms of luminous effect, Stoker follows upon Irving's ingenious employment of the fledgling medium without comparing it to the Savoy's use of electricity throughout house and stage. The implication, however, seems rather obvious. Stoker and Irving stress electricity as simply another kind of light, just not the kind appropriate to light whole scenes.

I return to Washburn and Bachelard and Lacan's point about the irradiate quality of light as a source of reflection not just for the subject but as one. As a source of thought, the light source comes to speak for itself, and it implicates the subject within the gaze. It does so, strangely enough, by becoming a kind of subject itself. In distinction to the dispersed agency of Bennett's assemblages, the inspiration to thought collapses present light into a locatable subject, present and radiant. In addition to exploring light, and particularly the electric light, as an assemblage with dispersed agency it is also useful to examine this quality of light as a subject, as a character with a role. In his essay, “The Line and Light,”

Lacan famously writes of a glittering sardine can whose sparkle forces Lacan to become aware of his own subjective place in the world. Lacan begins his essay extolling the importance of the organ of the eye: “The relation of the subject with the organ is at the heart of our experience.”141 Lacan's emphasis on the importance of vision and the visual keeps with Freud's own thoughts on the matter of images, claiming the relation of the subject to the eye as central to the experience of psychoanalysis. His emphasis on the eye grants an equal importance to the role of light and, as mentioned above, it is not simply how light reveals space to the eye, but how it inspires reflection. “The relation of the subject with that

95 which is strictly concerned with light seems, then, to be already somewhat ambiguous,” and that ambiguity sparks the confusion whereby the subject apprehends herself as being seen,

“caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision.”142 What catches the subject in the gaze is the irradiate quality of light, its emanation, its source speaking for itself. In order to illustrate this he tells “a true story” of personal embarrassment, caused in part by a shimmering sardine can. A young Lacan has found himself out of place, working with some fishermen, when one points to a sardine can floating on the waves and says to Lacan, “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!”143 The fisherman laughs and Lacan registers his discomfort, locating within his response the sense, “I was rather out of place in the picture.”144 It is particularly the luminous gaze of the can that makes the picture: “That which is light looks at me,” he writes of the gaze, “and by means of that light in the depths of my eye, something is painted.”145 Something is painted, not perceived, and the sardine can is the painter. “The picture, certainly, is in my eye,” he writes, “But I am in the picture.”146

In order to illustrate how the light source comes to speak for itself, how it operates to reveal the gaze, I would like to offer a few stories where light is at the center. In order to explore the electrical grid as an assemblage with dispersed agency, Bennett looks to the

2003 Northeastern blackout. My own true story, however, paints a different picture. Like

Lacan, a play of light drew me into a picture, implicated my subjective place, and animated the inanimate. Unlike Lacan, the play of light I experienced was the blackout itself. I was in New York City at the time, having recently graduated from university. As much as I would like to say that the art called me indoors, it was the free admission and the climate control that beckoned me into the familiar halls of the Metropolitan on that sunny, hot,

96 Thursday in August. I was immediately struck by the quality of the paintings, illuminated, as they were, by the intense summer sun shining through the skylight windows. I realized then that I all to frequently reserved visits to museums for dreary days, a habit that muted the paintings, overcasting them with a shade of gray. I wandered about the top level, basking in the natural glow from above, when my eye was caught by bronze statues of ballerinas and galloping horses in an enclosed, dimly lit room. I moved out of the sunlight and into the electrically lit chamber. Degas' still images of the ballerina and the horse, repeated over and over within the display, evoked the extremity of movement, spurred on by competitive discipline. I was particularly interested in a dancer composed of pencil and pastel, slightly animated in the interplay between the drawing media. I stared at the seemingly still dancing figure, all swirls of slightly metallic-gray and overlays of coy pastels, when suddenly she came to life –her sudden animation caused by a plunge into darkness. The lights in the small room went out and, as my eyes adjusted, an afterimage danced over the still vaguely visible gray dashes of pencil, animating a ballet through an extreme, instantaneous shift in the lights. The art was no longer protected by electronic surveillance and motion and proximity detectors and it seemed to offer itself to me in a completely new light. It remained dark for twenty minutes before everyone was ushered out of the halls, guided safely through the unlit corridors by flashlights, like comets guiding the way.

To the public at large, the electric light was touted as the safe medium. It flooded urban streets with light and reduced the risk of fire. In addition to safety, electricity was touted as a cleaner, domestic option and therefore linked to, not only safety, but to nurturing, maternal comfort. In an essay entitled, “Tinkerbell, the Fairy of Electricity,” Murray

97 Pomerance describes the electric campaign as focused on the domestic and maternal, “Very like a mother, electricity protected us, nursed us, shaped us and guided us.”147 Tinkerbell is fading. She does so without a word. Once an energetic spot of light, her energy has been drained by her personal sacrifice for Peter, as she drinks the poison meant for his lips.

Tinkerbell is dying and we know this because she fades, dimming before our eyes. Only applause, instructs the boy who never grew up, can bring this poisoned light back to life.

Applause restores brilliance. And we applaud because we care for light, our attention and care keep it alive. Tinkerbell entered into the Disney repertoire around the same time that the Disney films expanded off the screen and into the park in Anaheim and she continues to shine on digitally as the star character in a series of computer animation features. It is little surprise that this luminous fairy from the theatrical stage is the only one to eclipse the brilliance of Mickey within Disney corporate branding. She, after all, writes the logo (and name) of Disney in light, begging our applause for the lights to continue. In a strange way

Tinkerbell is Disney, as she signs for him, as him. From the theatrical stage to the screen to

Sleeping Beauty's castle in Disneyland to the digital realm, the figure of Tinkerbell remains a luminous mold; flitting from one light source to the next, risking death over and over again, only to return to full brilliance through adoration and applause. Tinkerbell has been realized in a variety of forms since she was first conceived at the end of the electric campaign, from the simple reflection of a mirror to a human actor, but she was also made of the first electric sparks in the theater, the spotlight of the carbon arc.

Electricity first appeared in the theater in the form of the carbon arc, an intense luminous bolt used for both spotlights and early film projectors. The intensity of electricity destined it for stardom, as the carbon arc increased the brightness of the stars onstage and in

98 front of the lens. The carbon arc generates an active electric thread, like visible lightning, that jumps between two metal plates, which, when generated in front of a lens, produces a powerful throw of luminescence. First demonstrated in 1808, lack of electrical power sources left the carbon arc out of theatrical use till the 1840s where it began to gain some use despite its noisy, crackling reputation.148 As the use of electricity turned the century, the carbon arc not only expanded its use in theatres but also became a popular light source for the new technology of film. The spotlight transformed into film projection just as J. M.

Barrie conceived of the spotlight as a stage star in its own right.

Tinkerbell may radiate some of the maternal qualities espoused by the electric campaign, but, perhaps guided by her nature as a spotlight, she is also jealous. In the Disney feature film, Tinkerbell is jealous of the flesh and blood Wendy and her relationship with

Peter Pan. Like Sideshow Bob, Tinkerbell's jealousy reveals a flip side to the safe, nurturing light of electricity. One could read Irving's deployment of electricity during the sword fight as a violent use of electricity directly opposed the electric campaign of maternal nurturing and safety. That the flashes of electric light also represent the demon Mephistopheles reveals the other side of the electric promise. Irving's violent employment of electricity demonstrates that care and protection are only one side of a medium of force bent on domination. Almost a hundred years later, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera similarly presents a light source as a weapon. In fact, the very narrative of Phantom is bracketed by dates that align with the electric campaign. The play famously opens with a prologue set in 1905, as a chandelier faces auction (as lot 666), before illuminating and rising to life as the stage returns to 1881. Between 1881 and 1905 theatrical chandeliers were caught in a light war, between the warm inviting glow of gas and the cool, safe hum of

99 electricity (and a chandelier was certainly capable of mass destruction). The electric campaign was furthered by two gas fire catastrophes in 1881 alone: the Nice Opera burning killed 70 and the Vienna's Ring Theater killed an estimated 640-850. Less than a quarter century later, 1905 marks the end of the electric light's campaign and the beginning of its luminous rule over public spaces, having vanquished the flame of gaslight. That the chandelier plays a bit part as a weapon only highlights the distrust that can accompany the safety provided by light.

Revealing Light of Apocalypse

Word of the electric apocalypse reaches me well before Mr. Burns’ premiere in 2012.

The media blazed with words portending the end times as the global financial crisis marched on and environmental catastrophes multiplied revealing our impact upon the planet. The

Apocalypse is a look into the future, a gaze revealed by the past; Apocalypse means revelation. From English, back through Latin to Greek, the act of covering, casting a shadow (καλύπτειν) is flipped off (ἀπό), revealing apocalypse (ἀποκαλύπτειν).

“Armageddon has hit!” I read off the website of Woolly Mammoth theater as I bought two tickets by punching in numbers off a plastic card into a button pad connected to a glowing screen. I switch electric pages on the global network, to purchase train tickets and bus tickets to the theater's home in the District of Columbia; all this electric labor simply to move my body to a safe haven during the Apocalypse. Armageddon is, after all, a place where the chosen will be gathered together during the end times. Armageddon has reserved seating.

The radioactive fallout of the electrical already scorches the world of Mr. Burns, and

100 this post-apocalyptic vision acts as a warning to the audience, myself included, not to put too much faith in the nurturing and comforting side of electricity. Electricity's flip side is a tremendous giant, consuming and distributing power as a commodity extracted from the earth and refined into the electric grid. And we respond differently to this side of electrical promise. The ubiquity of the electric grid stands as a constant reminder of our level of dependence upon its provision, and this dependence manifests as a kind of furious, justified nostalgia in the wake of its demise. Stewart describes the different nostalgic approaches to things small and giant, stating, “And while our daydream may be to animate the miniature, we admire the fall or the death, the stopping, of the giant.”149 Our reveries are for the stopping of the giant, to experience life apart and without. We admire the stopping of the giant, even as it surrounds us and becomes our environment because it either stands as an obstacle or becomes a mirror to ourselves.150

In fact here, at the site of distrust emerges a split where some media scholars explore the individual, social, and political actants that influence media while others explore the effects determined by technology. When viewing media, then, the question often is who or what we should distrust. Distrusting the thingness of media is often dismissed as technological determinism. The problem most scholars have with McLuhan's critique of media, or anything labeled determinist, for example, is that it simultaneously strips the spectator of agency and collapses the spectator into a universal human form without attributing any such power to the political and social actants that control media. The retort is that the electric base has the potential to supersede the desires of a public to shape and control media, as McLuhan writes with characteristic dark humor: “Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public

101 wants' played over its own nerves.”151 McLuhan is frequently framed as a determinist, but it is important to note that his view of technology stems from the human form; not only the physical, biological body, but also the space-less realms whereby the world is apprehended and translated through the senses. His word play, turning nerves into anxiety, illuminates both the physical and psychical connections that extend out of humans to our technologies

(which McLuhan defines as extensions of man). The electronic image, then, is not merely a gathering of media under a single domain, but also an image with its own agenda, a strategic, electric one.

Washburn's second act looks at the evolution of a particular type of nostalgia into a commodity, tracing how soothing recollection transforms into a competitive theatrical enterprise of re-animating. The second act is literally a theatrical rehearsal for a naturalistic staging of the once cartoon episode, “Cape Feare.” Those who were gathered around the fire in act one, appear in act two, seven years later, having formed a theater troupe specializing in the now immensely popular entertainment of re-staging The Simpsons. At this stage in the post-Apocalyptic, nostalgia for television of the recent past is layered with demands for accurate reenactments and the theatre troupe rehearses diligently to get their production as close to the original episode as possible. They are not the only theater company competing for audiences and no one survives this competition as the second act closes on the murder of every character that has been with us thus far. That another theater company shoots them brings competition to its violent, apocalyptic limit. Washburn's eradication of her characters throws all the attention for the final act onto the survival and transformation of “Cape Feare” as it enters a third act under improvised, post-electric lights. Of utmost importance are the transformations that occur in the details of the re-telling, (re)staging, and remembering of

102 the television episode. As Washburn writes, the final act is a transition from a commodity into a “vehicle for digesting” enormous change in time, across a before and after, “from a pre- to a post-apocalyptic society.” In the final act, we witness the staging of “Cape Feare,” transformed into an eerie, violent musical reflecting upon the electric apocalypse. Sideshow

Bob is replaced or transformed into Mr. Burns, the owner of the nuclear power plant where

Homer Simpson is employed. Multiple transitions are effected in this character switch, drawing our attention from electric light to radioactive power, from the inconsequential to the powerful. Even Mr. Burns' name evokes the transition whereby light ceases to be immaterial as it literally burns one's skin. Mr. Burns and his radioactive towers remind us of the material consequences that lie behind seemingly placid electric light. As much as light is nurturing, radiation injures, reminding us that light is both pulse and matter. It shines in that uncertain space of transformation. “Let there be light” now, and there was light already in the past, as visible twinkling radiated out from stars millions of years ago. Light is caught between its origins and its reception, neither past nor present. Light has shined before as other absolute characters, reminding us that the voice of Genesis speaks “Let there be light” before one reads, “In the beginning was the Word,” of The Gospel According to John.

Beginning and ending with words, symbols, algorithms; alpha and omega.

Performance Labors of Digital Rays

As one of the longest running shows in television history, The Simpsons straddles the transition of light from analog to digital. In their fourteenth season, well after “Cape Feare,”

The Simpsons made the switch to digital production. By building The Simpsons animation in a virtual space, an additional stage of converting power into light is added to the

103 animation process, especially since digital animation demands more processing power around lighting an object than moving it through space. In traditional animation, actual light aids only in the photographing, or imaging of cells, whereas color and shading provide subtleties of light. In digital animation, however, the computer greatly simplifies the animation of characters (with the ability to plot out paths of animate parts rather than having an artist draw the character movement frame by frame), but digital animation requires complex algorithms and tremendous computing power to bring their creations to light.

Although the digital revolution seems to offer something in addition to electricity, computers remain electronic and it is important to recall McLuhan's proclamation: “When electric speed further takes over from mechanical movie sequences, then the lines of force in structures and in media become loud and clear.”152

Other than the fact that it arrives on the currents of electricity, what does a cartoon have to do with electrical apocalypse? The answer lies in the tautological consumption of electricity by the assemblage of the computer as it renders electricity into virtual light space.

Similar to the electrical campaign, digital rendering of electricity into virtual, navigable space (such as desktops, windows, and 3D environments) seeks to attract more users through ease of use, increasing the electrical assemblage by connecting an ever growing number of digital devices. Digital animation is essentially a lighter's craft. Theatrical lighting design is the goal of digital animation, which desires the quick speed of natural illumination. Even if cartoons do not mimetically represent or offer the dimensional and visual realism of theater, digital animation relies upon virtual lighting design that aspires to a theatrical model.

Advances in digital simulation, while not always in pursuit of realistic representation, do desire the ease and flexibility that lighting design offers in a real, as opposed to a virtual,

104 space. The desire to make digital light operate as quickly as light in nature drives the electronic image toward overload. The lighting of virtual surfaces accounts for ninety percent of computing time for feature animation production and is the primary obstacle to efficient digital animation. Ron Henderson, Director of Research and Development at

Dreamworks, defines computer graphic film production as a “digital manufacturing problem,” where the majority of what must be manufactured is a realistic rendering of light over digital surfaces and environments. Henderson also claims that theatrical lighting design is the goal of digital animation, as it strives toward performance efficiency. The labor of light is not simply a matter of computing time, but requires vast amounts of human labor, as “lighters” often outnumber animators on a digital feature production, not unlike the enormous teams required for lighting gas chandeliers.153 The reason for this lies within the two forms of simulated light that media scholar Friedrich Kittler predicts as the fate of the computer, raytracing and radiosity. The lighting of digital objects can be achieved through two vastly different processes, which compete with each other as much as they are combined in animation. With the computer, electricity brings about luminous competition while remaining the immanent force, using internal competition to grow its domain.

Animation is the fate and not the goal of the digital, which is the dimensionless realm of numbers. In the preface to Optical Media, Kittler describes a media trajectory of light and image that moves through dimensional matter, from three to zero dimensions and back again; from theater to the computer to virtual theater. Building off of Vilém Flusser's notion of virtual abolition, Kittler's trajectory of media is not traditional, although it summons familiar stories and characters: “The question remains what raised the cinema as pied piper above the old desires of theater. This question leads us back to lighting

105 technology.”154

Similarly to Lacan, Kittler is interested in how the viewing subject is “caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision.”155 Both Lacan and Kittler draw few distinctions around what constitutes a visual image or picture, allowing for a more dynamic historical approach to the development of media. Kittler begins with a call to investigate the theatrical history of light in order to comprehend the trajectory of media, “little light has been shed on how ballet, opera, and theater... evolved from elements that would later constitute the cinema. This can be seen above all in Babbage and Faraday's lighting engineering....”156 The lighting engineering to which Kittler refers is for a production that never premiered, canceled out of fear of fire. This fact does not stop Kittler from describing the ballet in intimate detail, first introducing Charles Babbage as an early 19th century computer engineer, with outlines for a kind of calculating Touring machine—needless to say, he never executed his plans. From failed originator of the computer to an unopened “ballet about natural science research and the rainbow,” where the gimmick was the instantaneous change of colored light upon the dancers white tricots, Kittler animates Babbage's dreams of light design.157

According to Kittler, the successful application of Babbage and Faraday's ideas was achieved by Richard Wagner. Alongside this success, Kittler goes so far as to claim

Wagner's innovations in theatrical architecture as the instigating switch from art into modern media: “In short, Wagner's newly founded opera house in Bayreuth truly achieved the transition from traditional art to media technology.”158 What Kittler identifies out of

Babbage and Faraday and in Wagner's Bayreuth Theater as media technology is the separation and control of senses, achieved predominantly through the absolute control of

106 light. Kittler writes, “If media technology must first isolate and incorporate individual sensory channels and then connect them together to form multimedia systems, then Wagner's

Bayreuth opera was the first historical realization of this principle.”159 Once isolated, a sense becomes multimedia when it reconnects to other controlled senses, like the pairing of light and the sound of the Bayreuth Theater's acoustics.

The isolation of certain senses depend on the obliteration of others, and this obliteration often brings about an aesthetic that benefits from (at least the idea of) human absence: “To highlight the music of The Rhine Gold overture, there was nothing and no one to see either in the auditorium or on stage.”160 Praising the lure of film realism, André Bazin wrote of the attraction of screened space in opposition to the flame of the theatrical actor:

In contrast to the stage the space of the screen is centrifugal. It is because that infinity which the theater demands cannot be spatial that its area can be none other than the human soul. Enclosed in this space the actor is at the focus of a two-fold concave mirror. From the auditorium and from the décor there converge on him the dim lights of conscious human beings and of the footlights themselves. But the fire with which he burns is at once that of his inner passion and of that focal point at which he stands. He lights up in each member of his audience an accomplice flame. … This is why this dramaturgy is in its essence human. Man is at once its cause and its subject.161

Kittler's media trajectory uncovers another path by which the other arts also began to eliminate the presence of other humans by obliterating them in the darkness, the centrifugal space of the screen, offering isolated channels for both the senses and the subject. Rather than actually being intent upon destruction, isolation leads the way to more users, expanding the audience without alarming its members, offering privacy and seclusion despite the immense sociality of the network. This is part of the drive of the computer to attract more operators.

107 Kittler concludes his scopic lectures with computer simulations, which he calls “the only conceivable future of film and television for practical and economic reasons.”162 By projecting “the only conceivable future,” he claims the digital as a technological endpoint, a limit. His certainty that there is no technological media beyond the digital is based upon a theory of dimensional abstraction whereby symbolic acts gradually reduce from a four- dimensional space-time continuum to the one-dimensional text and ending at the zero- dimensional digit. These media reductions, for Kittler, form the site of ultimate contest, war: “This is the reason for the polemics of the Greek philosophers against gods of flesh and blood, the wars of iconoclasts or reformers against religious images,” bringing us to the final war “of technology and natural science against a textual concept of reality.” It is at this point, however, that the digital emerges to reduce dimensionality to zero, “and the point is that zero dimensions do not include any danger of concealment whatsoever.”163 This is the end. The end, that is, until the story reverses itself in order to reconnect or attract new calculators, operators, and users.

Slowly, out of the zero-dimension of numbers, early computers first gained one- dimensional command lines (text prompts) followed by two-dimensional user interfaces

(like Microsoft Windows). According to Kittler, this dimensional growth is not the nature of the digital but is employed to attract users, programmers, and calculators. In order to interface with more users, the computer had to construct its relationship to vision up from numerical bits of physics into graphic simulation. This is why Kittler ends his Optical

Media lectures “not with the oldest preserved silent film or with the latest program from

RTL,” as he predicts his readers to anticipate, but with simulation, the domain of computer animation. He breaks simulation into two categories: those that “visualize the unreality of

108 mathematical formulas,” and those that “hyperrealistically reconfigure our so-called reality like raytracing or radiosity.”164 These two terms refer to computer graphic's mapping light and its complex behaviors inside digital images, and it is at the site of these digitally fabricated light sources where the electronic image reveals the labor of animation as well as its fated end and overload.

