inside from marouso marinopoulou on Vimeo.

introducing the body...

In this term I started exploring a new area, a bit different from the one in my essay of the second term. I am reading about video art, video installations and I am trying to find information on the role of the body as a spectator and as a participant in the installation. The difficulty is that now I found myself between three different cases in my study: cinema, (cinematic) theatre and (immersive) performance-installation. My practice is more near to the last one and it was the one that was missing in my last essay. So, now except for Robert Lepage and Robert Wilson I am studying the work of Bill Viola. Viola is mainly a vido artist but his works have a highly performative aspect. The viewer walks into the immersive environments he creates, where he/she plays a vital role.

‘The most important place where my work exists is not in the museum gallery, or in the screening room, or in the television, and not even on the video screen itself, but in the mind of the viewer who has seen it.’ Bill Viola

So, I am trying to introduce the role of the viewer-spectator in the theatrical, the cinematic and the installation experience and the function of the body inside them. The positions and the points of view of the body are important for each experience.

‘Adopting an embodied perspective to understand post-linear performance recognizes that the bedrock of live performance is the body, and more specifically, the bodies of the audience in the act of deciphering, assimilating, or enjoying the experience provided by the alchemy of bodies and technologies ‘onstage’.’ Susan Kozel

The fragmentation of time and space in ‘cinematic theatre’

Cinema and theatre

The relation of cinema and theatre and the fusion of these two art languages is one of the latest subjects in the discussions about performance art. Following the birth of cinema in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the art of theatre began to experience, some changes associated with the birth of this new medium. A new way of thinking on space and time was introduced. According to Steve Dixon ‘theatre became more cinematic in conception, particularly in the latter half of the century.’ (Dixon, 2007 p.10)

The main difference between theatre and cinema is their immediacy. Theatre happens “here and now”, whereas cinema doesn’t belong neither to the same space with the audience, nor to the present.

Babak Ebrahimian refers to the definition Peter Brook gave for theatre in his book “The empty space”:

According to Peter Brook’s definition for theatre, the three elements required to create and define theatre are: a stage (a three dimensional space), a body (the actor) and the spectator (the audience). These three are located together in the present time. Film on the other hand has its essence located in distance – or in the past – in an absence. (Ebrahimian, 2004, p.4)

Film is an absence, it is not something material, but only light coming from a projector. This gives cinema an immense freedom as far as it concerns time and space. The director can create unfinished worlds (with real and unreal spaces) and cut and paste them (montage), manipulating the timeline.

“(…) Susan Sontag (1966) suggests that what distinguishes theatre from film is the treatment of space – theatre being confined to logical, continuous space, while cinema may access alogical, discontinuous space. A further distinction is, of course, temporal: watching a film, we watch something that has happened in the past, whereas, watching a play, we watch something that unfolds in the time of the performance – even if it represents events from the past.” (Giesekam, 2007 p.6)

As far as it concerns the audience’s perception of theatre and cinema there is a fundamental difference: the ‘eye of the camera’. In cinema we can have a lot of different points of view, a lot of perspectives for the same subject. Robert Lepage notes that “theatre (…) is about pushing away, about showing an ensemble, because people [in the audience] are far from the object and action. It is about looking at things with a long shot. Cinema is about looking with a close-up.” (Dunjerovic, 2007 p. 179)

Dixon notes as well:

Unlike the fixed point of view offered to the seated theatre spectator, screen media facilitate multiple viewpoints on the same subject through the variation of camera angles; and perspective and spatiality can be transformed from a vast panorama to a huge close-up in a twenty-fourth-of-a-second blink of the projector’s eye. (Dixon, 2007 p.335)

The fusion of cinematic and performance language

Nowadays, people are familiar with the cinematic language as it has become a part of their everyday life, since it entered inside each house through television. Rapid successions of images, close ups, slow-motion, flashback are only some of the techniques of cinema that form the visual vocabulary of the audience that goes to the theatre. As Robert Lepage argues, the coming of film ‘liberated theatre’ and contemporary audience have a ‘sophisticated narrative vocabulary’ that we should take under consideration when creating theatre. (Giesekam, 2007 p.220)

Robert Lepage whose work has been described as a ‘video/theatre hybrid’ (Giesekam, 2007) speaks about a new form of art that is about to be born:

‘I really think that there’s not a lot of hope for theatre as it is today and there’s not a lot of hope for cinema in the direction it’s going right now… And there’s a place in the middle I think, and there’s a form of art and I don’t know what it looks like and I don’t know what’s going to happen … but I’m sure it’s going to happen and that’s what I’m interested in.’ (Dudjerovic, 2003 p.5)

Can the fusion of theatre and cinema create a new form of art? For sure it can create a new space: multi-dimensional and discontinuous, live and mediated, characterized by a fragmented time. How does this fusion take place? What are the techniques or the ideas used to make theatre more cinematic? The most obvious is the use of film or video in the live performance. This is a literally fusion of the two mediums. But the use of video shouldn’t function only as decorative, in order to transmit the cinematic character to the performance.

