In recent theatre practice, attempts have been made and desires expressly voiced \u2013from puppet theatre to robotic, cyborg, hybrid and\/or intermedial performance\u2014 to create pieces of theatre that defy the gravitational limitations of live presence. The flexibility of theatre forms and of \u201ctheatricalizeable\u201d material has in many cases rendered the actor\u2019s body nearly obsolete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The extensive use of multimedia forms, besides \u201cupdating\u201d theatre\u2019s \u201cpolyphonic system of information\u201d (Barthes), no doubt mirrors an instinct for self-preservation and brings to the fore ontological questions about the multiple facets of performativity in a post-humanist era. Furthering the understanding of the \u201ctext-ability\u201d of any constituent element of the stage within the current postmodern, postdramatic paradigm, the paper dwells on the battle between a semiotically-bound self-reliant performance text as inscribed by technological simulacra and its phenomenological claim by the actor. The presentation focuses on examples taken from the multimedia work of\u00a0Robert Lepage,\u00a0Ivo van Hove\u00a0and the\u00a0Wooster Group, exploring the tension experienced by both performers \u2013and by extension, spectators\u2014when faced with their screened\/duplicated\/\u201cghosted\u201d selves. In these directors\u2019 work, the implication often becomes that digitized representations of the self \u2013and by extension of the world\u2014 are frequently the only valid, if counterfeit, realities in postmodern, \u201cpost-existential\u201d culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The examples of Lepage, Van Hove and the Wooster Group is significant in defining a landscape where the technologically-informed mise en scene actually reflects a kind of nostalgia for the individual\u2019s \u201cpure\u201d corporeality, which has in our times been further and relentlessly problematized by a multitude of cultural metaphors. While it is certainly worth investigating the ways in which the combination of video and live images can become \u201ca visual metaphor of split subjectivity\u201d (Causey in Auslander: 2008, 386), it is equally important to consider the reasons and conditions that have rendered technological mediation in performance an increasingly vital partner in the representation of contemporary identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Addressing issues of identity and self-definition, auteur directors have relied on digital articulation to manufacture narratives that transcend the inbred constraints of the theater form. This involves engaging the aesthetic of the media that often combines live and mediated presence, recorded voice, and TV-like segmentation of story-telling. Efforts to compete against the speed of the moving image and to accelerate, annul, or blur time and space have resulted in the essential\u00a0liveness<\/em>\u00a0of theater1<\/sup>\u00a0becoming increasingly devalued or irrelevant. While the abundance of intermedial practices suggests that we are way past the stage of demonizing the binary trajectory of the \u201creal\u201d and the virtual, the anxiety of immateriality and fragmentation generates a sense of nostalgia that is both attractive and unnerving. If actors can be pixels or cyborgs (thus, posthuman), is our own outlook on identity postexistential? Are we becoming less real ourselves by virtue of our fascination with all those multiple versions of \u201ccharacter\u201d and \u201cself\u201d in performance, which in effect reflect our own potential \u201cmultipliability\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The work of The\u00a0Wooster Group,\u00a0Ivo van Hove\u00a0and\u00a0Robert Lepage\u00a0has consistently collapsed hierarchical definitions of meaningfulness, recalibrating phenomenological notions of\u00a0presencing<\/em>. In their productions, constituent immediacies are revisited and compromised; the audience\u2019s connection to the performer \u2013 well anticipated in more mainstream forms of representation \u2013 is subjected to the authoritative function of projections, recordings and visual framing, and, as a result, the critical distance between spectator and spectacle is carried through the performers\u2019 estrangement from their own selves: quite often, they are in fact \u201cbodies distanced in images, viewed as resources, lived as things to be seen, managed and mastered2<\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well embedded into the tissue of acting, the duality between materiality-presence on the one hand, and on the other hand an \u201cuncanny\u201d (as it has been broadly described) condition that is both hyper-real and intangible, yet reproducible, both influence the performer\u2019s construction of identity Faces and bodies are split, multiplied and manipulated at the director\u2019s will, their subjectivity is extended, challenged and reconfigured. (Causey, 2008, p. 382)\u00a0Nostalgia occurs precisely at the point of loss of the so-called \u201cauthentic\u201d self\u2013the consequence of a competition between the actor\u2019s live presence and its screened simulacrum. In dramaturgical terms, the onslaught of character deaths (a theoretical concept introduced by\u00a0Elinor Fuchs\u00a0in her seminal 1983 study), leaves behind a trail of tears for any such \u201ccarnal demise.\u201d Yet, that bittersweet nostalgia is rather short-lived, given that our philosophical adjustment\/reconciliation to the character\u2019s re-incarnation as a hybrid is immediate, drawn as we are into the character-performer\u2019s state of liminality, an existence caught between corporeality and imagination. \u201cIf there is any clear watershed,\u201d argues Fuchs, between modern and postmodern in drama, it is that \u201cpostmodern normalizes and shrugs off as \u2018merely conceptual\u2019 the sense of terror (or novelty) associated with posthumanist thinking.\u201d (Fuchs, 1996, p. 35)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the productions of\u00a0LeCompte, Lepage and van Hove, technology does more than reflect or reinforce the alienation between stage and auditorium, or that between the live performer and the virtual world, created for and around her. Rather, the use of video screens, microphones and live cameras adds a more complex compositional dimension to what is usually termed \u201cvisual dramaturgy.\u201d Liz LeCompte of The Wooster Group describes character as \u201can accumulation of fragments of which the performer is the initiator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The character is a \u2018moment in stage time.\u2019\u201d (LeCompte, 1993)For her, as also for Lepage and van Hove, the manner in which actors are layered or undermined through the addition of voice recordings, film footage, split-screen and\/or montage, inadvertently involves the performer in the mechanics of \u201cre-dramatizing\u201d the character. A composite of the live and its electronic double, the actor is naturally a generator of action (as the very name suggests), and a site where meaning is inscribed. Thus, actors alternately create and receive\/reflect narratives: they interpret through movement and presence, but also receive and respond to the projection or broadcast of impressions and structures that seem well beyond their control. Seen in this light, acting becomes the art of both doing and allowing things to be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, perceiving an intermedial performance as a spectator turns into a process of re-writing the characters\u2019 essential narrative, by resolving the conflict between the characters-performers\u2019 actual and virtual selves and ultimately saluting their convergence as necessary and liberating. Commanding moderators of identity, plasma television screens and microphones on metal stands abound in the multimedia art of The Wooster Group, where the performers demonstrate the work of acting amid objects of technology, which heighten, distort or sabotage both the actor\u2019s and the character\u2019s fundamental selfhood. The company\u2019s productions To You, the Birdie <\/em>(2002) and Hamlet<\/em> (2007) subvert and fragment the actors\u2019 presence on stage, constructing \u201cconsciously inauthentic bodies in performance\u201d (Monks in Mitter and Shevtsova 207), while their high-pitched, interceded voices convey a sense of distance just as the body oscillates in its dual role of living entity and machinery component. This tension is carried through to the spectators, challenging them to hierarchize the projected material. LeCompte is very much aware of how mediation works on an audience and how, in principle, the performance of identity on stage can alter or even define attitudes in matters of gender, race, and sexuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n