As a historical concept, raytracing can be found in most attempts to comprehend the rainbow through the application of geometry; tracing a ray of light through a rain drop and its subsequent shift in direction allows for the calculation of its virtual projection, emanating from and through the perspective of subjective eyes. In contrast to raytracing, radiosity projects a luminous source, such as the sun, through a totalizing approach as opposed to invisible ray after ray and surface point by point. Radiosity is clearly the preferred render approach to generating virtual worlds, but any totalizing approach consumes its promise in processing time and this is the threat of luminous overload. Kittler reduces the relationship, or choice, to duration, marked through the absent labor of the technician, or, rather through the animator's idling time, waiting for the electric machine to calculate its global light array:

..one starts up the algorithm, contemplates the as yet completely black screen, takes on of the coffee breaks so famous among computer programmers, then returns after one or two hours to have a look at the first passable results of the global light energy distribution. What so- called nature can accomplish in nanoseconds with its parallel calculation drives its alleged digital equivalent to overload.165

Reducing the massive amount of processing time and energy to light virtual objects is the primary goal of any computer chip intent on interfacing with more users. This goal is most frequently articulated in terms of image realism, as Mike Seymour writes in “The Art of Rendering”: “The modern chase for realism revolves around more accurate simulation of

109 light and the approaches renderers have taken to provide the best lighting solution.”166 What is rendered is an algorithm into light and into vision. Renderers are themselves algorithms, the software that weaves virtual worlds out of numbers into light. Rendering is the labor of electricity and microchips, the surrender of the time of light to the machine as it builds a virtual world from zero dimensions. To bring light to a virtual image, one surrenders to the time of the machine. Rendering takes time, but it takes the machinal time of digital processing, which sends the operator off on a coffee break. Consuming massive amounts of processing power also requires a tremendous amount of electricity to both process and cool the stacks upon stacks of servers, known as “rendering farms”; all this to bring greater clarity to the electronic image. It all begins to sound a bit tautological, which is why Kittler warns that “this hunt for realism should not deceive us with regard to the basic principles of computer graphics,” for the teleological drive of the electronic image is not mimesis.167 The electronic image is not spurned on by a desire to copy, but by a desire to connect the zero- dimensional digital computer to more users. It is this goal that pushes the hunt for realism within the electronic image to its fate: electric overload, an overload of both the actual flow of electrons as well as an overload of dependence on electricity. Mr. Burns stages this fate and, in doing so, draws attention away from the screen to the electric grid, both its own grid and the larger framework of the theater as somehow both an inheritor and archive of electronic media. At the end of Washburn's play the electric light returns to the U.S. through the theater, born again as both a hope and a warning. In the last few pages

Washburn describes a “SLOW ELECTRIC DAWN” that builds over the singing chorus:

a variety of fixtures: strings of Christmas tree lights, maybe old theater lights, maybe one of those artificial candle sconces or plastic electric menorahs, table lamps, perhaps even a chandelier, or two!, hung

110 throughout the theater, are clicking on one by one. / As this happens the actors turn towards each light, indicating it with their hands, encouraging with each new illumination a greater round of applause. / By the end the stage is a blaze of light.168

Each light fixture is given a round of applause, encouraged to shine on. This return of the electric light accompanies a kind of nationalistic rebirth as the actors take up the final song, “We are American,” to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's “For He Is An Englishman.”

By bringing back the electric light, they reconstruct and hold onto the identity of an electric

America: “But though swept from our foundations,” they sing, “Through our steely endurations, We remain American (O we remain American Yes we remain

Ameriiiicaaaaaaan!).”169 Here, at the climactic burst of the song and the end of the play,

Washburn writes, “the curtain slips aside to reveal the actor playing Mr. Burns, powering a treadmill. As he runs out of steam the lights slowly dim, to blackness.”170 Mr. Burns' bodily labor, rather than his fortune and radioactive power plant, bring the electric light back. This emphasis on the working body of the actor is a technological extension of what Schneider calls “the hard labor of the live,” an extension because its liveness is in service of electronic media.171 Mr. Burns' transition from boss to hard laborer is a key transformation within the play, as the promise of rekindling electric light rides upon a transformation in its production.

The ambition of this promise, where human labor and movement can replace the splitting of atoms in electric production, falls short in theatrical (re)production. In Woolly

Mammoth's production, a string of lights flicker and the curtain rises revealing a stagehand dressed in black, generating power by pedaling a bicycle. Yet the power generated by one individual is not enough to illuminate the lengthy list of light fixtures envisioned by Wash- burn. What is important, then, is not the amount of power generated, but the distance be-

111 tween the production of power and illumination. In Washburn's final scene, electricity's fu- ture is scaled down, where production, transmission, and illumination share the same space.

How long it will stay contained is, perhaps, anyone's guess. As McLuhan warns “the 'mes- sage' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”172 The speed of electricity strives to overcome distance, mapping the scale, pace and pattern of human affairs onto its own instantaneous current. Taming or es- caping the current is a difficult endeavor, revealed by the newly born electric lights aglow under the theater's electric grid and Washburn's haunting epigraph that collapses the flow of time and the current of electricity into a violent force of nature: “Every story ends on a dark and raging river.”173

In The Theater and its Double, Antonin Artaud connects the light of theater to the in- tense glare of a tragic sun, “In the theater as in the plague there is a kind of strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that the difficult and even the impossible sud- denly become our normal element.”174 Modes of light can cue viewers to what is real and what is theatrical, but, as Artuad points out, crisis, plague, and apocalypse can also shift light into the strange sun of the theater. Light reveals the crucial distinctions in life and media as well as the distinctions within and between scenes, something shared across life, stage, and screen. Light can draw in the subject, or shine with the impossible rays of a strange sun. It can soothe, become a commodity, or a vehicle for comprehending enormous societal changes. Light can signal the beginning or the end, or likewise reveal a murderous truth in plain sight:

OPHELIA: The King rises. HAMLET: What, frightened of false fire? QUEEN: How fares my lord?

112 POLONIUS: Give o'er the play. KING: Give me some light. Away. POLONIUS: Lights, lights, lights. --Hamlet Act 3.2 267-272

113 Animality 3 Part Pest: the un/heimlich animal

Fear of falling is the subtext of performance—(the) inspired choice or chance of going too far –and going too far, exceeding the stage, is an imperative of theatrical foresight. —Spencer Golub, Infinity (Stage)175

There is something to be said for those dangerous flying objects — excuse me, I mean actors — that keep whizzing around... —Ben Brantley, New York Times Theatre Review176

No one denies the animal auto-affection or auto-motion, hence the self of that relation to the self. But what is in dispute... is the power to make reference to the self in deictic or autodeictic terms, the capability at least virtually to turn a finger toward oneself in order to say “this is I.” —Jacques Derrida177

'What,' asks the proverb, 'do geese dream of?' And it replies, 'Of Maize.' —Sigmund Freud178

End of the year, 2011. In the headlines, “best of” lists abound, albeit somewhat pessimistically shaded: “The Best: Even Amid the Chaos and Uncertainty of 2011, there were some bright and Heroic Moments,” “2011: The Year In Shit Shows: Nuclear

114 Meltdowns and Budget Standoffs...,” and one of the “Americans of the Year” is selected by the editors of Esquire because she was fired from her job, or, rather, because of her ambition.179 In an article entitled, “There's Something to Be Said for Ambition,” recently let-go theatre maker, Julie Taymor, is named an American of the year for her part in directing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the infamous Broadway-musical production –a play which, on its own, claimed many top positions: most expensive Broadway-show of all time, most dangerous play for actors, longest running previews in Broadway's history, worst reviews; the lists run on and on.180 What begs to be said for ambition is an articulation of empathetic fear and wonderment, the “ooos” and “ahhs” of watching someone take great risks, and, not too secretly, hoping to witness a failure. The greater the ambition, the more spectacular the fall; and there were many accidental falls in Turn Off the Dark, which sent five actors to the emergency room.181 In print (and the amount of press on this play is astounding), references to the Hindenburg and Titanic multiplied on top of each other as the

(oft proclaimed) seventy-five million dollar production spiraled into a tangled web of infamy; as technical failures, injuries, and creative differences between the show's producers and its high profile team of writers (Taymor and U2's Bono and the Edge) made international headlines.182 Yet, still, there is something more to be said for ambition. In the year of shit shows, Spider-Man's particular brand of ambition and theatrical failure came to stand in for (ad)venture capitalism, economic speculation and risk, and the value or, rather, cost of persistence. This failure also reveals a perverse kind of glee that, from the theatre world, is difficult to resist: the pleasure in witnessing the failure of corporate, branded

Broadway. Not just any failure of corporate ambitions on Broadway, but a failing that proved something was wrong with the model that helped Disney-ify 42nd street 14 years

115 earlier with the purchase of the New Amsterdam Theater and the critically acclaimed opening of The Lion King. Despite nine years of development, despite $35 million in architectural refurbishments and another $30 million in production costs, and despite navigation by the innovative puppet design and theatre maker, Julie Taymore (who merged commodity culture and high art with her staging of The Lion King); despite all of this,

Marvel's extension of the Superhero out of comics and onto the stage, failed. And we love it. Broadway, however, is a quick mimic, and in the spirit of late capitalism itself, Broadway and Spider-man assimilated the critiques of the commodity that were mounting around 42nd street, and risked an enormous failure –since we all wanted to see it anyway. I couldn't help myself, I went for this very reason –like the sick pull of looking at a mouse in a trap followed by glee at discovering Mickey there. But Mickey wasn't there, instead I got caught in Peter's web. This chapter argues that the theatre provided a rigged gamble in failure, promising, as it does, the possibility of accident in lieu of so much mediated safety; a gamble guaranteed even at the site of Spider-man's stage debut, the Foxwoods Theater, named for the largest casino in the U.S.. It also seeks to construct a theory of the pest, as frequent sites of contact for between dimensional worlds, making of the mouse and the spider super additions to the human. The pest can be witnessed in the plague that Artaud identifies with the theatre. I argue that the figure of the pest and pestilence is wound up with issues of theatrical failure. If the previous chapter looked at the art of light as the liveness of animations, this chapter looks at the shadow of a figure, falling, failing, but resilient, even in the face of death. Animations often rely on the half-animal in order to remove some idea of deathness from the live figure of the animator, Mickey can't be killed can he? Uncle Walt's body is, after all, famously frozen till further animation. But various sides of the animal

116 reveal the exact thing they are there to deflect; death. The curious figure of the pest challenges deathness as a simple category, looking at the multiple live and living creatures that are seen only in the one caught in a trap, or frozen in the stare of a flashlight.

As for Turn Off the Dark, what appears to be sold is the failure of the production predicated upon a future risk, the danger and thrill that Spider-Man might fall on top of some rich, expectant audience member in orchestra seating. The urgency, it would appear, is in urgent-care. None of this is lost on any of the critics, nor should it be, they've all seen enough theatre to know that sometimes a mistake, accident, or fall on stage can be the most engaging event in a play (if for no other reason than to witness the virtuosic abandonment of the text by an improvising actor). Before Turn Off the Dark, Spider-man remained safely framed by the page or as the digitally animate in cinema. The figures in animation are so famously removed from risk that they often display a kind of hyper-violence in lieu of their indestructible nature. Yet on the stage, risk becomes a different play thing. Bert O. States begins “Actor/Text” from Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of

Theater by defining the theater actor against the film actor through claims to actuality illustrated by the accident as disciplinary divide: “But in the theatre our sympathetic involvement with the characters is attended by a secondary, and largely subliminal, line of empathy born of the possibility that the illusion may at any moment be shattered by a mistake or an accident.”183 Is it even more “largely subliminal,” deeply suppressed, that an accident may disturb the narrative flow of cinema or television, should the reel catch fire or a newsflash interrupt broadcast? In any case, “largely subliminal,” doesn't account for the experience of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark. The in-your-face possibility of accident as a

117 commercial draw to the show is described by Richard Dorment in his Esquire feature as “a cockeyed example of what Taymor has called 'the double event' in theatre, in which puppeteers and other technicians aren't hidden from view but rather visible to the audience.

We still lose ourselves in the story and suspend disbelief, but because we understand how the magic happens, we believe in the magic that much more.”184

In Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, Nicholas Ridout argues,

“that it is precisely in theatre's failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeouis pastime that its political value is to be found.”185 This chapter further explores how theatrical failure and “capitalist leisure” go hand-in-hand in offering a production predicated upon “liveness” as risk of injury or death. It also questions the order of things, as the onstage Spider-man is ushered into embodiment from a drawn image that regularly risks life and limb from the secure position of iconic immortality. To pose a cockeyed question: did Spider-man script the injuries that occurred in the rehearsal process, mirroring the origin story of Peter Parker fumbling through new found powers toward his superhero alter-ego? Ridout seeks out a political value in the many accidents and failures that attend performance, from the child to the animal to fear of the stage; all of these modes, routes, and pits of failure coalesce in the figure and web of Spider-Man or, rather, in the peculiar split he embodies between animal and man, actor and multiple-persona character, pest and human adolescent (another form of pest). In other words, Spider-man's failure was present before he risked the stage.

Within performance, the realm that most embraces risk and accident on a conscious level is the circus. Taymor considers the origin(al) of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, “a

118 rock n' roll circus,” intended for a tent on top of Madison Square Garden; turning the roof into Spider-Man's spectacular circus rings.186 The circus, also made by “actual” bodies, has always emphasized risk as part and parcel of its virtuosic acrobatics, vaulting, and animal taming.187 The level of acknowledged risk, however, accompanies all divisions in media.

Even between animation and pro-filmic cinema, accident lurks in editing continuity and within the frames of the photo (even where it goes unseen, as in the mythic, suicidal, stage- technician caught hanging in the background of the talking apple orchard in The Wizard of

Oz) more than it lurks in the cartoon (drawn, as it is, with frame-by-frame precision, composing a character and world that can never harm itself, try as they might).

What seems to be so "cockeyed" about Spider-Man, at least for Dorment, is the absurd notion that live bodies, hurt in the course of laboring (at play), could be the show- itself (at least when the show is specifically not a sports game). That is to say, that what capitalism normally wants to cover up, its damage to working bodies, is so blatantly revealed onstage as to make one blink, doubly. Such combative injury is often reserved to training fields. Back to Ridout, it would seem that even when it makes a huge profit, the theatre remains a privileged place for witnessing our own laboring conditions under capitalism. As a cockeyed example, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is, perhaps. the perfect specimen, as it seems to fail totally, tripping across all of Jon McKenzie's paradigms of performance: technological, organizational, and cultural. Although overtly simplified, within this reading the injuries to actors enact technical failure; the creative differences, the lawsuits, the multiple versions of the show, all point toward an organizational failure; and the show's hilariously derisive reviews at least suggest a cultural failure. Nevertheless, this

119 spectacular failing amounts to a certain success, in the same way that the bite from a genetically modified spider might turn a teen geek into a muscled, aerial artist and hero.

Like the success of a pest as it evades the hosts' attempt to capture, kill, or domesticate it – all of these modes, routes, and pits of failure coalesce in the figure and web of Spider-Man or, rather, in the peculiar split he embodies between animal and man, actor and multiple- persona character, pest and human adolescent.

In Spider-Man it is not only costume that frames the superhero; the visible theatrical wires must always be taken into account. They are the theatrical double that signals flight.

For some playwrights, wires of flight signal theatricality itself, as Tony Kushner writes in the opening note to his 1993, Pulitzer-prize winning drama Angels in America: Millennium

Approaches, “The moments of magic... are to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion –which means it's OK if the wires show, and maybe it's good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.”188 The wires that suspend actors bring about theatrical time, revealing the double's dependence upon wires and pulleys and other laboring bodies that give flight to Spider-Man. When the wires snap, it seems, things go doubly double. That the actor might plumet to the ground, closing the distance between beholder and actor, turns the actor into a “dangerous object –I mean actor,” for the audience, even as and because they witness the “double event” of theatrical wires of flight.

Although Taymor claims that the “double event” accomplishes something animation misses in its hiding of the human, this “double event” of the theatre is related to Tom

Gunning's “Aesthetic of Astonishment” and Dan North's “spectacular dialectic,” whereby the combination of pro-filmic (photographed) and animated materials in a special effects

120 film are “characterized not by the absolute undetectabilty of the mechanisms behind it, but by the interdependence of those elements.”189 What is at stake in these claims is both the position of the audience as particularly savvy about the techniques of a medium and their contact with paratextual elements that surround the show; such as press, posters, toys, but, also, previous medium incarnations of characters across comics, cartoons, and films.190

Before Reeve Carney was Spider-Man on Broadway, and before the webslinger was Toby

Maguire then Andrew Garfield on film, Peter Parker's arachnid half was already split among various Marvel comic book narratives: The Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, and Ultimate Spider-Man all spinning alternate narrative versions of the same half-spider half-kid. In order for the theatrical Spider-Man to stand out amongst so many mediated half-arachnid teens, first, it would seem, he had to risk the stage. The “spectacular dialectic,” “the double event,” and States' “secondary line of empathy” fall upon failure (and its potential) as a revealing factor, as a theatrical component that unveils the double by tripping over and, subsequently, tearing the curtain down.

Risk is practically a motto of the theatrical: if you're going to fail, fail big enough –it echoes in our meaning every time we shout, “break a leg!” In The Theatre and Its Double,

Artaud writes, “Like the plague the theatre is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction.”191 In the face of death, the powers of theatre are nourished. Artaud's penchant for words such as “cruelty” and

“evil” act not as resolute moral signifiers, but exclamatory metaphors and metonymy of the inescapable contact and wearing down that occurs in the world of matter and time. The

“time of evil” of the theatre is the time of the “dark powers,” the shadows of the very same

121 pesty double that offers chase, sparked by crisis, in Artaud's words, “a crisis which is resolved by death or cure.”192 Whereas Artaud's juxtaposition of the plague and theatre seeks to find its ethical instant “at the moment when theatre abandons ethics,” here I am interested in another time of the theatre, that which lies beyond human “evil” and “cruelty,” a time related to that of the plague, the pestilent time of the animal.193 The pest is the animal in the domestic space that we fail to domesticate, that carries its unheimlich otherness into our familiar (heimlich) surroundings; it sets up house within our home, occupying an other's space. The pest is both at home and unwelcome. The pest that is labeled as such draws attention to itself, it leaves traces and signs, all of which pester the host: Mickey's droppings,

Peter's webs. The pest is not discreet. It resists domestication. The pest follows after, invading, and giving rise to chase. But, as Derrida notes and Shakespeare's Puck illustrates, it is also the human that follows after the pest, and in following after often finds itself behind: “To follow and to be after will not only be the question, and the question of what we call the animal. ...And by wondering whether one can answer for what 'I am (following)' means when that seems to necessitate an 'I am inasmuch as I am after the animal' or 'I am inasmuch as I am alongside the animal.'”194 Whatever the answer, the role of the pest gives rise to chase:

PUCK: I'll follow you: I'll lead you about a round! Through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar; Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound, A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire; And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar and burn, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at ever turn. Exit195 the runt of the litter

122 That the cartoon and theatre occupy similar qualities within film and performance theory indicates less their strange ontological alignment but rather their shared (forced) opposition against a dominant medium, namely (but not exclusively) photography. As will be discussed below, Deleuze throws a medium wrench into the debate when he links performance, the theatre, some cartoon films, and long exposure photography together in opposition to cinema, pointing to the slipperiness of medium specificity and disciplinary distinctions. The more one attempts to cage a medium, the more one finds its essence escaping via unforeseen routes. Writing on works classified as “medium specific,” Mary

Ann Doane notes, “Proper to the aesthetic, then, would be a continual reinvention of the medium through a resistance to resistance, a transgression of what are given as material limitations, which nevertheless requires those material constraints as its field of operations.

Hence... it is ultimately impossible either to reduce the concept of medium to materiality or to disengage it from that notion.”196 This chapter moves away from “crucial” phenomenological disciplinary distinctions based upon absence/presence, immateriality and materiality, to explore figures of resistance; figures that trouble their frames, promiscuously cross media, and pester their mediums. As Mary Ann Doane surmises about medium specific works, these figures of medium resistance often end up reinforcing disciplinary boundaries by making borders more evident in the first place. We will explore how the borders of Mickey, the mouse-man, and Peter, the Spider-Man, utilize the human/animal divide to test and reaffirm their own borders; as well as pester their neighbors, by burrowing new holes and building new webs in the corners where mediums collide.197

Before turning to performances of half pests it may be useful to untangle why,

123 exactly, theatrical failure is the pest of performance art. If failure onstage opens onto the presence of the “real” --the holy grail of performance work-- why then would performance artists disparage theatrical failure? The trouble with theatre seems to be in the double, in mimesis, in the fake copy, in the wink from a play within a play, in Hamlet's Mousetrap.

Theatre's “double event,” as Taymor describes it, where puppets and puppeteers exist side by side, or where an actor is both herself and a character simultaneously, is not only a doubling of matter and space, but of time. Gertrude Stein describes this theatrical quality as

“syncopated time,” where “Your sensation as one in the audience in relation to the play played before you your sensation I say your emotion concerning that play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking to which you are listening. So your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play.”198 In theatre, time doubles, it becomes syncopated between actor, character, audience, and narrative world, and in these splits the body multiplies as well. In the opening to

Performance Remains, Rebecca Schneider locates anti-theatrical sentiment among performance artists, who “storm the museum as a 'rebel form' … arguing in the name of medial specificity that performance (unlike theatre) is 'pure' and 'raw'....”199 The trouble, it seems, is also in the hybrid body which eschews the “pure” and “raw," opting instead for the body that reveals (and wears) multiple characters, identities, costumes, egos, and species; all syncopated across time.

In “The Ontology of Performance,” Peggy Phelan extracts the double, syncopated time of theatre from the “essence” of performance where she claims, “Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies.”200 In performance art, the living,

124 performing bodies strive to be what they are, strive to be real, not doubled as an actor/character. Phelan writes of performance as, “the runt of the litter of contemporary art,” where to be the underdog is the elitist position that evades, even transcends capital, or, at least, proclaims to: “Performance's independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically, is its greatest strength.”201 For Phelan, performance art evades reproduction to a greater extent than theater, whereas theatre, as Ridout notes, is

“guilty, and knows it.”202 Through its double, revealed through failure, theatre pokes holes in the ephemeral, evasiveness of “live” presence performance. Performance art doesn't want to go wrong, it wants to go real.