The semiotic relationship and tension between the screen imagery, which we could call A, and the live performers, B, is most commonly interpreted as either formulating a dialogic relationship (A versus/in relation to B), or as establishing an additive combination which engenders something entirely new, namely C, (A + B = C).(Dixon, p.336)

This new [C] is the new space and time created by the use of the two collaborating elements (screen and live).

The incorporation of cinematic language in theatre doesn’t absolutely demand the use of video and film. It can be revealed through other means as well. Lighting, puppetry, shadow play, sound, movement or a fragmented narrative can contribute to a cinematic feeling of the performance. What mainly contributes to the cinematic language of a performance is the treatment of time and time fragmentation, together with the emphasis on the visual.

‘Visual’ - The use of video and film in theatre

Theatre in the last decades keeps changing, as does our society. We live in the hegemony of image and technology and theatre has not remained untouched from it. Lehman in his book invented the name postdramatic to characterize all the theatre forms that were born after 1960s and share the characteristic of not being based on a text. (Lehman, 2006) As Lehman notes: ‘(…) postdramatic theatre establishes the possibility of dissolving the logocentric hierarchy and assigning the dominant role to elements other than dramatic logos and language. This applies even more to the visual than to the auditory dimension.’ (Lehman, 2006, p.93)

Theatre in the last forty years has become very visual. Mise-en-scene, images and visual composition are more important than a narrative or a text. This is the consequence of a culture where images are powerful and occupy the biggest amount of people’s everyday life. (advertising, television, cinema, photographs etc)

Following this fact, the introduction of film and video in the stage was inevitable. It is worth mentioning that early experiments took place since the mid-1920s with the German director Erwin Piscator. One of the leading figures of the film-theatre fusion during the 1950s is the scenographer Josef Svoboba. Nowadays there are a lot of theatremakers and performance companies that use video and technology almost in all their productions. Just to mention some of them: The Wooster Group, The Builders Association, Forkbeard Fantasy, La Fura dels Baus and Robert Lepage.

The use of video in live performance gives the theatrical space and time different possibilities: the actors and the audience can travel to other times (past, future), different views are revealed and other realities are born (actors’ unconscious, dreams, memories, fantasies). According to Robert Edmond Jones, motion pictures are more near to our unconscious. They can represent successfully the inner self.

They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do, and their speed with their flashbacks – like sudden-up rushes of memory- and their abrupt transitions from one subject to another, approximates very closely the speed of our thinking. (Jones, 1941 p.16)

Robert Blossom also writes:

To combine a present experience (stage) which, though rehearsed, nevertheless has the touch element, with a past experience (film), presented as present is thus to combine the unconscious (recorded) with the conscious (present)… Time thus, perhaps for the first time in theater, becomes present as a spatial element… (Dixon, 2007 p.525)

So, live performance can be linked to the conscious self and the recorded video or images to the unconscious. The unconscious includes dreams or memories that are stored in our brain and even if they are not recalled, they form our inner self.

The conjunction of live performance and digital imagery can produce a particular, hybrid form and experience akin to what Alain Virmaux has described in relation to Artaud’s film scenarios: “something which is neither theater nor film, but partakes of the evanescent reality of dreams”. (Dixon, 2007 p. 337)

The introduction of video and film in live performance has a lot of different objectives but it definitely created a new space and time on the stage, by introducing the cinematic language in it and provoking live performance to interact with the recorded image. As Greg Giesekam notes “Film or video inserts allow spectators’ access to a character’s subjective view of the action, or serve to underline a character’s responses through the use of close up, or depict action from elsewhere or another time.” (Giesekam, 2007 p.31)

Multi-space

What happens with the introduction of video in the space of the live stage? Theatrical space has three dimensions. As action takes place, time becomes its fourth dimension. In cinema, the image has two dimensions and as action unrolls, a third dimension is created: this one of time. Cinema is actually the art of time. The moving image can distort time like no other art. Time can be stopped, delayed, reversed, speeded up, jump from the past to the future, the present to the past or any other way. All these possibilities were unknown to the art of theatre. Time had always to unfold towards the future and the space that was represented was always the space within the stage. Now space can expand outside the limits of the stage.

