Helena Grehan

Performance, ethics and spectatorship in a global age

Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age is an innovative book that makes a significant contribution to performance studies scholarship. It undertakes a detailed investigation into the relationship between ethics and spectatorship in and in response to contemporary performance. Considering spectators both within and beyond the theatre, the text explores the ways in which they are stimulated or provoked by performance to address ethical questions about their roles as spectators and as citizens in a fraught media-saturated landscape. Through a detailed engagement with five internationally-acclaimed performances, this book talks about both the emotional and intellectual responses generated by politically-inflected work. It explores the feelings of awe, shock, delight and unsettlement that good performance engenders, and it traces the process spectators go through in making sense of those emotions through extended ethical reflection.

Actors, spectators, and "Vibrant" objects Kris Verdonck's ACTOR #1

In contrast to much new media performance, Kris Verdonck’s ACTOR #1 does not attempt to accelerate time or to enhance the spectatorial experience by juxtaposing theatrical elements. Instead the work presents a three-phase meditation that strips back the tools and techniques of theatre to allow, or perhaps even compel, spectators to focus on a single element, to inhabit one state, or to consider a single idea at a time.

Rakini Devi: Diasporic Subject and Agent Provocateur

Burmese-Australian choreographer/performer Rakini Devi is informed by her diverse skills in the areas of classical Indian dance, visual arts and contemporary performance practice. She uses these skills as well as her satirical wit and storytelling abilities to create an intricate portrait of the lived experiences of a contemporary diasporic subject. This is a portrait that is not only aesthetically stimulating but also politically inflected and provocative at the same time. Through her work Devi encourages us to remember that diaspora is more than a theoretical trope, that it is a complex and often contradictory experience which results in joy as well as pain as it is played out on live bodies.

Aalst: Acts of evil, ambivalence and responsibility

Based largely on transcripts and documentary footage of the trial, the play Aalst recounts the brutal killing of two children by their parents in the Belgian town of Aalst in 1999. This article explores the ways in which this performance engages spectators as witnesses in a play of seduction and estrangement during which the concepts of ethical responsibility and judgment are destabilized and radically challenged. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Arne Johan Vetlesen and Emmanuel Levinas a case is made for the importance of ambivalence as a productive mode of reading and responding to Aalst.

First Nations Politics in a Climate of Refusal

As a nation, Australians celebrate their cultural heritage through purchasing works of art by leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. These works are held in all major State-owned galleries and in most of the private collections of serious art buyers in the country. Australians also champion and support key artistic works in dance and performance. There remains, however, a distinct tension between the willingness of (successive) governments to celebrate the symbolic value of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ creative works and governmental readiness to participate in or endorse any performance that might usher in meaningful structural or material change for First Nations people who, in 2018, are still excluded from the Australian Constitution. The focus of this paper is to consider the performative qualities of both the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ (2017), written by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and presented to the people of the nation and to the government as an invitation to work together to achieve ‘Constitutional reforms’ for the First Nations people of Australia, and the Government’s response to this invitation via their Media Release and subsequent interviews. An analysis of the modes of address, the language used, and the aesthetic and ethical questions raised by each text, provides insight on the politics of speaking and listening in the current Australian political climate.

Cue Black Shadow Effect: The New Media Dramaturgy Experience

We begin with the notion that what was once called new media has increasingly become a familiar part of the dramaturgy of the last quarter century. By considering the dramaturgy of new media performance events, we seek to develop a language to describe, situate, and understand how the practices of conceptualizing, designing, directing, and reading/responding to performance are now in flux in new ways. This flux is facilitated in part by developments in digital culture, and by a desire to respond to and harness these. In observing these developments, we also see a decrease in the representation of mediated society and an increase in the simulation of the agency of its technical creations. Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, the ‘new’ in NMD is practiced and performed in the work of a range of important contemporary artists – through their work with objects, actants, atmospheres, visuality, sound, machines, and systems of various kinds. We note that the use of video, powerful data projections, new sound systems, and even technologies such as robots reflects not so much a vanishing of human bodily presence from the theatre or the arts of that period, but a more subtle repositioning of bodily presence.