Despite the hybridity and disciplinary blurriness found across all artistic mediums, the theatre is often assigned this pesty role of stealing, borrowing, and resisting other mediums (or generating that which should be resisted). J.L. Austin's famous claim that the locutions of a stage actor is "hollow or void," situating theatrical language as "parasitic upon its normal use,” has often been met as a kind of challenge by theorists and performance practitioners intent on proving the real effects of performance and ritual.203 Michael Fried's assertion that, "what is wrong with literalist work is not that it is anthropomorphic but that the meaning, and equally, the hiddenness of its anthropomorphism are incurably theatrical," not only sparks theatrical defense but situates theatre as the medium to resist.204 Indeed,

Fried's primary concern is a point that he "cannot hope to prove or substantiate..." that "the success, even the survival of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre," and, in doing so, carve out a unique disciplinary space.205 Fried is not concerned with objects that reflect humans nor anthropomorphized objects, but he shudders

125 at an art that forces one to witness the anthropomorphization. To be made aware of the duration of change in an art object, where the time of the beholder becomes immanent, is the theatrical quality that Fried objects to. This ubiquitous quality of theatre, as everywhere and containing all modes of aesthetic practice, spanning across duration, from which a medium position must be fought, also finds its way into critiques of animation. In "Bones of

Contention," Andrew Darley warns against understanding animation as some kind of "super medium" of movement that consumes all the motion arts, because in doing so, it loses its own borders; as a medium that borrows materials, a pest.206 Animation is often described as an evasive, slippery discipline, either feeding off or feeding on various materials and media from clay, ink, paper, photography, to film, sculpture, and action painting.207 In promoting the future of animation, Lev Manovich extends this animated quality to the digital realm, where he describes the aesthetic in hybridic, biological terms, claiming that new motion arts have “animation DNA –mixed with DNA from other media.”208 What is implied in the relegation of animation and theatre to the role of hybrid and/or parasite is that surrounding it is a whole host, with complete and defined borders and/or that the whole host is hybrid.

What is “whole” about the host is its time or, rather, what is troubling about theatre and animation is their lack of singular time. As Rebecca Schneider notes, “The time of theatre... is never singular, and never transcendent (which is why Fried disparaged it)”209 With non- singular time we arrive back at theatre's double and its doubling not simply into a twin but more, multiple. Following after Schneider and Antonin Artaud, the double emerges not as singularly twin but many; the theatrical mirror may be legion; a pestilent horde, marching in syncopated step.

126 instants of animal movement

Something pesters modernity. Something is recognizable to modernity, but evades its grasp forcing a domesticating move, to mold the pest into a commodity. Modernity's pest is time and technological media rises to the chase, turning time into possesable instants. In

Creative Evolution, Bergson writes, and in The Movement-Image, Deleuze quotes: “Modern science must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to take time as an independent variable.”210 On the “modern scientific revolution,” Deleuze writes, “Everywhere the mechanical succession of instants replaced the dialectical order of poses.”211 This rupture between dialectical poses and mechanical instants was not instantaneous itself, but marked a shift in a way of thinking that contemporary philosophers, then and now, still grapple with.

Conceptions of the still and instanteneity, Mary Ann Doane argues, comprise film's

“ideological investment in transforming time into a type of property, a tangible commodity,” which “shadow the cinema and reach out to inform a contemporary digitalized understanding of temporality as well.”212 Bergson believed that the domestication by which modernity tamed time into “an independent variable,” was about translating it into math, stilling its movement, reducing it to parts without reference to a whole. To do so, changed our conception of time by taming it into parts that could be cataloged and owned. Bergson saw “the science of matter” as that which, “distinguishes as great a number of moments as we wish in the interval of time it considers. However small the intervals may be at which it stops, it authorizes us to divide them again if necessary.”213 In 1907, Bergson predicted the ever extending frame rate of high definition video and M.I.T.'s photon capturing camera, which can “capture the movement of photons, which travel about one million times faster

127 than bullets,” essentially, it can record the image of the movement of the speed of light by breaking its pulse and matter down into a million instants.214 This modern way of thinking about time, as a series of instants grabbed at random, as any instant-whatever from the stream of time, removed us from an ancient way of thinking that Bergson thought “stopped at certain so-called essential moments.”215 The distinction between ancient and modern, for

Bergson, falls upon modern science taking time apart into a series of instant numbers rather than focusing on humankind's selection of “essential” events.

For many this shift in time also marks a change in pace, or at least, the perception of speed. In Electric Animal Akira Lippit aligns the animal's relationship to various speeds and signs of communication: “Animals were particularly useful in the development of technological media because they seemed to figure a pace of communication that was both more rapid and more efficient than that of language.”216 In order to stage Spider-Man's prowess, stage the speed of the animal, in a manner consistent with the speed of flights he makes across cinema and animation screens, Taymor utilizes eight Spider-Man doubles in addition to the speaking actor, Reese Carney. As Spider-Man flies in and out of the wings, what appears as one costumed hero is, in fact, nine rocketing, red-white-and-blue spandex clad bodies. In one particularly striking and memorable moment in Turn Off the Dark, all nine actors who play Spider-Man converge on stage, as the hybrid parts of Peter Parker confront the eight human actors that compose the arachnid-man's legs. This moment doesn't hinge upon a failure, it is a conscious choice to reveal the double, to reveal the multiple bodies necessary to turn Peter Parker into Spider-Man. Theatre's “double event,” as Taymor describes it, where puppets and puppeteers exist side by side, or where an actor is both

128 herself and a character simultaneously, is not only a doubling of matter and space, but of time. The time of the performer and the time of the character reveal the double to the audience, always out of step. This moment begs the following, can the many bring about the whole or, another way, what is the movement of the horde?

In his attempt to re-animate Bergson into a contemporary discussion of film,

Deleuze's two volume thesis on cinematic time and movement, situates movement as a primary exploratory concept within the technological framework of early twentieth-century cinema, where movement is a piece of time, a section of a durational whole: “movement is a mobile section of duration, that is, of the Whole, or of a whole.”217 To elucidate this point, he looks to the auto-affection or auto-motion of the animal in order to expand beyond the limits of human temporality and open onto movement:

An animal moves, but this is for a purpose: to feed, migrate, etc. … Movement always relates to a change, migration to a seasonal variation. And this is equally true of bodies: the fall of a body presupposes another one which attracts it, and expresses a change in the whole which encompasses both.218 Perhaps because of political and philosophical worry over modernity transforming time into posses-able instants, Deleuze points to the animal in order to trouble other relationships of ownership and mathematical reduction (whereby the many become one, the animal, or the human). What Delueze tries to emphasize is that a durational whole exists already as indistinct, hybrid, of and given over to change; “if the whole is not giveable, it is,” not as others thought, “meaningless,” but “because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure.”219

Change and movement thus slip through our fingers, because to still them, destroys

129 them. This is why the (re)production of movement through instants, frozen in time, is of such interest to philosophers across political realms; for some, the instant signals stop. For others it signals a u-turn, retracing our animal steps to a frozen state as the (unchanging) homosapien. For still others, the instant signals, simply, a sign (perhaps indicating how to move). In the conclusion to Proust and Signs, Deleuze compares the role of the narrator in literature to a “Body without organs,” which follows, indeed unconsciously responds to, signs: “The spider too sees nothing, perceives nothing, remembers nothing. She receives only the slightest vibration at the edge of her web, which propagates itself in her body as an intensive wave and sends her leaping to the necessary place. Without eyes, without nose, without mouth, she answers only to signs, the merest sign surging through her body and causing her to spring upon her prey.”220 Although the writer and narrator seem to have control, posses a body with organs, like the reader, the narrator is stuck following after signs and citations, responding to vibrations from (an)other. In the theater, the narrator is not merely the voice of the text, but the vision of the director.

The autobiographizing narrator is also caught in the linguistic web; a spider responding to vibrations along a constellation extended out into the world, into the wings, and the vertical flies of the theatre. Nevertheless, the eye that watches attempts to separate itself out from the animal action onstage. As Derrida writes of the animal, “No one denies the animal auto-affection or auto-motion, hence the self of that relation to the self. But what is in dispute... is the power to make reference to the self in deictic or autodeictic terms, the capability at least virtually to turn a finger toward oneself in order to say 'this is I.'”221

Dorment's article on Taymor begins with biography, which precedes an interview, indicating,

130 at least, that the biography is also, somewhat, auto. I quote its entirety:

She was a young American traveling through Indonesia when she almost fell into the abyss. She'd been told about an inspiring place, an active volcano that erupted every fifteen minutes. But to reach it and peer inside, she'd have to climb up the steep and dangerous side a dead crater. So she did. And when she reached the precipice of the crater, she crawled along its rim, terrified, her knees gripping the sharp volcanic rock and her eyes focused on the path in front of her, until she reached the volcano's edge. She looked inside and saw lava boiling in the brightest, deepest shades of yellow and red she'd ever seen, and she no longer felt terrified at all. She felt wonder. And joy. And then she slipped. She righted herself quickly but not before a piece of rock took out a chunk of her leg. She hobbled down to the nearest village, and even after suffering debilitating infections and permanent scarring, she didn't regret the climb. How else could she have known what was waiting for her inside the volcano?222

Here, the director's auto-biography substitutes for the performing bodies injured during previews and rehearsals for Turn off the Dark. The “I” substitutes for the “dangerous objects-- I mean actors that keep wizzing about.” Although Taymor was not herself injured during the play's nine year development process, this auto-biography stands in for the injuries of those who cannot speak but can only, irritably, follow the text she lays out, indeed spins out from her position of the diectic “I.” Let's flip this on its head, the tired tale of the puppet master director to the automaton actors –her perspective is, after all, ours', the audiences'.

I sat in the back two rows of orchestra seating filled with others who, like myself, had purchased morning rush tickets. The seats were half empty after intermission, as if one act had been proof enough. The half-spider half-man and the eight other actors who play his speed, his arachnid legs, reveal the laboring horde as “being used” by the “I” that paid for a seat, to become a part of the audience horde.223 Stuck to and suspended in the web of

131 capitalism, the flailing of flies in the wings of theatre summon the spiders. In response to twitches in the footlights, we, the arachnids, follow after linguistically voided, animated circus-signs; waiting for another one to fall, right in front of us, right on top of us, right in our web –if only to show us the horror of it all.

Similarly to the vibrations of the Deleuzian narrator-spider web, in The Open,

Giorgio Agamben looks to another arachnid in order to build a model of communication built upon speed, dormant (sleep) time, and tactility. For Agamben, the tick, also feminized in her quest for a feast of blood, responds to a mammal's touch, temperature, and movement in order to be activated into a passionate relationship with the world.

...one might reasonably expect that the tick loves the taste of the blood, or that she at least possesses a sense to perceive its flavor. But this is not so. [Baron Jakob von] Uxeküll informs us that laboratory experiments conducted using artificial membranes filled with all types of liquid show that the tick lacks absolutely all sense of taste; she eagerly absorbs any liquid that has the right temperature... [the] blood temperature of mammals.224

This senseless feast of the tick is initiated by three points of contact that link the arachnid to three relations with their mammalian host:

(1) the odor of the butyric acid contained in the sweat of all mammals; (2) the temperature of thirty-seven degrees corresponding to that of the blood of mammals; (3) the typology of skin characteristic of mammals, generally having hair being supplied with blood vessels. Yet the tick is immediately united to these three elements in an intense and passionate relationship the likes of which we might never find in the relations that bind man to his apparently much richer world. The tick is this relationship; she lives only in it and for it.225 The tactile, haptic communication of the tick relates her to a world of relational multiplicity; a multiplicity that extends beyond her arachnid bite to the surfaces across class, the hides of

132 mammals. This haptic-communicative relation beyond the self not only links the tick into mammal times and speeds, but also opens upon the resting, dormant sleep of the arachnid.

The zoologist Uxeküll remarks upon an eighteen year old tick, awaiting haptic activation across a lifespan beyond the consuming tick. Of this suspended tick, Agamben asks, “How is it possible for a living being that consists entirely in its relationship with the environment to survive in absolute deprivation of that environment? And what sense does it make to speak of 'waiting' without time and without world?”226

Without language yet able to respond to signs, the animal troubles our own relationship to time, not simply by experiencing it differently, but by existing inside the world of heterogeneous, auto-affective multiplicity. Or, perhaps more simply, the communicative collectivity of animals, across such classes such as arachnid and mammal, forms a world based on various forms, signs, and speeds of self-propelled movement. This collectivity, this multiplicity is a driving force of Deleuze's work with Guattari on

“becoming animal,” which stresses that, “the animal is defined not by characteristics … but by populations that vary from milieu to milieu or within the same milieu; movement occurs not only, or not primarily, by filiative productions but also by transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.”227 Animal movement does not simply follow its own instincts but is impacted and responds to “heterogeneous populations,” other creatures and beings that inform and inflect the totality of its living spaces (the sphere bent toward

“filiative productions”). Like the spider, intent on building a home/trap in the passageways of insects, all animals demonstrate the uniqueness of existence without individual characteristics simply by encountering and responding to the world around them. Derrida

133 catches his nakedness reflected in the eye of a cat, and pauses to reflect on a tapestry of shame between human and animal (a tapestry to which we shall return to re-weave as costume and the skin of our feasts). Through the auto-motion of the animal, Deleuze stresses that movement is a sign, and therefore, already partly frozen into a whole instant, as a part that indicates direction and relation within ever changing, “heterogenous populations.”

That it is ever changing makes it elusive.

This elusiveness of movement is also what keeps animation on the borders of

Deleuzian cinema. Because animation does not rely upon the equidistant frame capture of the film camera and instead relies upon drawings constructed within the time of the animator, cartoons, like theatre, have the potential to reveal the meantime; the time between frames, between instants, the flow of life as a totality.228 In The Movement-Image, Deleuze places the cartoon's time in direct relation to the time of theatre:

When we think about the prehistory of the cinema, we always end up confused, because we do not know where its technological lineage begins, or how to define this lineage. We can always refer to shadow puppets, or the very earliest projection systems. But, in fact, the determining conditions of the cinema are the following: not merely the photo, but the snapshot (the long-exposure photo belongs to the other lineage); the equidistance of snapshots; the transfer of this equidistance on to a framework which constitutes the 'film'... a mechanism for moving on images (Lumière's claws).229

Theatrical shadow puppets and long exposure photos belong to another realm, a realm where the stuff of representation itself transforms, rather than breaking into a thousand equidistant-instants intent on composing a whole of movement. Shadow puppets often pop up as a troubling type of theatre in the teleological histories of projected images,

134 whereas puppets (without shadow) often arise as the missing link between theatre and animation. Perhaps this is why Julie Taymor, with her training under Jacques le Coq, and travels in the land of shadow puppets, was always the perfect candidate to rocket animation to the theatrical success it found in her 1997 (and still running) production of The Lion King.

Like the animation cell, the still puppet requires a mechanism of motion to be brought to life, where that mechanism is, most often, human. The moving puppet is always a hybrid creature.

According to Deleuze, the body can shift poses thereby transforming itself, the long exposure photo can transform film stock over time, yet the snap shot is strangely denied this ability to transform over time; refused change. How much time falls between a long exposure and a snap shot? What temporal line distinguishes one from the other, long from snap, exposure from shot? One answer might reside in human perception of movement which, without spidey-sense, is limited to five and their (all-too-human) receptive registers.

We can see movement, hear it (especially in doppler effect), smell food cooking in the next room, taste melting ice-cream, feel it slide down our throats; but distinction of movement

(details of movement) cease at a certain, human threshold of perception.230 One of these thresholds, that of vision, makes the mechanics of cinema possible: “Is not cinema at the outset forced to imitate natural perception?”231 Deleuze's interest in the “natural perception” of movement is not weighed down by terms such as “persistence of vision” or other outmoded interpretations of visual reception, but instead he focuses on equidistant instants,

“selected” at random, “so as to create an impression of continuity.”232 The spacing and autonomous selection of time is the issue at play in movement.

135 There are some cartoon films, however, that fulfill Deleuze's definition for the cinema, “if it belongs fully to the cinema, this is because the drawing no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant whatevers of their course.”233 For Deleuze, movement is key to placing the cartoon within a legacy of cinema; if it belongs, there must be no cartoon cell only cells, as a whole, describing movement instead of posing. If, in its multiplicity and signaling of movement through this extending out across cells, it pretends to human perception of time via equidistant instants, then, it appears, such a cartoon would indeed belong to Deleuze's definition of cinema.

The prevalence of hybrid figures in animation: mice and men, talking ducks, spinning spiders, point to an interesting quality of the medium, as not merely composed of various materials but various speeds and signs of communication. The animal's relationship to communication transcends language through movement and in the next section we will look to Sergei Eisenstein On Disney, wherein the Russian dramatist and filmmaker calls upon animation and the circus as exemplary of movement beyond words.

growing sideways from animation to circus

The circus was an attractive form for early 20th century Russian theatre makers because its expressive language stood outside of ideology. Circus demonstrates the limits and potential of the human form. As Wassily Kandinsky notes, the circus takes a

“completely unconscious approach to the meaning of movement…. The greatness of art lies

136 in its right to be illiterate.”234 This characteristic of the circus was also attractive to the

Soviet regime, which relied upon popular art forms in order to educate and entertain the masses. Sergei Eisenstein made his cinematic debut with Glumov’s Diary, a filmic interlude intended for projection in his 1923 stage production of Ostrovsky’s Enough Stupidity for the

Wiseman. Eisenstein’s staging sought to examine the communicative possibilities of movement, ultimately generating a language combining emotion and physical movement.

Building off of a tradition laid down by the Futurists and taken up by the Soviet regime, the staging of the play drew inspiration from the popular form of the circus.235 For the Futurists, as well as the Soviets, the focus on popular arts was seen as a complete break with traditional bourgeois drama and the circus was particularly attractive precisely because of its virtuosity, discipline, and daring.236 For Eisenstein, the circus' intense attention to physicality and movement transcended text, propelling the performers body into the realm of metaphor: “A gesture turns into gymnastics, rage is expressed through a somersault, exaltation through a salto-mortale, lyricism by a run along a tight rope. The grotesque of this style permitted leaps from one type of expression to another, as well as unexpected intertwinings of the two expressions.237

The Wiseman marked a significant shift in the life and work of Eisenstein. The play not only featured his first film—signaling a significant move away from theatre—it was also the impetus for his first foray into film theory. With “The Montage of Film Attractions,” published in conjunction with The Wiseman, Eisenstein began his lifelong hunt after the essence of cinema. Although his theories and ideas changed and grew in complexity, there lies within them a circular nature that, by the end, brought Eisenstein full circle; back to the

137 circus. Nearly two decades after The Wiseman premiered, he began writing on the film work of American animator Walt Disney. In Disney, Eisenstein found the cinematic double for his early circus work in theatre. Eisenstein defends his writing on Disney by pointing to the animator’s popularity and the purity of form found in his films; “Truly, all ages…all races and all types of social systems are intoxicated by him…one could say that Disney’s works seem to contain all the faultlessly active features by which a work of art influences – seemingly in the greatest possible quantity and the greatest possible purity;” popularity and purity were key words for the regime's embrace of circus in the Soviet theatre.238 Eisenstein cleverly weaves his artistic interests across mediums into the language of the Soviet regime, doubling his investments along political lines that never forget the body of the audience.

Eisenstein's writings constitute a thorough, systematic investigation of the cinema conducted through an equally rigorous approach to larger questions concerning aesthetics in general. His last theoretical project, the unfinished Method, explores a vast array of art forms and practices; beginning with cave painting, he moves through Japanese graphic art,

Cubism, various modes of acting, Shakespeare, music, Dostoevsky, as well as circus, and the work of Disney. What Eisenstein was seeking in his exploration of various art forms was the nature of attraction, which he defined as “any demonstrable fact (an action, an object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination, and so on) that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience.”239 Eisenstein recognized that the attractability of art could not be reduced to a logical, conscious response by the spectator. At first he attempted to formulate a physiological and psychophysical theory of attractability: “emotional perception is achieved through the motor reproduction of the

138 movements of the actor by the perceiver….”240 This turn to the psychophysical maintained the primacy of movement, which he believed was “the basic element of art.”241 In the end, this approach did not satisfy him because it failed to account for the attractability of so many other art forms. In order to find an inclusive theory of attractability he turned to the work of

Anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Brühl, who was regarded highly in Soviet academic circles. It was Lévy-Brühl’s theory of primitive thought and the “law of participation” that captured

Eisenstein’s attention and aided in the formulation of his central aesthetic theory. Lévy-

Brühl presents primitive thought as pre-logical thought, that “does not differentiate among concepts, feelings, and actions; nor does it distinguish between subject and object.”242 Like the multiplicity of the Deleuzian animal, the pre-logical approaches signs apart from language and at a different cadence than reason. Lévy-Brühl bases his “law of participation” upon the concept that primitive thought does not contend with contradiction; a thing or phenomenon may, at the same time, be several different forms of being all without posing a tangle to/by logic.243 Eisenstein renames primitive thought, “sensuous thought” and formulates the attractability of art around the tension between logical and pre-logical thinking.244

By locating attractability in the movement between two poles of thought, one “of the highest conceptual steps of consciousness” and “sensuous thinking,” or feeling, Eisenstein maintained movement as the basic element of art –or at least the element he most wanted to explore. Armed with the pre-logical, Eisenstein's further work extends concerns over movement from the domain of the actor and camera to that of the spectator. In the pre- logical there are no strong boundaries between self and other, the autonomous subject does

139 not fit. Mutability and movement, found in the circus and animation, offer Eisenstein an amorphous collection of entities in opposition to the taming tactics of the logical world. On

Disney, Eisenstein writes, “I’m sometimes frightened when I watch his films. Frightened by the absolute perfection in what he does. This man seems to know not only the magic of all technical means, but also the most secret strands of human thought, images, feelings, ideas… He creates on the conceptual level of man not yet shackled by logic, reason, or experience.”245

Animism lies in Eisenstein's sensuous thought, extending senses toward the animal and the confusion of self and other, subject and object. Disney was emblematic of

Eisenstein's thinking on the matter. Regarding animism, Eisenstein wrote, “there is not yet a differentiation of the subjective and the objective. And it’s from here that the ‘animation’ of nature arises: I and nature are one and the same, later on—identical, still later—alike.

Before the stage of a sense of—difference, they all work towards the animation of nature, toward animism.”246 Eisenstein situates this lack of differentiation in terms of visual perception. In the pre-logical, the difference between the movement around an object and the eyes’ movement around an object is indistinguishable.247 Thus, through a confusion of subject and object, the object becomes animated life, and it is this pre-logical, visual condition that Disney exhibits so masterfully: “The very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism…. And thus, what Disney does is connected with one of the deepest-set traits of man’s early psyche.”248 In Eisenstein's

Disney, animals and humans collide in a sensuous exploration of existence before language extracts itself from the world of signs. Although the circus does not provide Eisenstien with

140 the same animate mirror as the Disney cartoon, it nevertheless bears a relationship to nature after the pre-logical.

The precision and ease with which a circus performer relates to his/her performance object or partner often works to merge the two. It is often said of virtuosic vaulting that the horse and rider “move as one.” The circus ring itself functions to bind together horse and rider and vaulting was the first sport of the indoor circus to set the stage, indeed, transform it into a ring.249 The trapeze artist takes to the air with the same fearlessness of a bird; in the side show, a furry man's father is a wolf; a sword swallower becomes a human scabbard; in the circus, the halves split endlessly.

At the time that Eisenstein made the transition from theatre to film, the cinema was considered the most powerful popular art form, but as the new medium grew, so too did its critics. By the time Eisenstein was writing on Disney, the cinema was no longer merely a popular form, it had its high art aspects as well (many of them contributed to by Eisenstein himself). Nevertheless, his writings on Disney sought to re-establish the value of the popular cinema by finding in it higher virtues, for both aesthetic practice and the regime. In defending Disney’s work, Eisenstein compared it to the circus and offered this warning for those who would casually dismiss Disney’s work:

He who takes it into his head to bite hold of Disney by the usual analysis and yardstick, the ordinary requirements, the standard norms, inquiries and demands of ‘high’ genres of art—will gnash his teeth on empty air. And still, this is a joyful and beautiful art that sparkles with a refinement of form and dazzling purity. As much a paradox in the community of the ‘serious’ arts, as the unprincipled but eternal circus, as the singing of a bird—lacking any content, but infinitely exciting in its warbling.250

141 Disney’s work became for Eisenstein a key to his totalizing aesthetic theory that he intended to gather together in Method. We are left with fragments and layers: notes, imaginings, earlier writings, and biography, that re-weave the tapestry of the lost compendium. He began his career in the theater with circus forms and left us with musings on Disney.

Perhaps what Eisenstein saw in Disney's brand of animation was the evolution of the cinematic circus, full of daring, precise movement capable of endless transformations of form, shape, and metaphor. This is at least what he wanted to extract from what others interpreted as Disney's Taylorized, mechanized image, brought about through intense, repetitive labor. Eisenstein saw color as Disney's contribution from within the mechanized machine of capitalism:

The grey, empty eyes of those who are forever at the mercy of a pitiless procession of laws, not of their own making, laws that divide the soul, feelings, thoughts, just as the carcasses of pigs are dismembered by the conveyor belts of Chicago slaughter houses, and the separate pieces of cars are assembled into mechanical organisms by Ford's conveyor belts. That's why Disney's films blaze with color. Like the patterns in the clothes of people who have been deprived of the colours in nature.251

Here, we arrive at another version of the circus' evolution into animation: big business. In The Circus Age, Janet Davis explores the American railroad circus as not only a model for big business but as a promoter of industrialization. Davis situates the circus as an early model for other entertainment conglomerates, pointing specifically to the film industry and Disney.252 Davis reads the railroad as operating upon the circus laborers' body through its time tables and the industrial-age demands of technological performance efficiency.253

The early railroad circus lived in mobile routes, mechanized along modernity's clock. Just

142 as Eisenstein attributes a cathartic release in Disney's use of color, the circus was supposed to bring color and scintillating flesh into the gray world of mechanized factory life. Its dependence upon routes of travel offered it the pesty option of springing up in ones' town, like an invading spider, scurrying along time's high wires, tents, cages, and railroad rails. In her memoir, Circus Queen and Tinker Bell, Tiny Kline frequently relates the necessary precision of timing to the spectacle and shine of her costume. After laboring in the wings of the circus while wearing a dressing robe, she would dash to her dressing room only five minutes before her entrance onstage: “Spangles and metallic fabrics tarnish with the body heat, and once you have your tights on, you must remain standing or they get baggy at the knees and look like long underwear.”254 The spectacle is in the timing. Tiny writes of the rail road circus, “everybody strove to be on time, everything punctual. 'Time and parade wait for no man!' is the way we heard the slogan.”255 Time might not wait for a man, but the spectacular labor of the circus still held forth a promise of the performance efficiency of the swarm –as long as it kept moving. Tiny describes the ever moving quality of the circus, as a place of abandon, a queer rootless place where one runs away, and keeps on running; to disappear en-route; a site where children can refuse to put down roots and never grow up, or, as Kathryn Bond Stockton writes in The Queer Child, “grow sideways.” your DNA belongs to me!

Spider-Man is unique in the Marvel universe for his childishness, his role as a teenage superhero. In the introduction to the The Queer Child, “Growing Sidways, or Why

Children Appear to Get Queerer in the Twentieth Century,” Kathryn Bond Stockton begins,

“If you scratch a child, you will find a queer, in the sense of someone 'gay' or just plain

143 strange.”256 It is this adolescent brand that marks the arachnid's duplicitous fame. In both the 1970s and 1990s, Marvel Comics introduced extensive clone narratives into the Spider-

Man narrative, casting doubt onto the authentic origin(al) of Peter and Spider-Man, where the clones open avenues to question Parker's age. Clones travel differently in time, emanating from the past, growing sideways into the present, and meeting their double in the future; oftentimes, where projections summon them. In the final sentences of “Hello Dolly,

Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre,” Rebecca Schneider writes: “If what Dr. Lee

Silver, a mouse geneticist and reproductive biologist at Princeton, says is true –if

'Absolutely, we're going to have cloning of humans' --then they are among us already, as they become ourselves by traveling back in time. Then we are among them already, as we become themselves, by traveling....”257 It is not the genetic make-up of the clone that interests me but its make-up; the painted layers, masks, trained bodies, and costumes of the

(queer) theatrical clone. My own concerns revolve around the costume of Spider-Man, and how the full body suit allows nine actors to perform the webslinger in a single production.

In the production I attended, a few clones of Spider-Man stood out from the crowd of their brother arachnids' legs. These clones were distinguishable along lines of color; of a color other than the Caucasian-painted Peter Parker of Marvel comics. The bodies that risk injury, the stunt doubles, labor behind the adult white male face that articulates the “I” of the ever adolescent Spider-man. Is this colorblind casting gone cockeyed, where any part can be played by anyone as long as they are fully covered in costume; or is it cockeyed in its ability to show us the lies of a colorblind cast and audience? Questions of race creep upon both theatre and animation, as Wendy Chun sums up in Control and Freedom:

144 ...the popularity of Walt Disney is linked to Mickey Mouse and its cast of animal characters that can travel across cultures without being necessarily identified as American, while at the same time being heavily identified as such. Arguably, the large Japaense eyes [of anime] are a citation of Mickey Mouse—or at the very least, an attempt at racial obscuring that makes the Japanese-named characters universal. … Animation structurally parallels (myths of) cyberspace, since both these 'spaces' suspend indexicality and are thus spaces in which race need not matter, and yet does profoundly.258 Indeed, the movement of animated figures has been racialized into a quality of agitated movement Sianne Ngai identifies as “Animatedness.”259 Judith (Jack) Halberstam extends this same quality of un-tameable movement to children and queer culture in their The Art of

Queer Failure.260 And why does costume fail to blur gender in the case of Spider-Man (why no female web-slinging double?), whereas questions of race sink behind both masks and the white face and voice of star Reeve Carney? Minority positions assert themselves, reach out, revealed in questions and failings of the production, demonstrating our inability, in both performance and cinematic theatres, to either evade or transcend capital's class divisions that too often ride upon race. But again, covering over this, or asserting itself, is another reach through time, marked in the adolescence of Peter Parker. “Spider-Man R.I.P. New York

City's Fallen hero was Queens' High School Student Peter Parker,” reads the headline of the

Daily Bugle on the first page of “Ultimate Comics Spider-Man: Death of Spider-Man

Fallout” from 2011, where Peter Parker's recent death and substitution by the African-

American/Latino Miles Morales allows the teenage emphasis of Marvel's Ultimate Spider-

Man to continue past Parker's narrative aging while also realigning Parker's lower class status to a (“new”) minority historiography.261 Miles Morales, however, is neither clone nor

Peter, but is now, Spider-Man; keeping the struggling teenager alive in the arachnid pest.

Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark re-imagines the Peter Parker story as an encounter not

145 with a radioactive spider, but with a genetically engineered spider. A lab creature from which traits of strength and power are extracted by Dr. Harry Osborn (eventually) in order to build an army of supermen, cloned off of a human-half and animal-half, the best of both worlds; classic bad-guy move. Recall Walter Benjamin's description of Mickey Mouse's unique corporeality as demonstrating “for the first time that it is possible to have one's own arm, even one's own body, stolen.”262 The animated body's connection to the world and other bodies opens it up to a threat contingent upon time, as it interacts across various times of species, age, and ancestry as what is shared may be stolen. Spider-Man is formed through a sharing, the bite of the spider on Peter's hand; whereas the military supermen extract and steal arachnid genes for enhancement. With the diegetic body of Spider-Man, clones multiply endlessly, stealing and sharing various parts of Spider-Man and Peter Parker: there are the onstage clones of Spider-Man that play his other legs, and there is a popular cross- comic clone saga of Spider-Man from the 1970s and then again in the 1990s, wherein Peter finds out that he is a clone (at which point he abandons his role to his (original) double), and there are the various film stars and animators who cinematize The Amazing Spider-Man out of comic-strips. On stage a radio active spider escapes detection, but with altered genes it grows into an enormous puppet that bites the puppeteer, transforming Parker. In the double event of Spider-man, the puppet holds the strings.

Schneider begins her investigation into the Western cultural fear of mimesis and the copy by first acknowledging obvious clonal anxiety over “the flow of economics that attend

'proper' identification of ownership and lineage.”263 Who owns a clone matters in the theater. Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark has two versions, and they both beg the question,

146 which came first? Is the second a clone of the first, or is it the imagined version, the could- have-been of Taymor's Spider-Man that is actually the clone: where the promise of something great and lost is generated after the second version opens, and flops, onto

Broadway? After Dr. Osborne, played by Patrick Page, transforms himself into the hideous villain, the Green Goblin, he chases down the heroic Spider-Man who pesters his evil plans.

The monstrous Goblin screams after Spider-Man as he flies off into the wings, “Your DNA belongs to me!” At that line, my audience partner poked me in the ribs and murmured, “I wonder if Taymor says that when she watches this version?” your DNA belongs to us!

Sharing or stealing informs a paradox of the pest. In its out-stretchedness the animate Mickey is threatened; Walter Benjamin describes Mickey's unique corporeality as demonstrating “for the first time that it is possible to have one's own arm, even one's own body, stolen.”264 The plasmatic body's connection to the world and other bodies opens it up to a threat contingent upon time, as it interacts across various times of species, age, and ancestry as what is shared may be stolen. The stealing and sharing of genes seeks to domesticate biological time, as diseases are futurely fought with stem-cell research. The clone, real, aesthetically doubled, and in fiction plays out questions of biological-time; across the child, the non-reproducing queer, and the archive of genetic DNA.

In “Of Mice and Ducks,” Miriam Hansen echoes the voices of many critics of the early Disney films that emphasize Mickey's uncanny pest-like nature before his features and actions were rounded into the soft-cuteness associated with the contemporary Disney aesthetic. “The radical edge the first Disney cartoons might have had,” Hansen writes,

147 “critics tend to agree, disappeared sometime during the early 1930s. Perhaps Disney had his own, or rather, his corporation's, second thoughts on the uncanny hybrid that some of his viewers discovered in his creation. Mickey's perverse streaks were sanitized, his rodent features domesticated into neotenic cuteness,” giving way to a, “sentimentalized world.”265

The “uncanny hybrid” nature that comprises Mickey's nature is his indeterminate status as man or mouse, male or female, live or android.266 The trans- confusion of identity that marks the critical acclaim of the uncanny hybrid, seeps out, as the wheels of a corporation hunt the hybrid pest, not to kill it, but to tame its borders, claim its powers, and domesticate its features away from the queer and the uncanny.

In Circus Queen and Tinker Bell, Tiny Klein describes the queer appeal of the circus, as a place of abandon, where one runs away, to disappear en-route. She describes encounters with “sex-confused individuals,” specifically drag queens who ascribe various feminine monikers, “such as Spring Breeze, Dawn... in great favor among them also are the names of candy bars...”267 Kline tries to give a range of homosexuality in the circus, including “jealous” lesbians, a fairy Aztec, and an animal tamer, rumored to be emasculated by one of the beasts and so, “effecting a change toward effeminacy.”268 The industrial railroad circus offered the queer a mobile space that rewarded risk and failure, within the safety net of capital and the promise of industrial progress.

Many aspects of queer markers move along with the theatrical; along strands of passing, drag, flagging, and the gestural. The queer clone is most often identified as the homosexual that appropriates an identifiably performance-centric, hyper-sexuality as a kind of reverse drag in order to 'show up' the costumery of masculinity from which they often

148 find, or found, themselves excluded. I am interested in the clone that uses poses, makeup, and costume to generate a hyper-prefix that opens upon and before Schneider's revelation that, “in the space of the hyper the pure is strangely undone.”269 Rather than an us and a them, an I and an other, the queer, hyper-clone can also offer a singularly embodied us, within the love of another them.

In the collective pronoun of us, Drag King performance artist L.I.G.H.T. Aka D.r.e.d.

DIVINE Reality Every Day, employs a vision of the dressing room as a reaching out to other identities, both within and without, reaching across multiplicities through costume and play.

In D.r.e.d.'s performance piece, “I was Always the One I Wanted to Marry,” he emerges in white preacher robes trailing a tremendous wig of dreads; approaching the mic solemnly, it eventually squeaks forth a piercingly effeminate, albeit gay male drawl, “hai!” This image/sound dissonance is followed by the instructive, sonically gendered query, “Not the voice you were expecting?” Over the course of twenty minutes, D.r.e.d becomes an it, becomes gay becomes fey becomes she becomes Shaft; all through slow attention to costume, makeup, headdress, redress, affect, and (trans)gendered movement. Under it all lies a package that reads as phallic, but also, other than a phallus. Reaching under her dress, into his briefs, she pulls out a deep red apple, and takes a bite; not to know good and evil, but herself, as the one he always wanted to marry.270

The performance of multiplicity, however, takes a theatrical and physical toll.

Exterior, frontal spaces of performance require multiple costume changes in order to bring about the multiple within the one. The freaks of the freak. The Goblin frequently stirred the crowd to giddy uproar with his improvised quips comparing his own genetic

149 transformational disaster to the show's failings. Calling himself a “Sixty-Five million, some say Seventy-Five million dollar circus freak,” the audience roared in response. Page plays out a ritual that was earned through the rehearsal process, wherein technological problems constantly stalled the actors; when disaster struck, Page took up his role as villain and poked holes in the absurdity of it all. In this rock n roll circus, the villain wears the oversized shoes of the clown. This partly answers why he looks like a circus freak. The Goblin doubles as both villain and clown, both of which transform the actor's face into a comic, animated horror-show; a realm of the double often called the uncanny. shamefully uncanny hordes

As Miriam Hansen makes clear above, there are both good and bad uncanny effects.

A bad uncanny effect would seem to be that which threatens corporate interests or interfers with narrative by asserting an unintended uncanny figure. Thus, as we know, what is bad, can also be, quite good –sometimes. The drag image of the cloned queer, sometimes, falls into a naughty realm, the bad bad. Sometimes this drag culture falls into glorious confusion with fetish culture to deliver a negative gay clone stereotype: the muscled, waxen duplicates of hyper-strength (often found in pornography). In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam investigates the dark histories of the clone; its fascist underbelly, where replayed masculinity becomes a silent witness, accidental victim, and perpetrator of fascist regimes. Halberstam writes, “In a disloyal historiography homosexuality is not so much an identity stretching across time as a shifting set of relations between politics, eros, and power.”271 This historiography begs the question for Halberstam, “What does your masculinity mean now?”272 The image of the clone, however, has never been a static identity, dragged

150 perfectly across time; it has always born the scraps and bruises of its temporal dragging.

Schneider locates the transformative work of hyper-masculinity –work that Halberstam might call “gay betrayal”—through a dissassembling of purity.

As we know, purity can lurk anywhere, always threatening to point out an impure fault. Halberstam claims that advances in computer generated imaging (CGI) technology have “opened up new narrative doors and led to unexpected encounters between the childish and the transformative and the queer.”273 Although her interpretation of these new cartoons' narratives is intriguing, it fails to deliver a technological model or mode of attraction that departs from Eisenstein's plasmatic body or Benjamin's positioning of Mickey's precarious body. For Halberstam, the narrative of these new cartoons is linked more to the youthful age of their target audience and less to their form and style of animation. When she does address form in relation to the young audience of animated feature films, what emerges is a relation between life and the movements of the mechanically reproduced swarm. Referring to

Pixar/Disney's A Bug's Life, Halberstam writes, “The combination of attention to the specificity of ant life and the development of a computer technology capable of generating crowds or swarms creates depth as the level of both narrative and form.”274 The narratives that succeed at meeting Halberstam's stamp of approved failure enforce a collectivity that extends beyond the hetero-normative; whereas animations that end in a nuclear collectivity fail to open new narrative doors. The danger is that, at times, the value of parents within a collectivity can be understood as hetero-normative while failing to see the ways in which the shared care for a child's upbringing oftentimes breaks the barriers of isolating, nuclearvizing, hetero-normative behavior. This is most apparent in Halberstam's reading of Coraline,

151 which appears to be the narrative of a strong young girl, but instead, Halberstam reads the film's conclusion as reaffirming the abandonment of the strange for the safety of a nuclear, hetero-normative home. What Halberstam's fails to witness is that the family Coraline chooses is comprised of an odd assortment of theatrical failings—what Coraline resists is the seductive yet predatory and solitary life of the spider –at home in a web, with only strands connecting it the world beyond.

Even in his utopian defense of Mickey, Walter Benjamin wrote of the uncanny mouse in a narrative fragment, “All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.”275 The villainess in Coraline is a spider that at first spins fantasies of desire, only to erect a simple, soul-consuming trap from which

Coraline must escape if she wishes to return to her life. The spider seals its contract through a replacing of eyes, the portals of visual perception, with fashion accessories, buttons. One reading of this eerie, stop-motion animated film is certainly Halberstam's cautionary, anti- theatrical, hetero-normative interpretation, but further investigation into the narrative by comic-book writer Neil Gaiman and illustrator and film director David McKean also unfolds the story of a cloned parentage.276 What Coraline is offered by the spinning Spider are clones of her grouchy parents; shined up, sparkling, smiling, and skilled at their parental duties. What is missing or, rather, what is cloned out of her replicated parents are all their faults and failures. What is offered is greener grass across a cloned fence, where children can reshape their parents, while maintaining the image of their genes. In the end, the trap is like a glassy addiction that smooths over her parent's failures; failures that Coraline eventually learns to embrace, love, and admire. Throughout, she both challenges and

152 recognizes that even if her parents want to help shape her into something else (an “adult”), they will always love her, as she is. Despite this narrative of familial failure, because

Coraline turns to her parents and not an alternative collective, the narrative fails for

Halberstam's queer art. That the theatrical illusion of scrubbing away faults and failures is spun out by a wicked Spideress, certainly speaks to some levels of anti-theatricality and mimetic fear of femininity, but this film is tempered by a healthy theatrical environment, one that thrives on its own foggy relationship to time, marked through place and the stilted, labor-intensive, time-consuming form of stop motion animation.

I argue this narrative interpretation, not to pitch it against Halberstam as I believe many interpretations can hold, but simply as an example of how even the objects that fail for

The Queer Art, might still offer a place of transformative resistance in their failures, repetition, traditions, clones, and ambivalence. Deriding Coraline, Halberstam writes,

“Obviously there is no guarantee that animation, and stop-motion animation in particular, will produce politically progressive narratives.”277 True enough. Nevertheless, none of this stop-motion caution stops Halberstam in the search for revolutionary themes hidden on the surface of animated narratives. What is elided in Halberstam's reading of Coraline, is a deep history of the long aesthetic of failure, the theatre—an aesthetic enterprise that needs little help in being queered and one that has always been the pest of ethical norms.

The film is coyly set in Ashland, Oregon, recognizable only in its foggy, evergreen mountains, endless rain, and its status as home of the west coast's premiere Shakespeare festival. The fog helps mask the dpeth and transition in layers in the deep animate background of Coraline's lush setting. The tenants in Coraline's home range from a mice

153 taming, contortionist, circus performer, to two retired actors of the stage, living in memorilized dust in the basement. Although the Spider vilainness spins a glossy version of the circus and basement theatre in the alternate world-web she offers to Coraline, it is the gloomy failure of Ashland's theatre that Coraline ultimately embraces. The stories, talents, and theatrical histories of her true neighbors call out to Coraline against the lure of pure neotenic spectacle; illusion without failure fails to be illusion, it becomes an unnoticed trick.

This is what Coraline rejects, not a utopian collective of promise, but the promise of perfection, beyond failure, without it. Within the web of the Spider-Mother, the foggy skies of Ashland are purged by the addictive lure of illusion, but the beautiful costumes, eccentric characters, and theatrical tenants in Coraline's house, all echo a theatre that is always failing, rather than succeeding in glossy perfection. Strangely enough, the uncanny, cloned doubles in Coraline are the perfected models; their faults, failures and genes all spruced up. What is creepy is the perfection, not only of the mimetic doubling, but the character's smoothed out flaws. Near faultless perfection is a common trait of the uncanny, one often sought to be avoided or at least rerouted within the field of animation.

“Uncanny” is a recent go-to word for digital animators intent on bringing their often static creations to vivid life, while bypassing the creepy glare of an uncanny zombie.

