images of The Playgoer

a taste of invisible

The Playgoer, is a new experiment of interaction spectatorship. In previous projects, I have tried several methods to achieve this object, such as position interchange, role infliction, and light irradiation to oppress audience. In this piece, I tried to build an invisible theatre by using invisible actor (body replacement) , but sound display. The purpose of replacement of actor's body, is to raise audience’s essentiality in the balance of audience actor inter-relations.

This performance alternated with other's, as prologue and ending, since the unawareness of theatregoing is essential for invisible theatre. But I put the form of The Last Supper into it, to avoiding excessively performance scenarion and continuing role infliction part.

The pressure in this piece could be found in these points:
1, ask to swich off mobiles and cameras;
2, ask to tuck napkins into their T-shirts;
3, ask to draw food order down on their white plates.

In the aim of achievement of participation, I chose theatre of the oppressed to forcing visitors instead of offering more freedom to them, as that the apectator today should walk out of the stage of emotional resonance, and then realize rational criticize.

dissertation for MA

Social Consequences of Audience Actor Inter-relations
July 2010

Finding Interaction in Body Displacement

Les Chaises (The Chairs)
Video Recording
Eugene Ionesco
Modlin Center for Arts
Richmond, Va
2006




I am keeping on exploring audience actor interaction, and looking for methodologies of participation realization, then ignored that there is something called “absurdism” opposing the idea of realism. It accentuated the “paradoxical invisibility of spectators” (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 106), which explains spectator’s significance in another point of view.

Artist “Ionesco’s game of presence/absence, placement/ displacement, reality/ unreality serves to accentuate the invisibility of the spectators in the modern theatre and their phenomenal disembodiment as they sit in the dark. Like the onstage chairs, those in the theatre auditorium serve as seats of displacement for an audience that surrenders to dramatic mimesis and assumes invisibility through the self-effacement of theatrical watching (a spectatorial disembodiment, as Worthen notes, often central to the aesthetic of realism).’’ (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 106)

In The Chairs, as video presents, empty chairs were arranged as queues on the stage, as those in auditoria, with a huge mirror projecting them, then actors shuttled back and forth among the rest, which looked as a routine “speaking theatre” “promising a spatial and material field for linguistic self-extension and for a regaining of self-possession through speech” (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 104). Then those audiences sitting in dark were playing the role of pure witness outside of “theatre watching”, and they, in my opnion, had nothing difference with the spectators of television or film.

Ionesco’s game of paradox of theatre audience (both there and not there) was playing audience itself presence as absence (visible as invisible), by declining spectator’s appearance:

The chairs explores the paradoxical status of this theatre audience that is both there and not there---- that, paradoxically, is there by making itself not there---- and Ionesco’s ending underscores the mutual, though problematic, entailment of embodiment and disembodiment: “We hear for the first time the human noises of the invisible crowd; these are bursts of laughter, murmurs, shh’s, ironical coughs; weak at the beginning, these noises grow louder, then, again, progressively they become weaker. All this should last long enough for the audience---- the real and visible audience---- to leave with this ending firmly impressed on its mind”. In Ionesco’s metatheatrical game, these “real and visible” audience members may have been less “present” than their chairs. (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 107)

Since the interpretation of absurdism: “[The] divorce between man and his wife, the actor and his sitting, is properly the feeling of absurdity (Camus, 1955: 23)” and Ionesco’s saying “personal identity is rendered unstable in the general confusion of placement and displacement (Stanton B. Garner, Jr., 1994: 105)”, my understanding of this separating of affinity stuffs or unstable rendering for confusion in absurdism is purposive reversing explanation. Then this practice of making visible body as invisible is just in order to make awareness of the consequence of spectator’s presence, through absence of physical body in phenomenal to get an inside bodily self experience in awareness, perception, knowledge and intention which beyond audience’s physical boundaries.


Reference:

Camus, A. (1955) The Myth of Sisyhus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’ Brien. New York: Random House.

Stanton B. Garner, Jr. (1994) Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press

Finding Interaction in Invisible Installations

The Edges of the World
Large-scare Sculptures
Ernesto Neto
Hayward Gallery
London
19 June -- 5 Sep 2010



Before starting the discussion about the application of interaction in The Edges of the World, it is worth making a clarification of Neto’s large-scale sculptures are theatres, in specific invisible immersive theatre.

Firstly, we should go back to the question what theatre is? In comparison with fine art installation, for me, the theatre is an installation with (within) body and his action. At this point, the incorporating spaces both for view and for play of The Edges of the World allows visitors to move freely through and around it, then it is a theatre as the combination of bodies’ movement and installations.

Secondly, what kind of theatre can be called as immersive theatre? As previous arguments in dissertation defined, the identities of immersive theatre are reduction of reality, aesthetics, emotional and resonance. Then taking these characters in The Edges of the World, visitors are encouraged to “wander through fabric installations, relax in cushioned soft spaces, ascend stairs into artworks overhead and, following on from Neto’s signature ‘nave’ works, venture barefoot through an all-encompassing nylon vessel […] whether submerged in a sculptural pool or balancing on an undulating path, visitors find themselves becoming active participants in the artworks”. Those abstract biomorphic quality creations are reductions of reality (or at least they are produced according to the real human organ and celling), and they achieve resonance by creating sensuous sculptures and then raising echo in emotion.