Applying the fragmented time to the space, the space that is created is a hybrid. It is the live three dimensional space of the stage, together with the two dimensional space of the screens (that represent another three-dimensional space). It is a fusion of live and recorded space. The new transformed space that is created is based on the immaterial (light and projection) and the material (objects, actors, real stage).

The creation of a new space, or better a multi-space, inside the theatrical stage can be found in the notion of polyscenicness that Svoboba invented: “An expression of a free and many-sided time-space operation, in which one and the same action is observed from several optical and ideational angles… it means breaking up the linear continuity of theatre action, and its transformation into separate events or moments.” (Giesekam, 2007 p.53)

Time fragmentation

All the above uses and effects of video and film in live theatre, have their roots in the new use of time by cinema and are reinforced by the postmodern fragmented society of the last decades. After ‘the end of the grand narratives’ (as Francois Lyotard describes postmodern condition) we live in a fragmented world, made by small pieces, bombarded by a huge amount of different information and images.

In cinema, time is not linear. The narrative is presented in pieces, through the use of montage. According to Sergei Eisenstein montage is the main element of cinema, ‘the nerve of cinema’ as he calls it. Montage is the art of ‘arranging the sequence of frames, of shots, to convey the narrative’. (Ebrahimian, 2004, p.66) According to Bazin the basic definition of montage is ‘the creation of a sense or meaning not proper to the images themselves, but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition.’ (Ebrahimian, 2004, p.68) This can be applied to the video/theatre fusion and to the new meaning that can be born from the combination of the video-images with the live action on stage. The collaboration of the two mediums create a new meaning, that can be also translated into a new feeling for the spectator. Dixon notes: ‘(…)many theatre artists juxtapose live performance and projected media more to excite visceral, subjective, or subconscious audience responses than objective and conscious ones: to appeal to the senses and nervous system (…) rather than to the rational intellect.’ (Dixon, 2007, p.336)

It is clear that time in a multimedia performance is fragmented. There is more than one time that is unfolding in the performance: the time of the film or video and the time of the live performance. Audience’s perception of time as linear is disrupted. The visual narrative is deconstructed and a new space is created, where there is a fusion of times. This can be achieved also by the use of lighting and other techniques by creating a kind of montage in theatre and it can be found in the art of Robert Wilson, that is analyzed below.

We will take two examples of theatre artists that create a kind of cinematic theatre, each one in a different way.

The theatre of images – Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson is considered one of the most important visual artists of the 20^th century. He is not using a lot technology and videos or projections in his work. But his theatre is visual and based on the creation of images. Movement, sound, lighting, shapes and choreographed gestures are his ‘materials’ to create high quality images and seduce his audience. His work is not text based. He is deconstructing narratives and his main interest is on the visual elements. He is playing with the transformations of space and time through lighting and mise-en-scene. The fragmented time and the image-based theatre he does, made him one of the precursors of cinematic theatre. Cinematic qualities can be found in his theatre, as he is creating a new space and time through light, sound and movements, materials that belong also to the big screen.

‘Wilson uses visual devices unavailable to languages. Some of these devices originated in the cinema: montage, time dilation, close-ups, and microphysiognomy. During rehearsals, Wilson often uses cinematic terms to describe the effects he wants.’ (Holmberg, 1996, p.189)

Wilson is using montage to link his scenes one with another and simultaneity to compose each scene visually.

Like the great formalist directors of Soviet Cinema -Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov- Wilson builds the visual architecture of a work rhythmically through montage, a dialectical process of free association that create meaning not by narration or discursive logic but by the juxtaposition of two often seemingly unrelated scenes. (Holmberg, 1996, p.97)

The cinematic language is introduced in his work through the use of montage in its pure and original meaning (the one that the formalists gave it). He creates new meanings through the ‘collision’ of two different scenes. Montage is a tool which fragments time.