Sigmund Freud centrally positions the double and repetition in his thesis on the aesthetics of the uncanny, citing an encounter with his own image in the window of a railroad car.278 The horror arises in a syncopated encounter with the double, as Freud labels the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once familiar.”279

He then looks to its etymology, the roots of the uncanny as the German unheimlich. The

154 unheimlich is inseparable from its other, heimlich half, the “familiar,” “native” halves as

Freud defines the heimlich. This split forces a double nature upon the uncanny: “The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage,”280 Freud further locates the uncanny, not simply in repetition, but in a “repetition-compulsion” and stresses, “it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would otherwise be innocent enough.”281 Freud, of course, is referring to thrice happening upon a red light district, where the “involuntary repetition” of visits by his feet made the “innocent” separation between his body and conscious mind uncannily palpable. Like the spider responding to vibrations in a web, this involuntary movement is surrounded with an

“uncanny atmosphere,” an animal realm, of the firmament, suspended as a compulsive spider. It isn't merely the double that is uncanny for Freud but the animal otherness that surrounds it through its unconscious, instinctual air.

Like Eisenstein, Freud looks to animism to understand the unique position of humans in the throes of modernity. His move to animism begins with the story of the primal horde, found in Totem and Taboo, and concerns an anthropologically inflected, psychoanalytic reworking of religious origins of shame. Freud's version –a hypothesis he claims is spun out “of Charles Darwn's [work] upon primitive men” –is inflected with the intention of looking to the multiple as arising out of the original Father, correcting a fault

Freud finds in Darwin: “There is, of course, no place for the beginnings of totemism in

Darwin's primal horde. All that we find there is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.”282 Freud's addition to

155 Darwin, his layer onto the theory of evolution, seeks to find a place for the ritual of the totem meal: the consuming of a body in order to take on some of that body's qualities.

Freud's story of the primal horde goes, “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde.

United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.”283 In Freud's version, the Totem meal, which brings about half-human half-animal, is a ritual replaying of the murder of the father: “The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things –of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.”284

From the anthropological point of view of much of performance studies, this begs the following question: if the feast of the primal horde is a ritual repetition of the outsted brothers' cannabilism of the greedy Father, then is this ritual replaying surrounded by an air of the uncanny? In what ways is the myth of the primal horde linked to the myth of community that permeates theatrical audiences? Freud does not link this earliest of festivals to the uncanny, but instead with shame: “After they had got rid of him [Father], had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him [via cannibalism], the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt....”285 Shame makes us perform rituals, but also dress up, hide our animal nakedness. Derrida questions the shame of his nakedness, caught in the gaze of a (his?) cat,

Ashamed of what and before whom? Ashamed of being as naked as a beast. It is generally thought... that the property unique to animals,

156 what in the last instance distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it. Not being naked therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short, without consciousness of good and evil. From that point on, naked without knowing it, animals would not be in truth, naked.286 Derrida demonstrates how clothes not only divide us from the animal, but that that division arises out of shame. Ashamed of what and of whom –as Derrida asks, and Freud attempts to answer over and over—stem from accidents repressed deep in our past. This shame is then played out in our rituals and costumes, as we cover the shame as a sacrificial animal, then dress in its hides to perform the ceremony. In the parasite, Michel Serres notes, “To parasite means to eat next to,” later he extends this meal to our clothes, “Our relation to animals is more interesting –I mean to the animals we eat. We adore eating veal, lamb, beef, antelope, pheasant, or grouse, but we don't throw away their 'leftovers.' We dress in leather and adorn ourselves with feathers.”287 As Mori's Uncanny Valley demonstrates, the uncanny is always with us, what matters are the moments where the cells (animation and biological) become dense with it, where the unheimlich fills the atmosphere; surrounding. The clone is a cellular body dense with uncanny doubleness and involuntary auto-life, clothed, as it were, by a mad, theatrical scientist.

The clone indeed replaces the original, yet, at the same time, the origin(al) lingers.

After what seemed like endless previews to disappointed audiences of Turn Off the Dark,

Taymor was replaced by a circus director.288 As horrible as the reviews for Spider-Man:

Turn off the Dark are, what is always praised is Taymor's touch: Dorment asserts, “Critics and audiences may complain about the story... and the songs... but they still marvel at the vision, the scope, and the sets. They still marvel at Julie Taymor.”289 I count myself among one of the marvelers. Like the primal father whose murder leads to shame in the primal

157 horde, Taymor hangs suspended above the scene, her departure making her stronger, invincible to the throes of theatrical criticism: “The dead father became stronger than the living one had been....”290

Suspension: a monstrous conclusion

In Spider-Man the visible theatrical wires remind one of the potential risk of a fall from the state of suspension. In Turn Off the Dark, suspension generates suspense. This potential fall is the theatrical trip that Fried objects to in modernist painting and sculpture which should, according to Fried, not only suspend objecthood but suspend knowledge of the suspension of the painting/scultpure itself. The actor that reveals, indeed, works in concert with its all-too-visible wires, doubles the already doubledness of the actor: the doubly double. Theatricality. How to approach the doubly double, the (un)expected accident, the (un)known hybrid, the lurking monster, suspended from above? At the conclusion of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida offers the image of the deformed future, the monster that carries a promise of hope within its evasion of concept(ion):

...there is a kind of question, let us call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing –but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.291 The birth or assertion of a clone, half-human half-animal, and/or new disciplinary border or hybrid make all of us, Derrida included, turn our “eyes away when faced by the as

158 yet unnamable,” the unknown monster/infant. Turn off the Dark emerges monstrously, consuming all in its path, and leaves us with a question: is a theatre, predicated upon the snapping of the (doubling) wires, monstrous in its duplicitous double? What about another monster, that which has already come and is yet to come, the monsters that transcend time, hanging suspended across milenia, like the ever swimming great white shark, floating crocodiles, scurrying cockroaches, and spinning spiders?

Teratology exhibits once drew vast crowds. In 1893, the study of monstrous babies spilled out of the scientific realm and into the carnival sideshow when Walter Sibley placed a conjoined-twin fetus on display at Coney Island. The practice quickly spread, and soon showmen everywhere barked the wonders of the “frog boy” and the “two headed baby.”

Showmen used their encased specimens, referred to as “pickled punks,” to warn expectant mothers about the dangers of drugs and incest, despite their ignorance as to the exact history of the deformed fetuses.292 On performance and pickling, myself quoting Schneider, quoting playwright Suzan-Lori Parks:

Pickling [performance] iz trying to find an equation for time saved/saving time but theatre/experience/performing/ being/living etc. is all about spending time. No equation or 293

Despite the bad name attached to teratology via the carnival sideshow and its performing barkers, the foundling social institution of the museum began to catalogue their own teratology exhibts, halls of preserved humans and animals floating suspended, like paintings on a wall, books on a shelf. These collections still exist. They are eerie halls, filled with

159 glass jars housing floating specimens that assault our understanding of the world around us.

Walking through these exhibits, F. Gonzalez Crussi describes his experience:

You turn a corner and discover, locked in a yellow twilight of decaying liquid fixative, the strangest, most extraordinary beings imaginable. Impossible to look at them without a shudder, but mixed with fear there is curiosity, pity, and astonishment. And you cannot ignore them, either. They seem to grab you by the scruff of the neck and tell you ‘Look at us.’ You obey, and your dearest preconceptions crumble. Gender, identity, number, human nature: all these ideas have lost their meaning.294

As Gonzalez-Crussi indicates, it is not merely the specimens' deformity that assaults preconceptions but their display, “locked in a yellow twilight of decaying liquid fixative,” that adds to this effect. In Contemporary Cultures of Display, Emma Barker writes of display as that which surrounds and upholds the work it frames. It is unavoidable in that display is “informed by definite aims and assumptions and evokes some larger meaning or deeper reality beyond the individual works in display. In short, it is a form of representation as well as a mode of presentation.”295 Suspension transforms an object into a piece that reaches out, crying “look at me,” but as Fried notes, not always at the same register.

Teratology displays are often countered with a set of fetuses showing normative development, but these “normal” specimens are often just as disturbing. Next to placards that proclaim its normalcy and stage of development, the fetus cannot escape its macabre nature as a suspended dead baby, floating alien like in a glass womb. On display in a specimen jar, a human fetus is doubly suspended; it floats in a mixture of formaldehyde and glycerin which prevents decay, suspending the natural march of organic time. It is intended to inspire wonderment at our humble beginnings and teach us about our growth and development, although, caught between representation and presentation, the displayed fetus

160 can no longer grow. Suspension sets the fetus apart, both framed out of time, but also in syncopation as it encounters a beholder.

The spectrum of suspended objects is vast; indeed, almost any thing can be suspended in air, liquid, or a congealed substance. What is unique to suspension is not found in the hanging object itself, but resides in its condition; a condition of display which transforms the object’s normative context into a state of perpetual indecisiveness, begging the viewer to seek out a new meaning. This idea can be etymologically traced back to the

Latin root for suspended, pendeo, which is related to pondus, the root for “ponder.” This relation stems from the original meaning of pendeo, “to hang, to be in doubt or perplexity” and its transitive form, pendo, “to weigh; to pay, render,” places suspension in an ever indecisive positon, accomplished through measurement and the assignation of value.296

Pondering an object is to suspend it in our minds, decontextualizing and internalizing its qualities and measurements. However, as an object hanging out of context, the suspended externalizes and inverts this process. When we ponder the suspended, we recontextualize it,

(re)build the world around it.

The Latin root for suspended reveals a root object: “For the Romans, to ‘pend’ something would be to weigh it in a scales –a quantity of grain, pieces of gold—in anticipation of disbursing it as payment to someone else.”297 The Roman scales refer to a balance scale comprised of a center fulcrum supporting a horizontal lever which suspends a weighing pan, or scale, from each arm. Existing simultaneously as a suspended object and a platform for suspending other objects, a scale is a key representation of the suspended. A singular scale has no function, it hovers in pure indecision; alone, it ceases to be a scale. It is only through a balanced relation to its twin, hanging at the other end of the horizontal

161 lever, that the scale achieves its purpose, equating mass through an attraction to its fulcrumatic twin. A scale extends this quality to the objects placed on the weighing pan, converting the original meaning of the object to one based on measurement of mass achieved through a comparative relationship with another object hanging in the opposite scale. Derrida notes, “Suspended means suspense, but also dependence, condition, conditionality.”298 What the scales reveal and what Derrida sums up so clearly is that the suspended projects the theme of an inability to exist autonomously. What is interesting about the suspended object is that it often resists this theme, despite the obvious necessity of its dependence on a hanging apparatus, container, and/or liquid in order to maintain its condition.

One of the reasons the suspended resists its dependence is because the hanging object does not contain that which allows for its suspension, but, as North's “spectacular dialectic” and States' “secondary empathy” make clear, it is always there, largely subliminal.

When we rebuild the world around the suspended object we often ignore or imagine away the apparatus that generates the condition. Examples of this can be found in the atrium of various aquariums and natural history museums (the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the

Smithsonian’s Ocean Hall, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, to name but a few) which are decorated with life-size model whales hanging stoically overhead. From above, the giant marine mammals echo the wonders of the aquarium as an unnatural repositioning of the elements, situating the sea between earth and sky. Inside the building, their suspension proclaims that natural order is deferred and beg that we imagine ourselves below the surface of the ocean. The wires that hold the models in place are nearly invisible, supporting not simply the whales but the idea that magical thinking is necessary in

162 order to have a successful aquarium visit. In viewing the suspended object our minds simultaneously seek the hanging apparatus and desire to make it invisible. We know the wires are there but, nevertheless, we conjure up a way of seeing through what we know, willing it away through a desire to experience an object free from the forces of nature. The same work is done when we look through the glass of the aquarium tanks into suspended living worlds. By ignoring that which generates the suspended condition we are able to both rebuild the world around the suspended object and place ourselves inside of that world.

The autonomy of the suspended reflects how Lacan describes the invention of autonomy, the wholeness of our individual identity, within the glass of the mirror stage.

Lacan claims, “the ego is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the subject it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man.”299 For Lacan, the idea of an autonomous ego is a fiction that we construct early in our development through an encounter with our double in the mirror: “this turning point in development, in which the individual makes a triumphant exercise of his own image in the mirror, of himself…. We can understand that what occurs here for the first time, is the anticipated seizure of mastery.”300 The Mirror stage marks the moment when the infant imagines the body as something that can be controlled, and develops an idea of the self through observing how he or she appears in the gaze of the other. For Lacan this

“anticipated seizure of mastery” generates an imaginary sense of totality against the experience of a fragmented real.301

Aspects of the Mirror stage extend beyond childhood and continue throughout life.

Through the mirror or the gaze of the other: “the human being only sees his form materialised, whole, the mirage of himself, outside of himself,” and through the employment

163 of this mirage, the subject confirms his own existence.302 In “keeping Ourselves in

Suspense: The Imagined gaze and Fictional Constructions of the Self in Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe,” Gary Leonard writes, “the primary role of confirmation played by the gaze of the Other is later repressed in the subject’s mental economy because he or she must see identity as self-originating in order to preserve the illusion that he or she controls (rather than is controlled by) this Other.”303 We search for meaning and the proof of our existence in the gaze while simultaneously disavowing that dependence, much like our relationship to the suspended object and its support structures.

The suspended object is not only analogous to the Lacanian model but can also function within it. Since the gaze is perceived outside the subject, it assumes transformative powers: “[The gaze] is an x, the object when faced with which the subject becomes object.”304 The suspended can support the subject to object transformation by assuming the role of the gaze of the other. In the opening lines of Aristophanes’ The Ecclesiazusae, a hanging lamp takes on a transcendent view that substantiates the private, erotic life through a kind of silent witnessing:

Oh! Thou shining light of my earthenware lamp, from this high spot shalt thou look abroad. Oh! Lamp… In thee alone do we confide… for thou art near us when we practice the various postures in which Aphrodite delights upon our couches, and none dreams even in the midst of her sports of seeking to avoid thine eye that watches us. Thou alone shinest into the secret recesses of our thighs and dost singe the hair that groweth there, and with thy flame dost light the actions of our loves.305

The gazing lamp has the power to transform her into an object. The lamp's suspended condition lends to it the illusion of absolute otherness, a transcendence that can also transform. Here we see an acceptance of the gaze as a validating force; however, the lamp is

164 a controlled gaze, existing as an object outside of the subject while its view is internalized.

Lacan writes, “we locate our different selves in relation to one another,”306 which not only demonstrates the relationality of the autonomous ego but supports the idea that the subject is not merely transformed into an object by the perspective of the other, but is substantiated by this relationship; where the subject does not build these relations, but is, instead, built by them.

Some examples of the suspended do not hide their support structures but make a big show of them, as seen in the body of Spider-Man, the text of Angels in America, and, on a larger scale, in the suspension bridge. Their roadways hang in the air above expanses of water, attached to elegant sweeping displays of cables that droop between prominent towers; a web stretched out over a stream. Even in name, the suspension bridge acknowledges a unity of its design and function. It does not disavow its dependence on a support structure; however, through the grandiose display of its unity, the suspension bridge proclaims its autonomy from the forces of nature. We do not (re)build a world around suspension bridges so much as envision them as complete, separate worlds of transcendance, carrying us all safely into a suspended state.

The Tacoma Narrows Suspension Bridge opened to traffic on July 1, 1940 and soon thereafter gained the nickname Galloping Gertie, owing to its tendency to buckle and vibrate in response to sustained, low velocity winds. The platform rose and fell like an ocean wave; like the wind, it oscillated between high and low pressure points in its support cables.

Transcending its definition as an extension of land, Gertie entered into a state of elemental confusion, hanging not so much above, as between the elements. Its utilitarian meaning transformed into an indecisive state, less a suspension bridge than a bridge in suspense. In

165 response to this suspense, anxious onlookers gathered through a communal desire to witness a moment of closure, a moment of collapse. Four months after its opening, that moment arrived. Forty mile per hour gusts induced a condition known as aeroelastic flutter, causing the roadway to twist violently around its center divider line. The natural vibrations of the bridge corresponded precisely to the aerodynamic forces acting upon it, creating a positive feedback that grew in intensity until Gertie twisted itself apart and plunged into the waters of

Puget Sound.307

Film theorists use the Lacanian, linguistically inflected psychoanalytic model to understand suspense as the emotional state that arises when the illusion of autonomous identity is threatened by a revelation of its dependency on the gaze of the Other, which generates anxiety about the position of the self.308 The illusion of autonomy in the suspended is always threatened by a failure of the hanging apparatus that it depends upon.

Such a failure shifts focus to the support structure, bringing the dependence of the suspended to the forefront. Like a language, the bridge is a symbolic order that constructs and upholds a certain reality. Galloping Gertie challenged its symbolic order and created, (according to

Leonard) the perfect set of ingredients necessary for suspense: “The subject is dependent on a Symbolic Order that must neither shift, nor reveal itself to be what it in fact is: a representation of reality, and not the whole of reality…. Suspense builds because the

Symbolic Order… begins to shift, revealing apparent reality as a fictional construction.”309

The suspended roadway did not resist the aerodynamic forces but instead entered into a relationship with the wind, oscillating in response to the positive feedback of the wind, increasing the revolutions of the road. For the spectators, the shifting dependence of the roadway destroyed the illusion of the autonomy of the bridge. Suspense arises in the

166 moment between the revelation of the illusion and the moment of collapse, where dependency simultaneously threatens to be revealed and destroyed; for once closure is achieved, suspense evaporates.

Like suspense, the suspended is uncertain. It projects uncertainty because it resides in the interplay between the imaginary world that we build around it and the real world from which it has been set apart. Within the mirror, the subject is suspended; like the eye of a lamp, the “I” of auto-biography. That the mirror stage achieves the singular through the double should come as no surprise; as even Freud's investigation into the birth of ritual and law through the totem meal re-enacts the horde's murder of the jealous father's insistent, singular “I.” The many and the singular remain in tension and that tension is played out along the self-diectic “I” that distinguishes human from animal.

After Pests

The pest opens up our social, domestic, and daily encounters with the animate and communicative worlds of others. Oftentimes, like the galloping bridge, such connections can be dangerous traverse. There is a threat to the pest. The theatre is often framed as a contagion, a pestillence, a plague. When the pests of animation encounter the theatre, their risk multiples and the threat of pestilence increases. As digitalia increases our encounters with animation, how and when we insert our own uncanny, disturbing presence—the pestilence of our bodies—into such spheres can dictate our own position as an other, making a home where one is not wanted.

As the intense labor and specific puppetry of animation encroach upon theatrical stages, theatre makers must caution the risk that such connections breach. This caution,

167 however, can also be productive in revealing the ways in which the animate inflects lives. In the next chapter, I offer two modes by which staged animations can reveal the apparatus as a connection between communicative worlds and ways of being: interanimation and inter(in)animation, the latter after Rebecca Schneider. In addition to connectivity the pest offers interaction with another world, although its nature as a pest opens up an inter-world, a world caught between leisure and work, at home while on the run; an un/hemleich world.

168 World(s) 4 Promising Inter-, or How to Stage Animation

This chapter begins a conclusion by returning to the project's initiating impulse to examine animation on theatrical stages, in theatrical space. Very simply I mean the screened appearances, projections, or otherwise visual manifestations of animation within theatrical space: actors and toons, onstage, together. This is not new. Early figures of cinematic animation such as Windsor McCay stood inside the cinematic frame and interacted with their animate creations. Before the appearance of the cinematic apparatus proper, a projector, aimed at a screen, was set behind the audience, early optic toys and carnival machines were toured as technological wonders. Similarly to McCay's standing against the screen of his animations, barkers and assistants acted as intermediaries to any number of peep shows and optic contraptions that brought the two dimensional to mobile, affective life.

As audiences became accustomed to the routines of screened animation, the intermingling of a live body alongside cartoons fell out of fashion, though not into obscurity. The pursuit of animation and performance together re-emerges due to digital tools that have expanded the potential for and theatrical practice of performing bodies interacting with cartoons.

Interactivity is a loaded term with a complex recent history, one this chapter explores,

169 nonetheless it remains an apt descriptor for the choreographed and/or responsive movements of animated projections with living, playing, laboring bodies. With the digital,

“interactivity” becomes the lens by which figures composed of light are understood as sharing space with flesh and blood actors. Audiences not only watch animations respond to the performers as if of their own volition, they also watch out for such digital interactivity. I am interested here in animate interaction as it manifests on stages and screens that upholds a clear divide between spectator and performer. In the first chapter, I explored how performance practices reverberate in digital animation production, using the foot's step into movement and its status as an imprint, to look at how the live and the record operate together. In this chapter, I want to trace out animations within stage space and their interactions with live bodies and explore modes by which digital animation seeks to reflect the live or reveal its own properties as it acknowledges its effects and affects upon a performance. Exploring the ground performers share with cartoon figures, the ways in which they join our dimensional reality through copying and/or revealing their manner of appearance, also reveals something about performance. Such outrageous invasion of the live stage by animate projections reveals performance spaces to always be a complex negotiation between technology and bodies –even the technology of the language we use to describe our practices. In the examples that follow, the ground becomes both the literal screen for overhead projections as well as the ground of the horizon, the touch between toon and performer, like the ever close and always distant touch of luminous sky and ground.

This chapter is motivated by a set of questions: how do theater and performance

interact with animation? How is the cartoon staged, given stage space, and given

presence? What does it mean to an audience for animation to be responsive to a dancer, a

170 moving human, and a user that stands apart from the creative operator? In what ways is such interaction a development of other entertainments and enterprises? And finally, what effects and affects are framed around performances that exhibit animate interactivity?

In performance and theatre studies, “interactivity” can mean a wide variety of engagements between performance and audience. Claire Bishop and Chris Salter have both focused explorations on participatory interaction. In Artificial Hells, Bishop traces a history and historiography of participation through theater that lends many useful insights into a media archeology of participation, both across forgotten media as well as emergent digital tools that emphasize participation. Salter concludes Entangled: Technology and the

Transformation of Performance with a shift away from looking at scenic technology to responsive systems that engage a non-trained “general public.”310 My own project seeks out animate, digital interactivity as it is represented aesthetically and examines what witnessing interactivity, without participation, produces in and for an audience of theater.