Finally, The Edges of the World will be put in the theory of invisible performance. Augusto Boal said: “in invisible theatre the spectator is transformed into a protagonist in the action, a spectator, without ever being aware of it. He is the protagonist of the reality he sees, because he is unaware of its fictitious origin (1992: 17)’’. Any space without actual actors but with body action can be named as invisible theatre, and its invisible actor is unawared audience, its invisible acting is just spectator’s movement, which accords with Neto’s formulation people“in between is a kind of dance”.

Neto successfully created “an art that unites, helping us to interact with others, showing us the limits, not as barriers but as a place of sensations and of exchange and continuity”. However, there are still some promotion spaces, for example taking videos of engaged participators to create another interaction piece for video watchers.


Reference:

Boal, A. (2002) Games for Actors and Non-actors: Second Edition. Trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge.

Southbank Centre
http://festivalbrazil.southbankcentre.co.uk/ernesto-neto/exhibition [last accessed 2 July 2010]

Finding Interaction in Pub Going

New Lounge
Live Performance
Shunt
London
13 May – 30 June 2010




“The New Lounge, not unlike the old Shunt Lounge, is both a platform project for artists and the most unusual late night member’s bar in town.” (Shunt, 2010)

As a platform project, Shunt created an exciting programme of art works that includes film, live music, circus, visual arts, performance, theatre, installation and the odd pole-vaulter within the damp brickwork space. The underground corridor itself is very unusual for spectators, also Shunt depends on this dark, long, high, rough underground space of London Bridge indeed. As mentioned before, immersive performance relies on the space for taking place, due to aesthetics is one of the most important characters of immersion.

However, I would like to define The New Lounge as pub going rather than site specific performance. There is a bar there, in fact, with a quality selection of drinks, and lots of tables, chairs, and sofas in various styles, with entertainment establishments, like table tennis, which provided more options and a more relaxed environment for audiences. Everything just looked like a bar as usual, which opened art to a wider range of audiences in a social environment.

As a mixture of site-specific project and late night pub going, The New Lounge gained an exciting outcome of a cross-fertilisation between artists and audiences as following methods:

Firstly, audiences are allowed to go through the performance space. Since there was no stage frame to separate stage area and audience seats, the whole tube became a social public space shared with every person equally.

Apart from that, audiences got the authority of selection of what they watch and when they go. All of the artworks of the multiple choices New Lounge took place in diverse time and locations, opening to limited quantity of watchers as small group performances, which forced viewers to make their own schedule of attendance.

Last but not least, audiences were invited to take a part of creators. The products of the fish workshop (one piece of The New Lounge), were used in dance performance, as setting and dancer’s costume, which put participators’ fish making into two times of interaction experience.



Reference:

Shunt Theatre Company, http://www.shunt.co.uk/newlounge.htm [last accessed 25 June 2010]

Finding Interaction in Cyberspace Game Playing

Best Before

Live Performance

Rimini Protokoll

ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts)

London

30 June - 3 July 2010

“Best Before pulls the multi-player video game out of the virtual realm and plugs it into an intimate theatre setting. Each audience member navigates an anonymous avatar via a gaming pad, to interact with a panel of on-stage experts - an electronic artist, a game tester, a politician and a traffic flagger. As audience and panel clash, collude, remonstrate, a simulated city, BestLand, gradually develops. Taking its inspiration from Vancouver's gaming industry, BestLand lives and dies through a decision making process that encompasses the personal, social and political. ” (ICA, 2010)

When I held the joystick and asked to take control of the avatar-projected role onto a huge screen, I felt glad with getting involved in, as a part of collective. Since every avatar-projected role has been connected to the every member in auditoria, with sex, name, appearance, job and props representing it’s identity, and grew up from time to time, this role-playing game became a completed imagined world created by audience and practitioner together.

Game playing, to be exact in cyberspace, has been distinguished as a kind of immersive performance in my critical paper, but Best Before is defined as “reality theatre” by Protokoll itself. Sometimes, I feel confused to classify a performance into a concept. I said that the features of immersive theatre differ from political are reduction of reality, aesthetics, emotional and resonance. Out of question, Best Before is a product of reductive experience from fictional world or an imitation of the physical experience. However, Best Before not immersed audience through audio or video effect as a role-playing game. Instead, audience was asked to show him or herself from seats when he or she win or lose the game. Start from this aspect, spectators noticed by third person frequently, which blocked them reach to the "total immersion" stage and reminded awareness of fiction games, then this piece could be belong to the political theatre, with social meaning.

That is my understanding of Frankfurter Rundschau’s comment “lies above all in the fact...that life could gain the upper hand, and theatre could lose control over itself." (Frankfurter Rundschau, 2010)

I would like to call Best Before as a product of image theatre. Due to each spectator gets the right to modify the “real image” (i.e. the image of reality, the world as it is), in order to show in “a visual form how it may be possible to move away from actual reality and create the reality we desire” as “ideal image” or BestLand as ICA said before (Boal, 1992: 3). In this way, this piece arrived to an image that represents a consensus among all the participators by thinking with their own images and speaking with their hands.

When the man next to me pated me on the back and said “hey, the winner with medal is me”, I can say this piece is succeeded in interaction.


Reference:

Institute of Contemporary Arts:
http://www.ica.org.uk/24619/Live-Art/Rimini-Protokoll-Best-Before.html [last accessed 14 July 2010]

Boal, A. (1992) Games for actors and non-actors: Second edition. Trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge.