Digital Arts & Humanities - Scholarly Reflections - James O'Sullivan

even though you’re working maybe with the same
tracks, how it gets mixed each night by the
technicians, who are basically performers – unseen
performers – and how you feel that according to
your feelings and how it comes to you. (Auslander
102)
In the end, the actors are using film as choreographer and
mood setter. The actors are then filmed and mixed in real time
with prerecorded video, which further effects the way they act.
If the ideal of using video in theater is to find the perfect
balance between the media and the human; to create Cyborg
Theater, which relies on both live bodies and technology; then
beginning with media, or at least introducing it to the actors at
the beginning of the process, is key to an integrated actortechnology
relationship. Collage is absolutely the aesthetic at
play: collage as an approach to performance lends to an ideal
marriage of art an technology, in which technology is no longer
simply a prosthetic, but an integrated, integral part of a piece.
Every element introduced informs all other elements, and the
combined elements further inform future developments. This
interrelation creates cohesion within the piece apparent even
through the chaos of the fragmented, reassembled regurgitation
of source material. The monitors and their motions are placed
strategically in accord with the architecture of the performance
space; and performance space is sculpted, manipulated, and
defined by the media content. Media is used as a starting point
for developing the content of a play, introducing it to the piece
physically and conceptually from the earliest stages of the
creative process. Actors use media as a tool for acting, as a
springboard for ideas and to set the mood. This mediainfluenced
performance is further integrated with media through
live mixing of the real and pre-recorded, blurring the lines
between the two.
Through this approach, it becomes impossible for elements of a
piece to develop independently of others, eradicating the
awkward last-minute union of set, narrative, live body, and
media. The actors are comfortable working with the media from
the beginning, and have an active role in deciding on how these
technologies could be explored in context of interrelation with
space and body. Space, architecture, movement, bodies, and
video unify into one large, mediated collage. Through the
Wooster Group, Cyborg Theater is fully realized.
Works Cited
Auslander, Philip. “Task and Vision Revisited: Two
Conversations with Willem Dafoe.” The Wooster Group and its
Traditions. Ed. Johan Callens. Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang,
2004. 95-105. Print.
43