To approach the aforementioned questions I propose two primary frames by which the cartoon works in and upon stage space as interanimation and as inter(in)animation.

The first as a development laboratory for hidden responsive systems, telepresence based on the phantasmagoria—which I argue is most valuable to the telecommunications industry; and the second as a responsive scenic and/or character design system that reveals and acknowledges its operations and limitations as well as its effects as an object upon the live performer. Which is also to say that the inter(in)animate frame acknowledges the inanimate parts that make up animation, and acknowledges their force and cross- constitution with the live. This term comes from the work of Rebecca Schneider which she builds out of a poem by John Donne. My own explication of Donne's poem and

171 Schneider's term reveals that within the second frame by which animation is staged is the

pedagogical, or the “how” of technology, which can be both an actual instruction manual

as well as a playful commentary on interactive technology and links to the commercial

world. Because all performance works that utilize “interactive system design” negotiate

levels at which they must reveal and hide their interactive apparatus, I look to extreme

examples of interactive animation in order to probe the processes at work in such hiding

and revealing.311 Between these extremes—and at their intersection—is the tension of

entertainment and enterprise; a tension between leisure and work, labor and play. Actors

often work hard to hide their labor under play, presenting characters that are themselves

usually not at work. There is also the benign leisure of entertainment, which works hard to

erase all indications of itself as enterprise. Digital interfaces also work hard to hide their

labor, as they function to hide the labor of code in place of easy access for users. In order

to explore these ideas, and keeping to an idea of traditional theatre spectatorship, I look to

three artists who do not demand participation from an audience, three artists who work

within traditional cinematic and theatrical modes of presentation, yet offer digital

interactivity as a central medium of expression nonetheless: the software and projection

works of Freider Weiss, particularly his collaboration with the Australian dance group,

Chunky Move, on Glow; the Musion Eyeliner hologram work of New York City company,

3-Legged Dog; and the performance video works of “Famous New Media Artist, Jeremy

Bailey.” Each digital artist and their works illustrate the primary frames by which

animation interacts with a performer.

A Digit On Interactivity

172 In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon opens “'Performing' Interactivity,” with the following: “All art is an interaction between the viewer and the artwork.”312 These opening lines almost scold those who would cling to a term like interactivity. Dixon aligns the term's popular spark with Marshall Mcluhan's insistence in Gutenberg Galaxy that interfaces mean interaction.313 After McLuhan, Dixon writes, “'interactivity' is a much used and abused term, and one which by the turn of the millennium had become an increasingly meaningless buzzword in myriad contexts.”314 In order to inject some meaning back into the term, Dixon categorizes four types of interactive art and performance: navigation, participation, conversation and collaboration. Of these types, it is collaboration that most significantly marks the engagement between a performer and interactive animation, as the audience witnesses the shared work between a computer and performer.

“What does it mean for a work of computer art to be 'interactive'?” asks David Saltz in “The Art of Interaction,” recognizing that the manipulation of images by a computer is not enough to grant an artwork the label “interactive.” Saltz describes three events that must occur within performance time: “1. A sensing or input device translates certain aspects of a person's behavior into digital form that a computer can understand. 2. The computer outputs data that are systemically related to the input (i.e., the input affects the output). 3. The output data is translated back into real world phenomena that people can perceive.”315 I agree with Saltz's definition, which focuses on events of sensation, translation, and expression as the core elements by which we perceive artworks to be interactive. What is important to note is the digital language of the input and the output, two modes by which the computer senses (input) and affectively enters the world (output).

173 What is on display in interactive artworks that do not engage with nor encourage

participation is the computer's ability to sense the world and respond in kind. For example,

holographic technology, like any telecommunication system, is a mediated connection of

inputs and outputs. Image and voice are captured (input) and then broadcast (output) to a

receptive input on the other end with its own outputs. Although holographic technology

works to copy the real live body as much as possible, its apprehension as technology gives

way to its use as a tool for physically interacting across distant space. By obscuring the

function and through its desire to copy the live experience, holographic technology is

perceived solely in its productive use, rather than in the ways it constrains, conforms, and

effects communication with its own affects. Its interactive, communicative nature is

presented as only useful, only utpoic. The computer's ability to sense and respond to the

world is what inspires an overreaching of the term interactive as it promises to be of the

world while also offering a re-imagined social sphere; oftentimes as a digital utopia.

Critiques of early digital utopic thinking are widespread and remain crucial as the

persistence of the digital promise prevails. But it holds firm because interactivity and

discourses of digital utopia are intimately linked, and live bodies performing with

responsive animations are seen as interactions. The digital utopia often insists upon

interactivity through the employment of theatrical performance. It hangs on the

presupposition of theater as somehow more interactive and communitarian than the other

arts and aligns itself as such. Parsing interactions, their engagements and limitations, is the

focus of this conclusion.

Intertain and Interprise: an inter(in)animation of work and leisure

174 Through collective engagement and the presumption of communal interactivity, theatre and performance claim to offer something more to an audience than media, a presumption Ranciere questions, finding as much value in the collection of individuals around a television—noted in the introduction. The mis-spellings of this section heading not only imply an interactivity in all entertainment and enterprise, but are also an update and provocation of what the Oxford English Dictionary labels as the only two remaining relics of a forgotten English. Entertain and enterprise are the only two words that stubbornly hold onto the French form of the Latin prefix inter-. That these two words refuse to change reveals something about the nature of the prefix inter- as it is not only between people and things but is itself held between benign pleasures and work. Entertain and enterprise share at their root a common idea split by opposing motivations: both mean “to hold” but enterprise emphasizes holding a piece of work, in hand, whereas entertain lingers on the embrace, alone and simply held. Or, perhaps, violently held. There is also the echo of “to hold off,” where both entertainment and enterprise are suspended in between, lingering, loitering, sometimes waiting; work and leisure intertwined, intertain and interprise.

I want to bring liminality and interactivity back together through the frame of staged animate interaction. Work and play are its limits. Although liminality can often emphasize the betwixt and between of people, and audience and performer, it also, like interactivity, can be between a live person and a thing. Both operate on a promise. Often a live body alongside animation enhances the promise of presence, but there can also be an inter(in)animation, where what is live ceases to be distinguished from a life-less thing and/or matter at all. The thing-ness of animation—its stack of cells, computer hardware and software, a projector, a screen—effects the live and puppets it in as much as the live

175 performer provides the movements (input) for an interactive system's response (output).

In exploring how things and performance co-constitute each other, Rebecca

Schneider turns to the term inter(in)animation as way to understand how the live and the life-less (including the life-like) “cross-identify,” “cross-constitute,” and “improvise” each other.316 Schneider's exploration looks beyond privileging one form over the other and instead explores inter-connectedness as a type of interaction that is always in process.

Projected and screened animations on stage very specifically highlight their interanimation as interaction, but only some reveal the (in) that interjects itself between— inter(in)animation–to hold the live performer in suspension as also, somehow, lifeless matter under the pretense of animation before it crosses again to animate its thingly other, in a moibus strip of interplay.

Inter(in)animation

Thus mimesis encompasses methexis, a participation or a contagion through which the image seizes us.317 --Jean Luc Nancy

“The Ecstasy,” by John Donne, begins:

Where, like a pillow on a bed A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest

The poem begins with two things: one inanimate (a pillow), one animate (a swollen river).

“The Ecstacy” begins with two affects of things: one soft and easy and inviting (a pillow on a bed), one threatening (a pregnant bank swell'd up to rest). Yet “pregnant,” though full of violent potential –having witnessed my brother's birth, it goes without saying much

“pregnancy” cannot escape all violence— it also contains a hope that harkens back to the pillow on a bed, where a newborn rests safely cradled; and now, following Donne, an

176 infant's feet stained with ink, individual identity having been entered into collective tracking systems.

This dialectic is a square that frames the image: animate, inanimate, inviting, violent.

And they can intermingle and layer atop each other, tumbling one after another, stanza after stanza. It continues throughout the poem, leading us to (and continuing past) the idea and word

Interinanimates two souls That abler soul, which thence doth flow Defects of loneliness controls. We then, who are this new soul, know Of what we are compos'd and made, For the'atomies of which we grow Are souls, whom no change can invade. But oh alas, so long, so far, Our bodies why do we forebear? They' are ours, though they'are not we; we are The intelligences, they the spheres. We owe them thanks, because they thus Did us, to us, at first convey, Yeilded their senses' force to us, Nor are dross to us, but allay.

Our bodies are separate from us, yet allies, whose input and output systems are lent to our intelligence to convey the force of our own perceptions, the input and output systems of our intelligence. It is a mirror that shows the inanimate intelligence its own animacies, that spring from the soul, and their force upon the world. “Interinanimates.” It is an interplay of the live and the life-like, a cross-constituting interaction.

In the forward Schneider writes that her inquiries into the categories of live performance and objects-as-such; inquiries into things and performing people is no,

“plotting for lineage, or privileging monument over passer-by, it is inter(in)animation that

177 lies at the heart of my inquiry here.” With my conclusion, here, I echo the same. Here I examine works and work that reveal interinanimation's (in), Schneider's parenthetical closing inside, in “inter(in)animation.”318

Here I examine two digital design artists working in performance and how they point to, work with, and otherwise reveal the apparatuses with which they play. They also show how interactive performance with digital animation has a controlling and oftentimes violent feedback, with the animate reflecting inanimacies. Here I also return to the work of Jeremy

Bailey, now self-identified as “Famous New Media Artist, Jeremy Bailey,” whose interactive digital performance videos formed the centerpiece of my writing submission to graduate school. At that time I was interested in the inter(in)animation of the live and digital video, although I had not yet encountered the term. In Todd Winkler's Brown University course on digital performance, where theories of performance and the digital are read and discussed alongside learning the operations of an interactive design system, I became interested in the ways Bailey's performances read like instruction manuals. With an earnest, utopic voice,

Bailey presents his digital interactive design systems as possible tools, entertainments, and ways of life and walks his viewers through how they work. When his work does not follow this format, he nevertheless still produces videos that probe (and poke fun) at the ways digitalia and performance are positively united through mimetic pedagogy. In this way, he constructs a kind of frame around the closing in, the framing and limitations of digital interanimation, inserting the (in).

In 2012, at a gallery event entitled “Augment it!” at the Stedelijk Museum in

Amsterdam, famous new media artist Jeremy Bailey appeared via a live broadcast to present his thoughts on the future of creativity and presented his “Creative augmented reality stock

178 trading software for the 99%.” In his piece, The Future of Creativity, he appears in the video frame within a mostly white room, interrupted by a light wooden frame with bath towels hanging hooked to dry on the door. Before introducing himself, he stutters over and mispronounces the name of the Museum, laughing it off as an absurd spelling. “I’m famous new media artist Jeremy Bailey and what I do is, I solve problems. I look at technology and

I use it in creative ways to create, to create expression but also solve a lot of the world's problems.” Attached to the image of his arm, and moving where it goes, is a poor rendering of a two lens television camera. His other hand holds a cartoonishly rendered microphone, also mapping onto his hand's movements. Color-shifiting shapes swirl about him. “I’ve been looking at the world recently and I see this problem that is, that is the 99%. … The

99% wants the 1% to give them most of the wealth, the 99% percent want 99% of the wealth. And why shouldn’t they have it?” At this point we the listeners are with him, he is naively but passionately walking us through a political dilemma as he sees it. And then he switches and pulls around, “I’ll tell you why they shouldn’t have it. Because most of them are… um... artists. I used to be one of the 99% artists but now I’m a famous new media 1% artist. And I find solutions, with art.” Enterprise. “The solution,” he says, “is software that lets you be creative while you manage money.” He then indicates the visual world around him, the floating, digital objects, “This is a stock trading application here, I know it just looks like colorful shapes that move with my body. … You can actually paint with the software to buy stocks.” He then jumps into his usual performance mode, or persona and explains to us how his digital interactive interface works and how to work with it. “Okay so let me show you how to buy some stocks here. Here I’m creating a painting and buying stocks.”319 Bailey is mocking a very real deployment of digital animation technologies.

179 Programs for sale online help stock owners visualize the trade, movements, and otherwise animate lives of their holdings in the stock market. What is interesting about these programs is the way they market the intelligence of viewing the market as a living organism. But it requires digital tools in order for our senses to interact with it as such.

Bailey presents his interactive design systems as tools that can reorganize the world for the better while pointing out the absurdity of such notions. In The Future of Creativity, he distinguishes himself from the 99% through his enterprises, ultimately revealing how the tools he expounds are accessible to only a limited number of people. He gives instructions on how to use enterprising and entertaining tools that, in the end, only he employs –as his vast number of productions indicate. In his 2010 video, The Future of Theater, he articulates how the digital presents itself as a utopia-building tool that can revitalize and save an irrelevant theater. Bailey's pixelated eye hovers over a blank, digital black-box theater space with the text “The Future of Theater” swirling in midair. “I’m not from theater,” he begins,

“I make art. And I have to confess up front, I don’t know much about this place. But this is what I do, I come into a new place and use technology and computers mostly, and make things exciting again for people.” At this point we hear an audience, someone laughs at

Bailey. This is a rare moment in his work, which rarely features the sounds of other people, listening and responding. By collecting a few friends to watch his performance he summons a powerful idea within theater. He continues, talking to an audience of people who work in theater, “And I can give you some ideas that you can take back with you to your local, small theater communities, no matter how tiny or minute. And for you to innovate there. Grow your audiences. Maybe make theater relevant again!” The problems he says he is going to solve are that of place and the body. He explains, “And I always wanted to... uncomfortable

180 with my body. I wish I was just a head. You know? The important part of the body where everything happens… up here. Once you're inside a computer you don’t need to be in a physical place anymore. Using video and animation you can be in outer space. Image King

Lear in outer space.” A simple, flat layer of stars covers the theater black box. “Also imagine that we have the entire internet archive of video as well and wouldn’t it be splendid to witness a small community production of Macbeth staged in front of this dog that cannot quite turn over. This little guy is quite adorable.” He continues to talk about the potential of the digital as he scrolls through many internet videos of cute kittens and dogs. “The possibilities are limitless,” he croons as we are subject to images that vary little in their content and effect.320

Bailey plays upon the internet's heralded utopic limitlessness founded in interactivity.

Recalling Rosen's framing of the ideal quality of interactivity: “As an ideal, it envisions bestowing both fully realized practically infinite manipulability and fully realized convergence on the spectator.”321 Bailey embodies multiplicity or “practically infinite manipulability,” by presenting a stilted performance persona caught up somewhere between explanations and doing; in essence he is performing the how of technology and revealing the absurdity of the technological development process and its visions of the future.

In his video series SOS, created for the Canadian television show King Kaboom,

Bailey presents a new computer interface created by artists. His presentation of the SOS interface falls somewhere between an instructive mode and the pitch of a salesman. He repeats over and over again that its various features and operations are “intuitive” yet his visual demonstration does not quite match up with his words and he struggles with his performance “text” as the technology resists it. Repetition is one of his most important

181 performance tools. The repetition in his dialogue serves to enact change by reflecting

Gertrude Stein’s claim, “There can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence” but in this case the insistence is not Bailey’s own, but rather the insistence of the technology as it resists the more perfect vision presented by his utterances.322 What is at play in this video is a clash between the utopic, salesman-like voice that girds the vision of technology and the actualities of how the interface truly works.

Bailey’s video, 8.7 MB explores a different angle by pointing to how a common problem related to video on the internet, compression, effects mediated performance in cyberspace. In this way Bailey explores how new technology constrains the reception of performance; he performs how it is limiting. In this video, Bailey sits on the floor with the camera above him. The video is being compressed to 8.7 megabytes while Bailey describes what he thinks this compression will be doing to his image. Bailey waves his hands about, going from slow to erratic motions, all with the intention of causing the compression to distort the visual representation of his movement. Bailey’s body responds to what he thinks will be distorted by video compression; he seeks it out in his movement and places the focus on the distortion that we witness, translated onto his performance. When he wants to be seen clearly he sits very still. The compression controls his movements, forcing him to follow a set of rules in order to be seen. When he breaks those rules, his image breaks apart and fragments into pixilated disarray. Bailey’s physical performance on camera is not striking or unique in itself. He presents a very simple, almost pedestrian physical personality, which works to highlight how compression actually controls performance in the public sphere, particularly concerning how the public performs in front of webcams. The compression in

8.7 Megabytes can be seen as the technological insistence of cyberspace’s control.

182 In his video Full Effect, Bailey uses another commonly available aesthetic to reveal the inter(in)animation of his performance with the camera/computer. Sitting close to the camera, framing his head and shoulders, Bailey tells the viewer he is having difficulty conveying how he feels. He asks “Maybe if I did this” –he adds a filter to the image of his face--“you’ll understand how I feel?” The filter flips his face, replacing his left side with his right. Another filter plunges him into grayscale. Still another turns him blue and white. His voice becomes desperate and by the end he chokes back melodramatic tears. He repeats over and over “Maybe now?” as he applies a new filter, changing the color, outline and even dimensionality of his face. One of the filters is a solid blue screen through which his voice begs, “maybe now you understand? In this video the repetition in his monologue serves to highlight the repetition of the filters. Although they drastically change the image of his face, filters fail to represent anything other than what they are, an effect. Bailey plays with commonly available filters to challenge how everyday video makers express feeling. His melodramatic performance reads like a sarcastic attack upon the shallow layering that filters provide, but, at the same time, his performance is pulled into the manipulation of his image that filters can provide. Full Effect expresses the public’s desire to place themselves in a world filled with effects because it invokes the narratives found in the televisual and cinematic. People using multimedia technologies to construct identity in cyberspace are constructing identities modeled after mediated narratives, in turn causing a compression of identity performance that is apparent in Bailey’s melodramatic display. The “how” that he is demonstrating, that of the filters, is ultimately revealed to be empty, as each one essentially achieves the same affect.

In Transhuman Dance Recital, Bailey creates his own virtual body accompanied by a

183 utopic narrative that seeks to cover the performance limitations inherent in the technologies design. Here we can easily see the play between the freedom Bailey has in creating his own designs and the limitations technology imposes on performance. “I freed myself from the imitative constraints of the natural world,” he begins as we see Bailey’s floating head over a body replaced by a pink collar and four pairs of tentacles which correspond to his arms and legs. “I have transcended my human form. Therefore I am now… free.” Although we do not see Bailey’s body, we know that behind the mask he is moving his arms and legs, interacting with the design system that has offered him transcendence. His floating head often looks down, and, beneath his tentacles we can sense his feet moving him about. The presence of his body seems highlighted by Bailey being out of breath as he introduces his video. He pauses and breathes hard after each phrase, bringing the idea of energy and exertion into his new form and highlighting the physical body behind it. “I don’t so much control them (the tentacles) as will them. They do however, have the most interesting response (breath) to music. They appear to see music as color. (breath) This form is best suited (heavy breath) because it is so free, to dance.” Again, Bailey stares out at us, but his gaze pierces through the lens and we watch him ‘watching’ his program interact with his body. Again his monologue is stilted, but this time due to distraction from watching himself perform and by his being out breath. He speaks distractedly, easily jumping to a new idea before finishing his first thought. In describing why he will dance to music with his new body, Bailey cycles through various utopic clichés: “Music is pure. This form I believe also to be pure (heavy breath) and this form (breath) I believe also to be pure (breath) and

(breath) free and men have music in (breath) himself and I believe my soul vibrates with the sounds of music and it’s a pure form.” His performance persona seems obsessed with

184 convincing us that he has transcended his human form, rather than allowing us to believe in what we see. He also seems concerned –and perhaps more importantly—with convincing himself.

Transhuman Dance Recital ends with a four minute dance. Here Bailey gives himself over to pure play. He interacts with his new virtual body to the song “Bizarre Love

Triangle,” by New Order. Once the music starts, Bailey allows his program to have free reign. He dances to the music, bobbing his head back and forth, while the tentacles swirl to the speed of the music. The tentacles also leave a ghosting pattern behind them as they sweep about the screen. The ghosting, or trails, left by the tentacles are a rainbow swirl of color. This ghosting effect feels like fading footprints, quickly being relegated to the past as new information floods the screen. By always presenting how a technology works juxtaposed against demonstrations of its workings and failures, Bailey begs us to look at the ways the digital puppets us as much as we puppet it.

Bailey's reference to music as a purity is interesting because the instruments of music, much like and sometimes as software, can be seen to be played yet how the instrument works is often a mystery until someone explains that a vibrating metal string resounds within a hollow wooden shell. And, yet, the presence of the instrument alone often suffices to make the translation from fingers to tonality make sense for an audience. In a video interview interactive system design, Frieder Weiss finds that an interaction between performance movement and visual projected output is easier for an audience to make sense of than the digital interactive translation of movement to music. In leaving programming for movement-generated music behind, Weiss explains,

I tried to explore something new, which was visuals. I started

185 with a dance, which had multiple shadows controlled by a dancer with different delay stages. And that was really interesting because the audience response was a certain relief because it was kinda obvious how it works. 'Now we don't need a manual to understand what they are doing.' Because the movement to sound relationship has a certain complexity, it can be a little bit hidden. It's not that obvious all the time, and that's sometimes very irritating. People know there is something going on but they cannot fully understand. With visuals it is much more obvious. Then you don't have to focus on the technologies. Like a co-existence. That was a turn with Chunky Move, we focused on that co-existence.323

The co-existence, between performing body and interactive projection system, which emerges in his collaborations with Chunky Move is one where, to quote Jean Luc Nancy in

The Ground of the Image, “the image seizes us.” What grabs and holds the dancer is the screen, the ground that supports her movements. This is a place where Gradiva lowers an

Achilles heel.