The new ‘video/theatre hybrid’ of Robert Lepage

Robert Lepage is a Canadian theatre artist that extensively uses technology in his productions. With the help of video, lighting, puppetry and the art of storytelling he is creating his imaginary worlds in the theatre space that usually have a ‘cinematic feel’. Except for theatre, the last years of his career he made films as well, but he considers himself more a theatre artist than a filmmaker. Of course the fact that he is inside both film and theatre world makes his work informed from the two mediums. As Dundjerovic notes about the work of Lepage, his productions were always considered as cinematic and ‘informed by vivid visual images. It is true that cinematography is a powerful inspiration on Lepage’s theatricality.’ (Dunjerovic, 2009, p.51)

‘For Lepage, video functions for the most part on a par with lighting, music, objects, machines, shadow-play and puppetry, and with his eclectic approach to performance styles: it is a device to be wielded at will as he seeks to create highly atmospheric, cinematically fluid productions.’ (Giesekam, 2007 p.244) He employs all these different tools in order to reveal a new form of theatre, where transformations are taking place constantly. In The Far Side of the Moon (2000) a glass porthole becomes a door of a washing machine, then a space capsule and then a fishbowl. More similar transformations take place in his works, usually with the help of video. Contrary to Robert Wilson, Lepage is a master in using technology in his pieces and he has even be accused ‘of imprisoning himself in technology’. He argues that technology is just a tool for him to explore things. (Giesekam, 2007 p.218)

Both the above artists work with time fragmentation and the creation of a new space on the stage that is based on the notion of image. Image is the basic unit of the art of cinema. Cinema is the art of time and the moving image. These two elements are being the basic elements of work of Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage, in this case to create theatre. Together with the notion of live time and live space the result is this new kind of art: the cinematic theatre. Robert Lepage is much more near to it as his work involve technology and projected images, which is literally based on cinema. But it is very interesting to see the cinematic aspects in a work that is not using video, like Wilson’s. Time fragmentation (use of montage) and the hegemony of image are the elements that give his work the essence of cinematic.

Conclusion

After the analysis of the specific character of our time and society (postmodernism, the hegemony of visuals and technology) we could detect the birth of a new kind of theatre: the ‘cinematic theatre’. This is based on the fragmentation of time and the creation of a new ‘multi-space’ within the stage. Theatre can be cinematic mainly with the contribution of technology and video, but also without it. It is very interesting and still under exploration until where artists can arrive with the use of all these new media, technologies and aesthetics of today.

Bibliography

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Charest, R. (1997), Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights, Translated by W.R. Taylor, London: Methuen

Deleuze, G. (1985), Cinema 2: the time-image, London: Continuum

Dixon, S. (2007), Digital Performance: a history of new media in theater, dance, performance art, and installation, Cambridge: The MIT Press

Dunjerovic, A. (2003), The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory, London: Wallflower Press

Dunjerovic, A. (2007), The Theatricality of Robert Lepage, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press

Dunjerovic, A. (2009), Robert Lepage, New York: Routledge

Ebrahimian, B. (2004), The cinematic theater, Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, Inc

Giesekam, G. (2007), Staging the screen: the use of film and video in theatre, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Holmberg, A. (1996), The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge University Press

Jones, R.E. (1941, 1969), The Dramatic Imagination: reflections and speculations on the art of theatre, New York: Routledge

Knoff, R. ed. (2005), Theater and Film: a comparative anthology, London: Yale University Press

Lehman, H.T. (2006), Postdramatic Theatre, Translated by K. Jurs-Munby, New York: Routledge

interim show

After the lab, when I realised that the position of the audience in relation to the screen(s) is very important and that the immersive feeling is very connected with this, I decided to place my spectator inside a ‘room’, surrounded by projections. Like this I could achieve the feeling of three dimensional
space. A maximum number of two spectators at a time would also allow a feeling of intimacy.

‘Inside’
‘Where is the line between reality and dream, present and past?
The real and the imagined body together with the spectator, coexist within the new space that is created through video installation and live performance.’

Concept
How do we perceive the space through the eyes (vision) and the body? Different ways of perceiving, remembering, feeling are illustrated. A huge pair of eyes is looking at the spectator, when in the two side screens, a body is ‘travelling’ in real spaces and non-spaces (white screen). The body is projected or it is a live shadow and appears and dissappears, comes and leaves, from different spots in the screens, confusing the spectator. Is he inside the head of these eyes? Is somebody watching him? The claustrophobic space, the eyes and the shadow create a feeling of uneasines.