The Virtual Machine: Projection in the Theatre

We begin in Chapter 2 with a discussion of data projection and the ways in which it has thoroughly transformed the notion of liveness in the last two decades. New projection technologies enabled the harnessing of data-based images to create immersive, multiple, virtual stage-spaces that became increasingly easier to reproduce in inverse proportion to the disappearance of the auratic analogic image. To this end, we discuss examples of video projection in dumb type’s seminal works S/N and OR and show how projection renders the theatre space informatic and performative rather than simply illustrative. Meanwhile, analysis of works such as Ong Keng Sen’s Desdemona and Kris Verdonck’s HUMINID foreground the experience of viewing mediated artworks and proposes a form of projection as critique. Finally, consideration of Chunky Move’s Glow shows the integration of projection with the performer to create a real-time and dramaturgically transforming expression of intermediality. Overall, this chapter shows that projection in the context of new media dramaturgy is something that has its own agenda and agency and is not simply at the service of a story or characterisation.

From Extreme Light to Total Darkness: The Dramaturgy of Organised Light

The discussion of illumination is continued and extended in Chapter 3 where we explore the development of outdoor lighting systems, large-scale projections, and light and video displays in installation works exhibited in gallery spaces. We draw on Sean Cubitt’s idea of ‘organised light’ (Coherent Light from Projectors to Fibre Optics, Open Humanities Press, London: 2015, 45) as the functional ability to focus and amplify light in parallel with developments of the technologies of luminescence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We argue that these developments predicate a complexity of aesthetic and political relations that have bearing on histories of urban space, political economy, and ideas of community and nationhood. Our discussion touches on both the rise of spectacular lighting events at expositions, civic events and world fairs, as well as case studies by artists including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, dumb type and Ikeda Ryoji. The chapter comes full circle in a discussion of Verdonck’s Stills, a large-scale work projected onto the sides of buildings in post-austerity Athens in 2015. The early termination of this work at the behest of the authorities created a media frenzy, and our analysis in this chapter shows how these manifestations of public lighting incorporate and extend technology to draw attention to an idea that also concretises political actions.

Play/Pause, FF/Rewind. End. Machine Times, End Times: Theatre, Live Film and Video

In Chapter 8 we consider two art media that have long been threatened with extinction – film and theatre – and discuss how remediation charts their formation of a practice looking backwards and forwards, communicating histories and the future worlds of NMD. This chapter deals with questions of temporality and belatedness in NMD and considers modalities of machinic temporality through a number of examples of work that seem to betray a dramaturgical commitment to a particular form of technically enabled recursion. This chapter pursues lines of enquiry opened by Cubitt and others on the idea of time-shifting – that since the advent of the Sony Portapak in the mid 1960s, and the subsequent ubiquity of technologies like the VCR, live temporalities have been subject to varieties of shifting: rewinding and repeating, fast-forwarding, pausing, amid the presentness of ‘play’. We discuss Tacita Dean’s Event for Stage, Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett, and Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot, works that in different ways seem to provoke existential questions about liveness, temporality and memory. We explore how strange this quality of time can seem to be and how easily it affects us. This uncertainty is also acute in Verdonck’s End, the concluding artwork for the chapter and a pivotal work for the book as a whole. End is a performance for ‘ten figures’, five of whom are actors – the others are machines, visual effects and projections. They seem to be performing the possible final stage of a human community. The ‘starting point of END’ comes from media images of environmental catastrophe, the extinction of species, and ‘the horrors of famine and war’ (Van Kerkhoven, End, A Two Dogs Company Website d). The performance lasts one hour but has no discernable beginning or end. It is dramatically flat – there is no story, only actions, and one senses that it could easily go on into infinity.

Robots: Asleep, Awake, Alone, and in Love

In Chapter 5 we look at the use of robots in recent theatre and argue that, in some cases, robots are ideal vehicles for performance based on new media dramaturgy as they can translate between the informatic and the organic, facilitating meaningful transactions between human visitors and autonomous or semi-autonomous machine. But they also raise significant questions about aesthetic representation and audience response. The chapter considers recent work in creative robotics, which gestures towards something beyond the robotics of industrial design and performance based on efficiency (speed and productivity) and beyond the comparatively simple question of the representation of robotics in the world. This involves a rediscovery of the larger representational function of robotics in imaging the enhanced qualities of human experience rather than simply its visual manifestations. We argue, through analyses of robot and android theatre works by Hirata Oriza and Ishiguro Hiroshi, Mari Velonaki, and Kris Verdonck, that the experience and meaning generated by this work is a result of the entire system’s design and dramaturgy and that it is dramaturgically constituted as a result of the interactions between entities rather than as a feature of one or more of the constituent entities. Recent work that explores what Braidotti calls ‘a displacement of the lines of demarcation … between the organic and the inorganic’ (The Posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge: 2013, 89) is also discussed in reference to theorising a political perspective on NMD and robotics. In short, we demonstrate that we do not need identifiably human actors as guarantors of meaning and intimacy either in robotics or in performance.