Walking into the theater space for Glow, Chunky Move's 2006 dance collaboration with Weiss, I am struck by the ground or, rather, a screen on the ground. A square of lighter stage sits surrounded by four risers. A large projection system hums away over head, as yet projecting nothing. It awaits the entrance of the dancer. Once assembled around the screen, my attention is pulled across the screen to other members of the audience. As the house lights fade, they disappear into the black box, only to re-emerge in the glow of the interactive animate light that plays in perfect synchronous harmony with the dancer. Like our attention, however, her movements are pulled to the ground. The gravity of the screen, and her absorption into it; her body also is of the screen, thus centers into it, and the dance is primarily one where she lays, sits, curls up, and otherwise conforms to the flat ground of the screen.

186 Every movement she makes is meticulously traced by heat-sensing imaging devices

(input) that then interact with Weiss' animate software designs to project (output) a cross constitution of performer and animate light. The image seizes her and she grabs at her feet, pawing them while articulating brute growls. The attention to her feet seems to be either asking them to support her, or recalling that before her inter(in)animation with the interactive design system, she was on her feet. When the system is off, she enters and when it ends she exits, both times on her feet, yet she only rises a few moments throughout the twenty-minute dance piece, reaching up and toward the light, before quickly falling back into the gravity of the screen; as a screen.

Weiss is careful to distance himself from any kind of digital utopic language. He introduces himself on his website:

I am an 'engineer in the arts', software developer living in Nürnberg and Berlin (Germany) and work with artists making performances and installations. What I share with artists is the dedication of all my work and energy into making things which nobody actually needs. The software i write doesn't do anything useful, in the best of all cases it is used for something aesthetical.324

His works are entertainments that reveal their enterprise through the inter(in)animation of performer and/as visual screen. He does not write that his works have no impact, he simply writes that they fulfill no need. He presents his work as art for art's sake, useless (although not necessarily meaningless) entertainments. Unlike Bailey, however, he gives no acknowledgment to the possibility that there is a need to learn about how digital technologies cross-constitute us. Perhaps Weiss's point is that it is not his place to decide anyone need learn anything, echoing Rancière where he writes, “An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators.”325

187 In addition to the ways the performing human body interanimates things to bring about animation, the practices and productions of animation also constitute the tenor of the performance, inflecting their thingness into an inter(in)animation. Nancy writes of this seizure as a “contagion,” an infection brought about by interactive “participation” with any image. “Thus mimesis encompasses methexis,” writes Nancy, replacing an “e” for an “i” in his production of a new term for the way an image is affective through its force of grabbing our senses' attention.326 Whether that image presents itself as intertainment or interprise.

Interanimation

Having explored works that reveal inter(in)animation, I want to explore those that obscure the (in) and hide the apparatus of interaction in favor of presenting interanimation.

In the following section, telepresence is deployed to braid performance into the digital utopic enterprise. In this section I set out to explore the most recognizable manifestation of

2-dimensional animation within 3-dimensional theatre space: hologram technology. In pursuit of the aesthetics of interactive media, Erkki Huhtamo traces a historical trajectory from the 1960s and participatory art that emphasizes the “expansion of the traditional field of art, the dream about 'Total Art,' the annihilation of the barrier between life and art...” etc.327 Staged digital interactivity, I argue, has a deeper historical trajectory, one that stems from the 18th century phantasmagoria. Following after Tom Gunning's media archaeological dig of the theatrical phantasms that ultimately led to the cinematic apparatus, my argument is that the aesthetics of the phantasmagoria, as projecting and changing the live space of the theater, reflect new digital broadcast technologies for telepresence, employing the theater as its development laboratory.

188 In Specters of Marx, in a chapter entitled, “Apparition of the Inapparent,” Jacques

Derrida employs the tropes of theater and the phantasmagoria in order to investigate the magical transformation by which commodities transform from use- to exchange-value.

There is a passage in which he compares how the commodity-form naturalizes the social characteristics of labor into and on itself to the reflective and distorting operations of the phantasmagoria. I quote at length in order to allow this passage to haunt this section rather than directly inform it:

How do you recognize a ghost? By the fact that it does not recognize itself in a mirror. Now that is what happens with the commerce of commodities among themselves. These ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts. And this whole theatrical process (visual, theoretical, but also optical, optician) sets off the effect of a mysterious mirror: if the latter does not return the right reflection, if, then, it phantomalizes, this is first of all because it naturalizes. The “mysteriousness” of the commodity-form as presumed reflection of the social form is the incredible manner in which this mirror sends back the image when one thinks it is reflecting for men the image of the “social characteristics of men's own labor”: such an “image” objectivizes by naturalizing. Thereby, this is its truth, it shows by hiding, it reflects these “objective” characteristics as inscribed right on the product of labor, as the “socio-natural properties of these things.” (195-196)

Here Derrida tries to unveil the specter of deconstruction that always haunted Marxism and vice versa. The commodity-form “shows by hiding.” It absorbs human labor onto and into itself and makes it appear as if this is the natural reflection of work. Like describing the ideal point of projected and perceived images, the point where they flatten or disappear in the middle of a vertical flip inside or between lenses, the magical transformation of the commodity-form is hauntingly difficult to describe. Bringing to light that which cannot be

189 recognized in a mirror leaves one slightly distorted. It turns us as spectators into specters of our own consumptions. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate how certain digital phantasmagoric practices and objects show by hiding, and, in doing so, generate something akin to visual capital.

The phantasmagoria is merely one mode whereby the properties of theater are and have been used to develop technologies of telepresence. What is important is that the phantasmagoria, as an apparatus of illusion, hides its input, placing performing bodies under the stage and in the wings in order to present a ghostly reflection. Technologies of telecommunication are based upon hiding input and output, to replace the tele-avatar for the live presence of its operator.

The recent emergence of hologram technologies are another advent in the related history between the live-performance stage and cinematic projection. Although the techniques deployed by hologram technology date back to the Phantasmagoria of the nineteenth century, recent advances in screen and projection technology have allowed for resolution advancements that bring the holographic projected image closer to the “actuality” of live performers on stage. As the marketing material for the most popular holographic system states: “Musion Eyeliner is a unique high-definition video hologram projection system allowing spectacular freeform 3D holographic effects to be projected within a live stage setting using Peppers Ghost technology. … It’s a sensory technology that wholly engages its audience and can transform information systems into visual capital that draws in today’s reality consumer.”328

The eyeliner hologram system first hit international attention and generated its

“visual capital” at the 2005 MTV music awards in Lisbon. It was billed as the first

190 holographic performance. The system was used to project the worlds most successful

“virtual band,” the Gorillaz, onto the award stage with various live performers alongside and among them, interacting. Since their inception, the Gorillaz have presented themselves as both a visual project as well as an extremely successful rock band that is composed of 2D, animate characters. Their project is aimed at the MTV generation that expects cinematic visuals and music to arrive packaged together. Their first appearance and their first video,

“Tomorrow Comes Today,” begins with the Gorillaz's animate avatars entering a photo- realistic urban landscape that has been edited to the frenetic pace of MTV perception. As the lead vocalist begins to sing, the landscape transforms into an animate world. In their earliest visuals they played with the animate image and its connections to and through photo-realism, making animation stand in distinction to the realism of the photograph.

Before working with Musion holographic systems, the Gorillaz maintained their cartoon avatar presence in live performance by performing behind screens that featured their silhouettes mixed with animate media. Since their introduction of holographic technology to the MTV world, the Musion Eyeliner system has been primarily developed at downtown

New York theater company 3-Legged Dog, led by executive director Kevin Cunningham.

Originally a non-profit theater group that financed itself through a for profit software company, 3-Legged Dog has since grown into a large conglomerate of tech enterprises and entertainment spaces. They are the foremost developers of interactive stage animation with a permanent theatre, one that has been built to the specifications of an old performance form: the phantasmagoria.

“What draws in today’s reality consumer,” as Musion's promotional materials state, is in fact a very old theatre trick that operates primarily through a hiding of the projection

191 apparatus, continuing the historical relationship between projection and the darkened, phantasmagoric theatre stage. As Tom Gunning notes, “The Phantasmagoria,” which includes Peppers Ghost technology,

differed from traditional magic lantern show primarily by concealing the apparatus from the audience’s view. …darkness not only enshrouded the device…, but showmen redefined the whole spectacle by placing the lantern behind the screen instead of in front of it, so that viewers saw the images projected –but not their source. Further, the screens themselves were concealed, first by curtains that covered them when the room was illuminated, then by the darkness of the room and finally by the lampblack that surrounded the figures on the glass slides, and thus eliminated a visible background which could have anchored them in space.329

This historical description is very akin to the architectural designs of 3-Legged Dog's hologram theatre. Musion Eyeliner’s deployment of “Pepper's Ghost Technology” harkens back to the first theatrical stages that paved the way for traditional movie projection systems.

Gunning writes that “The phantasmagoria (like the movie projection system that ultimately derived from it) created its illusions primarily by concealing its means.” 330 The invention of the phantasmagoric illusory trick of Pepper's Ghost is accredited to John Henry Pepper and

Henry Dirks and is accomplished through the casting of a projection from a hidden space, off of a mirror and onto a surface within the visible stage space.331 Pepper’s ghost relies upon a theatrical space with both hidden and visible spaces in order to achieve its effects, more importantly, the projection apparatus is hidden under, inside and around the theater space, which aligns it with a cinematic experience.

In building a new theater space downtown, heralded by the New York Times as a cultural salvation for ground zero, 3-legged Dog reconstructed the layered and hidden spaces

192 of Pepper's Ghost in order to work consistently with hologram technology. Recent hologram technology employs high resolution projectors which are hung above the stage at its rear, masked by curtains, and aimed at a reflective surface which then bounces the image onto an invisible screen, or foil. It is this invisible screen, the screen that hides right in front of the audience, the screen that gives the illusion of depth behind it, that is the true advancement of holographic technology. On their website, 3-legged Dog describes the technological advancement of the Musion eyeliner screen, or foil:

Eyeliner™ foil is less than 100 microns thick yet retains its durable characteristics once installed. Because the foil is so thin there is no drop shadow created when objects are projected onto it, as there would be if a system were using glass or perspex. Foil allows greater amounts of projected light through for brighter images – even in brightly lit shopping centers. In simple terms this means that the Eyeliner™ medium creates crisper, sharper and consequently more realistic representations of the object or person being projected than any other medium. It’s made out of a special optic polymer that includes plastic and steel molecules for reinforcement.332

As the statement from 3-Legged Dog demonstrates, this technology allows for “more realistic representations” where that “realistic representation” is achieved through further hiding of the apparatus: hiding the projector, the camera, and the screen. What hides the apparatus is the space and architecture of the theater. With Eyeliner technology the depth of the theater space as well as its black background is constitutive of the illusion, because the invisible screen requires space behind it in order for it to be invisible.

There is, however, another illusion at work here that goes hand in hand with the hiding of the apparatus, the illusion of continuity. This stage projection system differs from more traditional cinematic projections, namely, that in hologram technology there are no

193 cinematic cuts in the projected image: it primarily employs single, uninterrupted long takes or transmissions. In my second chapter on light, I locate a distinction between theatre and cinema in theatre's ability to maintain a constant luminescence, in theatre the objects under light can generate the change in image as opposed to the light apparatus itself. Although hologram technology is a deployment of projection technologies, it relies upon this theatrical quality as it seeks to transmit a whole presence. I write “transmit” because hologram technology is financially supported and developed by telecommunications companies.333 In

2011, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers presented Musion Eyeliner hologram technology as the future of their telecommunications development. “Think virtually,” he asks of his audience, “where the majority of communications will not be voice but the majority will be body English and the ability to communicate as if in the same location.”334

Before it was technologically possible, hologram technology was conceived of as an extension of telecommunications into telepresence, like Princess Leia calling out for help to

Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. Telepresence is a deployment of imaging and projection technologies based on the desire for continuity between bodies speaking across disparate spaces. The advantage, of course, is the visual extension of body language in the same way that voice was extended through and across space by the telephone. The game of poker often surfaces in marketing materials that promote hologram telepresence, for the simple reason that the game quickly illustrates the advantage of the visual during strategic business negotiations. Thus this technology relies upon the insistence that it is presenting continuous information, between the virtual and the live, from one body to another. This insistence of continuity is granted because of the hiding of the apparatus (telepresence conference rooms employ a hiding of the projector in addition to the invisible screen) and the lack of cutting in

194 the image. Like the specific architecture of 3-Legged Dog's theater, Cisco has recently released its TX9000 telepresence suite which is, essentially, a teleconference theater. It features six chairs, fixed in place at a conference desk, which face three large screens where their distant conference associates appear, utilizing another TX9000 on their side. Cameras and microphones are strategically hidden to keep the focus on the tele-present engagement.

It is, essentially, an interactive system that unites two distant theaters and its primary development has been within theatres.

The single transmission is a key desire and goal of telepresence, which essentially seeks to erase any interuption that would reveal the apparatus instead of the telepresence.

Well before the advent of hologram technology, the long take was granted special, realistic status by André Bazin. In his essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” he writes:

“The influence of Citizen Kane cannot be overestimated. Thanks to depth of field, whole scenes are covered in one take, the camera remaining motionless.”335 This scene, “covered in one take” has, according to Bazin, the ability to bring “the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality. Therefore it is correct to say that, independently of the contents of the image, its structure is more realistic.”\336 What Bazin asserts as a realistic structure shares a close affinity to the live theatre, where all scenes can be understood as “covered in one take.” What is missing from Bazin’s formulation, however, is the conflation of time that is presented in a long take. Bazin praises the long take for its ability to hide cinematic space and time through produced continuity. This very assumption of continuity and its value is what Foucault assaults in The Archaeology of

Knowledge, where he writes of the founding of the subject:

Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the

195 founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity…. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness.337

Continuity is the “indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject” and it conceives of time in “terms of totalization.” Here Foucault is writing about continuous history, but it is precisely the subject he identifies, founded by representations of continuous history, that is expounded in realistic tropes of cinema.

The totalization of time, and the reconstituted unity of the past are echoed by

Deleuze in his description of a cinema of time. In The Time-Image Deleuze finds in Citizen

Kane a structure based upon manipulations and conceptions of time: “These are the paradoxical characteristics of a non-chronological time: the pre-existence of a past in general; the coexistence of all the sheets of the past; and the existence of a most contracted degree. It is a conception that can be found in the first great film of a cinema of time,

Welles’ Citizen Kane.”338 It is a cinema of time that layers “all the sheets of the past” into an image, in the form of a long take, that Bazin finds “closer to reality.” It achieves this through a further hiding of the cuts that are first masked by persistence of vision; it hides the fragmentary time of the cinema by presenting an image without interruption. Bazin also praises Welles’ long take for its stability, because the camera does not move it is closer to reality –the reality of the motionless, seated spectator. Thus Bazin finds in the motionless camera a continuity between the live situation of the viewing body and the moving image on

196 the screen. That the camera does not move might be viewed as a further hiding of the apparatus. By remaining still, the camera ceases to draw attention to itself, allowing for the spectator to form a continuous relationship between his/her seated position and the action on the screen.

Holographic technology also deploys a motionless and hidden camera or input system. In fact, most digital systems that generate interactive animation on theatrical stages employ input systems that remain fixed in space. In order to respond to live performers, input devices must frame the whole of the performance space in order to map out how and where animations (output) may respond. In some deployments of hologram technology the audience is tricked into thinking there is no projection; the theatrical productions of 3-

Legged Dog often rely upon the confusion of the projected image and live body. In presentations not concerned with pretending away the presence of projection, however, there is, nevertheless a persistence of realistic tropes. In The 3-Legged Dog performances, for example, once the image is shown to be projected and manipulated, it nevertheless persists in presenting itself as contiguous with the live stage event –the apparatus is not suddenly revealed, explained, or otherwise pointed to within the performance despite its being a centerpiece.

Linked into the enterprise of telepresence, hologram artworks emphasize their clarity, dimensionality, real-time response (interactivity), in essence, it strives for any aesthetic that eliminates the presence of the telecommunicator's absence. As Gerald Gaylard notes in his 2004 article “Postmodern Archaic: The Return of the Real in Digital Viruality,”

“the digital virtuality industry today often emphasizes its naturalism and realism; it is an industry that currently sells itself less on its ability to abstract than on its increased high-

197 focus representational resolution.”339 This emphasis can be found in the language surrounding the hologram projection system: “the Eyeliner™ medium creates crisper, sharper and consequently more realistic representations of the object or person being projected than any other medium.”340

It is this same interplay and confusion between reality and its aesthetic markers within virtuality that Deleuze finds to be generative of the long take, a privileged style of what he calls a “direct time image.” Although he does not use the word “digital,” his description of the direct time image and its relationship to virtuality is particularly evocative of digital technology: “…when the actual optical image crystallizes with its own virtual image, on the small circuit. This is a crystal image…”341 This crystal image, made on the small circuit “reveals a direct time-image. … What the crystal reveals or makes visible is the hidden ground of time, that is, its differentiation into two flows, that of presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved. Time simultaneously makes the present pass and preserves the past in itself.”342 What is striking is that time’s “differentiation into two flows” mirrors ontological claims about live performance in opposition to recorded media. The first flow, “that of presents which pass,” is easily recognized in Peggy Phelan’s claim that

“the disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered.”343 Whereas the second flow, “pasts which are preserved,” are how ontologies of the live interpret the pre-recorded projected image. However, according to Deleuze, it is precisely the long take that reveals time’s “differentiation into two flows” –one could be the flow of live performance, the other the cinema, both rolled up into one projected image. It is the long take that reveals these two flows of time opening up the possibility for two time-images, “one grounded in the past,

198 the other in the present.”344 A time-image grounded in the present need not rely upon human actors to perform events but it is the logic of the live theater which becomes the lens and language through which this time-image asserts its relationship to the present, reality, and the time of its event.

Film director Robert Zemeckis is often credited with pioneering cinematic techniques that realistically integrate computer or traditional animation with human performance into a continuous space. In Forrest Gump(1993) the title character often finds himself inside of historical media footage. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?(1988) Zemeckis used puppets to stand in for animated characters during pro-filmic shots, before adding layering animations into the film and joining them with filmed performers. The use of puppets allowed for greater eye contact continuity with the live actors as well as serving as in-space models for the animators. In fact, Roger Rabbit is mentioned in the marketing materials for Musion Eyeliner technology: “Live or virtual stage presenters appear alongside and interact with virtual images, humans or animated (think of the effect created for Warner

Brothers movie, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?").”345

Recently, Zemeckis has been leading the way with wholly computer-generated films, beginning with The Polar Express (2004). Since his most recent films are completely digital there is no need to create continuity between discontinous media and character.

Nevertheless, Zemeckis has adapted and extended his previously employed techniques for creating continuity to the new technologies. As Jessica Aldred notes in her article “All

Aboard the Polar Express: A ‘Playful’ Change of Address in the Computer-Generated

Blockbuster,” that Zemeckis favours, “the almost frenetically mobile long takes made possible by the fact that the only camera he must control exists in the virtual space of the

199 computer. Such prolonged takes function to preserve the sense of a unified, subjectively experienced digital play space more readily associated with that of the video game than with cinema.”346 In addition to the “digital play space” of video games, Aldred could also add the digital live play space of hologram theatre. What Aldred labels “frenetic,” I would call ecstatic long takes; they are absorbing and beautiful. What allows Zemeckis to make sweeping, mobile long takes stems from the fact that he does not film anything at all.

Instead, what is recorded is the whole of a performance event achieved through motion capture stages that translate studio stage movement into digital code. The code is then layered with digital animation at which point Zemeckis can decide where the “camera,” or cinematic point of view should be. The studio, or stage, is now the camera. Almost like the phantasmagoria. William Brown clearly articulates the techniques of motion capture employed in another of Zemeckis’ wholly computer generated films, Beowulf (2007):

… the technique of motion capture used in Beowulf involves ‘filming’ without the need for a camera: since the sets are virtual, there are no locations, and the actors are not filmed so much as sensors on their bodies translate their performance directly into code that is then outputted in a visual format that resembles human perception. That is to say, the actor’s performances are recorded straight on to a computer chip with no photography needed at all, not even digital photography…347

All that is needed is a performance event and a mathematical code that determines the increments of time that are traced and recorded. The camera is gone, it has been replaced by the human body performing on silicon crystals.

Motion capture technology’s ability to record performance events, coupled with computer rendering of a virtual space, allows for a totality of diegetic cinematic space. The whole space that is shown is a digitally animate one. The event occurs on the motion capture

200 stage, which is also the recording apparatus, it records the duration of the event and only after is the stage replaced by a virtual world. The performance event gives the first limit to the world out of which digital continuity is constructed and offered to the viewer. What the digital masks is the stage and its limits. Like the darkened halls of the phantasmagoria, the digital layers reflect a world that exceeds the stage by hiding the architectural limits of the theater.

Artistic works that merge animation and the live body are prevalent. Works of interanimation tend theatre toward the cinematic, sometimes adding the expense of human performers, but otherwise mostly hiding the apparatus in favor of astonishment and the appearance of seamless connections between performers and animate things. Works of inter(in)animation often reveal the apparatus, comment upon its operations, and employ its limitations as artistic medium.

Inter-: world/animality/light/movement

Access to the record, or living memory, or the pesty encounter with the index, or the simultaneous act and trace of walking and writing; all allow us to cast glances back, animating pasts in presents and afterwards. The stages of theatre are traversed by cartoons.

The screen of cartoons stand in the theatre. Together, the two reveal alternate affective labors in their production and presentation. Operating in one requires a knowledge of the other, as the digital forces a social encounter, an interface of the body and technology. Ways of perceiving worlds, animal bodies, light, and movement productively collide in their touch

—they make way for a condition of sense from an other. Theatre and animation together in performance have the power not simply to dissect our senses, but to offer an expansion of

201 our perceptions.

Knowledge and critique alone do not satisfy the enjoyment of animation and theatre.

I love watching cartoons for different reasons than I love watching theatre, and yet when the two combine, when the two distinct reasons touch, I find a spectatorial bliss like no other. I love animation for its precision and playfulness with the screen and frame. Theatre for the addition of the stage and minus the precision, but emphasis on that subtraction. I revel in the harmony of animate machine, its splendors in performance with a vulnerable human body in performance. Everyone is entranced by some kind of moving image, be it a simple mandala, leaves against an autumn blue, the walk of jockey, abstract or toonishly animate figures; our attraction should not be shamed, though certainly examined. Ecstasy in the inter(in)animation of images, bodies and things, is part of the motivation of their creation, growth, and sense of purpose; it is what makes matter so life-like.

202 Bibliography

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206 Notes

1 Media Introductions 1 Miriam Hansen, “Of Mice and Ducks.” The South Atlantic Quarterly. 92, no. 1 (1993): 33. 2 S. M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Y Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxi. 5 Ibid., 73. 6 Ibid., xxiii–xxx. 7 Ibid., xxvi. 8 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 33. 9 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992). 10 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators, and the Avant-Garde,” in Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 37–45; Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 2. 11 Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 12 Ibid., 3–4. 13 Donald Crafton, Before Mickey (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1993), 3. 14 Ibid., 11. 15 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4. 16 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2004), 31. 17 McKenzie, Perform or Else, 3. 18 Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 31. 19 Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 22. 20 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011). 21 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, 1st ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 13. 22 Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (Boston: Pearson Education, Allyn & Bacon, 2007), 28. 23 Ibid. 24 Charles S. Peirce, Philosophy of Pierce: Selected Writings, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1980), 108. 25 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, (University Of Minnesota Press, 2001), XIX. 26 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 160. 27 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media. Trans. Anthony Enns (Berlin: Polity, 2010), 22–23. 28 Ibid., 22. 29 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (Rutgers University Press, 1991), 27. 30 Ibid., 12. 31 “Cartoon, N. : Oxford English Dictionary,” accessed May 15, 2012, http://oed.com/view/Entry/28312? rskey=34AyuY&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. 32 Jan Fernback, “The Individual Within the Collective: Virtual Ideology and the Realization of Collective Principles,” in Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cyberspace (Salt Lake City, UT: Publishers Press, 1997), 37 my emphasis. 33 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, 1st ed. (University Of Minnesota Press, 2001), 336. 34 Ibid., 348. 35 J. David Bolter and Diane Gromala, Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), 147. Notes

36 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 44. 37 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 16. 38 Nicholas Ridout, “The Ice,” in Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 188. 39 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 22. 40 Mihai Coman, “Liminality in Media Studies,” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St. John (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 94. 41 Marvin A Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 20. 42 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), 36. 43 Ibid., 52. 44 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett, 13th ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 189.

Movement 1 Diectic Feet: performance as the index of animation 45 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 106. 46 Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 4th ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 1. 47 (qtd. in Freud) Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Jensen, Delusion and Dream: An Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva, a Novel, by Wilhelm Jensen, Which Is Here Translated, trans. Helen M Downey (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003), 150. 48 Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (The MIT Press, 2008), 220. 49 “EDIT9,” Edit-frankfurt.de, online, accessed October 29, 2011, http://www.edit- frankfurt.de/edit06/en/index.htm. 50 Andy Serkis, Gollum: A Behind the Scenes Guide of the Making of Gollum (London: Collins, 2003). 51 Mark B.N. Hansen, “Seeing With The Body: The Digital Image in Postphotography,” Diacritics 31, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 57. 52 Kozel, Closer, 220. 53 Rosalind E. Krauss, “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October 92, no. Spring (2000):3–33. 54 Ibid. 55 Ron Henderson, “Physics in Animation” (presented at ICERM, Providence, RI, November 15, 2012). 56 Jorge Ribas, “YouTube - Avatar: Motion Capture Mirrors Emotions,” accessed April 28, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wK1Ixr-UmM. 57 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 4. 58 Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 36. 59 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 105. 60 Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 7. 61 Ibid. 62 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 128–137. 63 Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (New York: Wallflower Press, 2008), 2. 64 Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. (Kenilworth: Rodopi, 2006), 334. 65 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), 18. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 11. 68 Tom Gunning, “Moving Away From the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 38. 69 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. 70 Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 142. 71 Gunning, “Moving Away From the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” 40. 72 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Notes

MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 91. 73 Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 13. 74 Ibid., 106. 75 Ibid., 13. 76 Ben Brewster, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 167. 77 Charles S. Peirce, Philosophy of Pierce: Selected Writings (New York: Dover,1980), 108. 78 Ibid., 108–110. 79 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 80 Ibid., 100. 81 Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 11. 82 Ibid., 7. 83 Ibid., 2. 84 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 102. 85 Mary Leakey, “Footprints in the Ashes of Time,” National Geographic (April 1979): 453. 86 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 103. 87 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 37. 88 Scott C. Richmond, “The Exorbitant Lightness of Bodies, or How to Look at Superheroes: Ilinx, Identification, and Spider-Man,” Discourse Journal 34, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 113. 89 Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato, originally 1970, http://www.movingimages.info/mit/readings/MorUnc.pdf. 90 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Writing on Art and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)193-233. 91 Ibid., 157. 92 Ibid., 152. 93 “Artfutura: Art + Thought,” accessed July 9, 2013, http://www.artfutura.org/v2/artthought.php? lang=En&idcreation=16. 94 Freud and Jensen, Delusion and Dream (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003) 146. 95 Ibid., 145. 96 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1st ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 97. 97 Freud and Jensen, Delusion and Dream, 285. 98 Wolfgang Ernst, “Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 107. 99 Schneider, Performing Remains, 108. 100 Ibid. 101 Schneider, Performing Remains, 109. 102 Ibid., 149.

Light 2 The Lightest Distinction 103 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 107. 104 Ibid., 10. 105 Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990), 9. 106 Tom Gunning, “Moving Away From the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” Differences Journal. 18, no. 1 (2007): 44. 107 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 20. 108 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 11. 109 Anne Washburn, Mr. Burns: a post-electric play (in Press), 2012, 3. 110 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, Reprint (New York: Verso, 2009), 3. 111 Rancière, The Future of the Image, 2–3. 112 Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (rev)94 Edition (Cambridge, MA: The Notes

MIT Press, 1994), 12. 113 Ibid., 9. 114 Ibid. 115 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 43. 116 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, (New York: Routledge, 2011), 92. 117 Washburn, Mr. Burns: a post-electric play, 3. 118 Anne Washburn, “In the Playwrights Words,” Exterior promotional material, printed vinyl and wood., May 2012. 119 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1993), 89. 120 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 24. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., 27. 123 Ibid., 25. 124 Washburn, Mr. Burns: a Post-electric play, 3. 125 Ibid., 7. 126 Washburn, “In the Playwrights Words.” 127 Anne Washburn, “Mr. Burns: a Post Electric Play, ‘from the Playwright’ Program Note,” June 17, 2012. 128 Washburn, Mr. Burns: a Post-electric play, 18. 129 Ibid., 7. 130 Auslander, Liveness, 23. 131 Schneider, Performing Remains, 133. 132 Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (Boston: Pearson Education, Allyn & Bacon, 2007), 347. 133 Brockett and Hildy, History of the Theatre. 134 Laurence Irving, Henry Irving, the Actor and His World, (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 529. 135 Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, (New York: Macmillan), 1906), 178. 136 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 94. 137 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross, Second printing, November 1971 (Boston,: Beacon Press, 1987), 14. 138 Ibid. 139 Washburn, Mr. Burns: a Post-electric Play, 32–33. 140 Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving,, 176. 141 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 91. 142 Ibid., 94, 92. 143 Ibid., 95. 144 Ibid., 96. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 Pomerance, Murrary, “Tinker Bell, The Fairy of Electricity,” in Second Star to the Right: Peter Pan in the Popular Imagination, ed. Lester Friedman and Allison Kavey (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 24. 148 Brockett and Hildy, History of the Theatre, 347. 149 Stewart, On Longing, 86. 150 Ibid., 89. 151 McLuhan. Understanding Media, 68. 152 Ibid., 12. 153 Ron Henderson, “Physics in Animation,” presented at the ICERM (Providence, RI, November 15, 2012). 154 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, 1st ed. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 226, 169. 155 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 92. 156 Kittler, Optical Media, 2010, 22. 157 Ibid., 171. Notes

158 Ibid. 159 Ibid., 172. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid. 162 Ibid., 25. 163 Ibid., 227. 164 Ibid., 25. 165 Friedrich Kittler, “Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction,” trans. Sara Ogger, Grey Room Winter, no. 2 (2001): 40. 166 Mike Seymour, “The Art of Rendering (updated),” April 10, 2012, http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the- art-of-rendering/. 167 Kittler, Optical Media, 2010, 228. 168 Anne Washburn, Mr. Burns: a Post-electric play (in Press), 104. 169 Ibid., 105. 170 Ibid. 171 Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 128–137. 172 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8. 173 Washburn, Mr. Burns: a Post-electric play, 6. 174 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 30.

Animality 3 Part Pest: the un/heimlich animal 175 Spencer Golub, Infinity Stage (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 2. 176 Ben Brantley, “‘Spider-Man - Turn Off the Dark’ Opens After Changes-Review-NYTimes.com”, http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes- review.html. 177 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 94. 178 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon, 1980), 165. Freud's 1911 footnote reads: A Hungarian proverb quoted by Ferenczi [1910] goes further and declares that 'pigs dream of acorns and geese dream of maise.'' [added 1914] A Jewish proverb runs:'What do hens dream of? --Of Millet.' (Bernstein and Segel, 1908, 116). 179 Richard Dorment, “Julie Taymor, American.,” Esquire 156, no. 5 (December 2011): 178–181. 180 Patrick Healy, “Untangling the Reviews For ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’ - NYTimes.com”, June 15, 2011, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/untangling-the-reviews-for-spider-man-turn-off-the- dark/; “Worst Reviews Ever? Spider-Man Musical Gets Slammed | NewsFeed | TIME.com”; Glen Levy“‘Spider-Man - Turn Off the Dark’ Opens After Changes - Review - NYTimes.com”, n.d., http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/theater/reviews/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-opens-after-changes- review.html. 181 Levy. “Worst Reviews Ever? Spider-Man Musical Gets Slammed | NewsFeed | TIME.com.” 182 Healy, “Untangling the Reviews For ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’ - NYTimes.com.” 183 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 119. 184 Dorment, “Julie Taymor, American.,” 179. 185 Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, 4. 186 Dorment, “Julie Taymor, American.,” 180. 187 Janet M Davis, The Circus Age : Culture & Society Under the American Big Top (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 37–81. 188 Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches, First ed. (Los Angeles: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 5. 189 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators, and the Avant-Garde,” in Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 37–45; Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (Wallflower Press, 2008), 2. 190 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010). 191 Artaud, 30. 192 Ibid., 31. Notes

193 Perhaps in the spirit of abandoning my own academic ethics, I use this moment to place Ridout's words into Antonin's mouth. Nicholas Ridout, Theatre and Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 70. 194 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 10. 195 William Shakespeare, A Midsumer’s Night Dream, Act 3.1.100–105. 196 Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 131. 197 In that collision they re-affirm the test drive, after: McKenzie, Perform or Else, 233–234,. 198 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (London: Virago, 1988), 93. 199 Schneider, Performing Remains, 6. 200 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 148. 201 Ibid., 148–149. 202 Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, 4. 203 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd 1975 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1962), 22. 204 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood : Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 130. 205 Ibid., 139. 206 Andrew Darley, “Bones of Contention: Thoughts on the Study of Animation,” Animation 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2007): 63 –76. 207 In the Introduction to Mannoni's text, Gunning describes all of cinema as slippery, yet Gunnings' investments in animation places his description of cinema within (at least) an animated understanding: “Origins are slippery things, figuratively and literally, and the cinema is possibly the most slippery medium that has ever existed.”Laurent Mannoni and Tom Gunning, trans. Richard Crangle. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), xix . 208 Lev Manovich, “Image Future,” Animation 1, no. 1 (2006): 43. 209 Schneider, Performing Remains, 208. 210 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Nabu Press, 2010), 256. 211 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 4. 212 Mary Ann Doane, “Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photgraphic Imaginary,” in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, ed. David Green (Photoworks, 2005), 23. 213 Bergson, 256. 214 “Ultrafast Camera Records at Speed of Light | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network”, n.d., http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/13/ultra-high-speed-camera-records-at-speed-of- light/. 215 Bergson, 256. 216 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 2008), 24. 217 Ibid., 8. 218 Ibid. 219 Ibid., 9. 220 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 182. 221 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 94. 222 Dorment, “Julie Taymor, American.,” 178–179. 223 As Ridout shows about the animal's presence on stage, it reveals who is working and how. Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, 127. 224 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 46. 225 Ibid., 46–47. 226 Ibid., 47. 227 Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 239. 228 The other way to approach Deleuze's objection to the cartoon would be that the animator carefully selects the first pose, the "any-instant-whatever" in the course of the figures movement, thus destroying the quality of any-instant whatever by choosing a particular pose and event to start from. Deleuze, Cinema 1. 229 Ibid., 5. Notes

230 I write this sensory list of movement in order to push against Christian Metz's description of movement as “never material but always visual, to reproduce its appearance is to duplicate its reality.” Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990), 9. 231 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 3. 232 Ibid., 5. 233 Ibid. 234 qtd. in John E. Bowlt, “When Life Was a Cabaret,” Art News (December 1984): 125. 235 Daniel Gerould, “Eisenstein’s ‘Wiseman’,” The Drama Review: TDR, no. 1 (1974): 71. 236 Previous to Eisenstein’s production of The Wiseman, both Meyerhold and Mayakovsky staged plays that relied heavily upon circus theatrics. Eisenstein was Meyerhold’s assistant on his circus heavy production of Tarelkin’s Death, which utilized clown acts, gymnastics, and a trapeze act. Eisenstein crafted The Wiseman around a circus ring and “all the characters were assigned functions as clowns and acrobats at various points in the play. The actor-acrobats did triple somersaults on an imaginary horse, walked over the auditorium on high wires, jumped down in parachutes, and climbed up [to] the ceiling on poles.” Ibid., 74. 237 qtd. in ibid., 75. 238 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 6. 239 Ibid., 18. 240 Eisenstein, Sergei M. Towards a Theory of Montage: Sergei Eisenstein Selected Works, Volume 2, trans. William Powell, annotated ed. (I. B. Tauris, 2010), 48. 241 Eisenstein, Non-indifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48. 242 David Bordwell. The Cinema of Eisenstein (Harvard University Press, 1993), 171. 243 Although Lévy-Brühl’s theory of primitive thought is formulated around certain tribal societies, he did not limit his theories to his ethnographic field: “There are not two forms of thinking for mankind, one logical, the other prelogical, separated from each other by an impenetrable wall. They are different thought structures that exist in the same society and often, perhaps always, in one and the same mind.”qtd. in P Tul’viste, “Levy-Bruhl and Problems of the HistoricDevelopment of Thought,” Soviet Psychology 25, no. 3 (1987): 14. 244 “The dialectic of works of art is built upon a most curious ‘dual-unity’. The effectiveness of a work of art is built upon the fact that there takes place in it a dual process: an impetuous progressive rise along the lines of the highest conceptual steps of consciousness and a simultaneous penetration by means of the structure of the form into the layers of profoundest sensuous thinking. The polar separation of these two lines of aspiration creates that remarkable tension of unity of form and content characteristic of true art- works.” Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form; Essays in Film Theory,, trans. Jay Leyda, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 144–145. 245 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 2. 246 Ibid., 53. 247 “The eye of the observer (the subject) `runs around' the observed (the `object').... at this stage of development there is yet no differentiation between the subjective and the objective. And the movement of an eye, running along the line of a mountain's contour, is read just as easily as the running of the contour itself.” Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 55. 248 Ibid., 44. 249 Davis, The Circus Age, 15–30. 250 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 9. 251 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 3–4. 252 Davis, The Circus Age, 39. 253 Ibid., 41. 254 Tiny Kline, Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline, ed. Janet M. Davis (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 44. 255 Ibid., 133. 256 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009), 1. 257 Schneider, Rebecca, “Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly,” in Psychoanalysis and Performance, 2001, 111. 258 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 216. Notes

259 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 260 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press Books, 2011). 261 Brian Michael Bendis, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Vol. 1 (Marvel, 2012); Brian Michael Bendis, Ultimate Spider-Man: Death of Spider-Man (Marvel, 2011); Brian Michael Bendis et al., Ultimate Spider- Man: Death of Spider-Man Fallout (Marvel, 2011). 262 Fragment written in 1931; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schri(ten, VI, 145. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Walter Benjamin, 1931. 263 Schneider, “Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly,” 96. 264 Fragment written in 1931; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schri(ten, VI, 145. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Walter Benjamin, 1931. 265 Miriam Hansen, “Of Mice and Ducks,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 1 (1993): 49–50. 266 Ibid., 48. 267 Ibid., 67. 268 Ibid. 269 Schneider, “Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly,” 98. 270 Dread performed “I’ve Always Been the One I’ve Wanted to Marry” in a cabaret at the Resoundingly Queer conference at performing arts center of Cornell University, March 2012. 271 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 171. 272 Ibid., 162. 273 Ibid., 20. 274 Ibid., 175. 275 Fragment written in 1931; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schri(ten, VI, 145. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Walter Benjamin,1931. 276 Neil Gaiman. Coraline (New York: Harper Collins, 2004); Coraline (Universal Studios, 2010). 277 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 181. 278 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny.” 279 Ibid., 124. 280 Ibid., 143. 281 Ibid., 144. 282 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (The Standard Edition) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) (New York: Routledge, 1989), 155, 175. 283 Ibid., 176. 284 Ibid. 285 Ibid., 177. 286 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 4–5. 287 Michel Serres, The Parasite, 1st Edition in English. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 7, 10. 288 “Philip William McKinley — a director whose credits include several versions of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” Brantley, “‘Spider-Man - Turn Off the Dark’ Opens After Changes - Review - NYTimes.com.” 289 Dorment, “Julie Taymor, American.,” 181. 290 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 178. 291 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 293. 292 Christine Quigley, Modern Mummies: The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland, 1998), 127–128. 293 Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (Theatre Communications Group, 1994), 13 emphasis in original. 294 qtd. in Quigley, Modern Mummies, 126. 295 Emma Barker, Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 13. 296 Elisha Coles, A Dictionary, English-Latin and Latin-English Containing All Things Necessary for the Translating of Either Language into the Other. (Detroit, MI: Gale ECCO, 2010) originally published 1677. 297 Christopher D Morris, The Hanging Figure : on Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 6. 298 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), 48. 299 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. John Forrester, vol. 1, 1st American ed. (New York: Notes

W.W. Norton, 1988), 16. 300 Ibid., 1:146. 301 Ibid., 1:79. 302 Ibid., 1:140. 303 Gary Leonard, “Keeping Ourselves in Suspense: The Imagined Gaze and Fictional Constructions of the Self in Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allen Poe,” in Suspense : Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, ed. Peter Vorderer, Hans Jürgen Wulff, and Mike Friedrichsen (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1996), 20. 304 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 1:220. 305 Aristophenes, “The Ecclesiazusae,” The Internet Classics Archive, n.d., http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/eccles.html. 306 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 1:140. 307 “Tacoma Narrows Bridge - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia”, n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge. 308 Leonard, “Keeping Ourselves in Suspense: The Imagined Gaze and Fictional Constructions of the Self in Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allen Poe,” 20. 309 Ibid., 22.

World 4 Promising Inter-; or, How to Stage Animation 310 Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 306. 311 This is one way Weiss credits his collaborative work. Frieder Weiss, “The Website of Frieder Weiss,” accessed December 20, 2011, http://www.frieder-weiss.de/.` 312 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 559. 313 qtd. in ibid., 560. 314 Ibid., 561. 315 David Saltz, “The Art of Interaction: Interactivity, Performativity, and Computers,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 2 (1997): 118. 316 Schneider, Performing Remains, 7. 317 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 9. 318 Schneider, Performing Remains, 7. 319 Jeremy Bailey, The Future of Creativity (Live from Toxteth, Liverpool), 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZgfiWTwfgA&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 320 Jeremy Bailey, The Future of Theatre, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VR9lSd0FBUA&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 321 Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 336. 322 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (London: Virago, 1988), 167. 323 Kristin Taylor, Frieder Weiss on Light Design, Creative Process, and Breaking Flatness (http://www.poptech.org/blog/frieder_weiss_on_light_design_creative_process_and_breaking_flatness, n.d.). 324 Weiss, “The Website of Frieder Weiss.” 325 Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 22. 326 Nancy, The ground of the image, 9. 327 Errki Huhtamo, “I Am Interactive-Therefore-Am I?,” in Pionere Interaktiver Kuust (Ostifildern, Germany: Hatje-Cantz, 1997). 328 “3D Holograms | Musion Eyeliner | Holographic Projection for Live Events,” accessed December 11, 2010, http://www.eyeliner3d.com/. 329 Tom Gunning, “Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and Its Specters,” Media Art Histories Archive, 2004, 296, http://193.171.60.44/dspace/handle/10002/296. 330 Ibid. 331 “Eyeliner,” 3LD NYC Art and Technology Center, November 22, 2010, http://www.3ldnyc.org/eyeliner.shtml. 332 Ibid. 333 “In Search of the Princess Leia Effect: The Future of 3D Telepresence - Telepresence Options,” accessed December 11, 2010, http://www.telepresenceoptions.com/2008/10/_normal_0_false_false/. Notes

334 6A1793B2 Cisco TelePresence Live Holographic Video Conferencing, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMCR9xep81E&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 335 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 33. 336 Ibid., 35. 337 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Vintage, 1982), 12. 338 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 99. 339 Gerald. Gaylard, “Postmodern Archaic: The Return of the Real in Digital Virtuality,” Postmodern Culture 15, no. 1 (2004), http://muse.jhu.edu.revproxy.brown.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v015/15.1gaylard.html. 340 “Eyeliner.” 341 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 69. 342 Ibid., 92. 343 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 147. 344 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 99. 345 “3D Holograms | Musion Eyeliner | Holographic Projection for Live Events.” 346 Jessica Aldred, “All Aboard The Polar Express: A ‘Playful’ Change of Address in the Computer-Generated Blockbuster,” Animation 1, no. 2 (November 1, 2006): 163. 347 William Brown, “Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie,” Animation 4, no. 2 (July 1, 2009): 161.