Watching the neighbours through the open window or listening to the fight of a couple sitting on next table in the restaurant constitute a favourite occupation of a lot of people. People always enjoy watching the others’ private life usually in a way that they cannot be seen. Is it curiosity? Is it identification of themselves through the others? Is it just a form of entertainment?
The art of cinema ‘legalized’ in a way the act of voyeurism and gave the chance to a group of people (the audience) to become the voyeurs of the intimate moments of the actors’, or to be more precise: the moments of the fictional characters of the actors. According to Christian Metz cinema gives its spectators this ability of watching the others’ (actors’) private moments, without being seen. A kind of voyeurism occurs in the cinema theatre, which is strengthened by the spectator’s solitude inside the theatre and by the different [space-time] in which occurs the act of viewing and the action of the viewed.
‘During the screening of the film, the audience is present, and aware of the actor, but the actor is absent and unaware of the audience; and during the shooting, when the actor was present, it was the audience which was absent.’ (Metz, 1977, p.95)
In the performance ‘Electric Hotel’ a kind of voyeurism occurs, but here the audience shares the same time with the performers. It is a live performance that takes place behind a membrane, which is the façade of the three-store building of the Electric Hotel. Each member of the audience is given a pair of headphones and watches the dance performance taking place behind the windows of the hotel. The glass façade allows the audience to see inside the different rooms of the hotel and watch the private moments of its clients. The sound coming from the headphones is the ‘connecting thread’ between the inside and the outside, the viewing subject and the viewed object.
The main interesting issues of this performance are: its cinematic essence and the immersion of the audience through the soundtrack.
The cinematicThere are three elements that connect this performance with cinema: the feeling of voyeurism, like it is explained above, the two dimensions and the sense of montage. The whole performance is seen behind a façade of a building: this reduces the depth of the stage (if we can call it a stage) and more importance is given on the vertical movements (from one floor to the other) and on the synthesis of the different squares (the frames of the room facades). The synthesis occurs mainly through the lighting design and the performers’ bodies (movement, position). The result looks like a two-dimensional screen divided in squares of different colours(the different rooms of the hotel). The main issue that gives this cinematic essence to the performance is the use of montage in order to ‘edit’ the different spaces. On the second floor there is a corridor and when the housekeeper opens the door to a room, she appears entering in the room downstairs. This fragmentation of space looks like the cinematic montage. In cinema the different plans do not have to represent continuous spaces. The spaces are connected through montage. This is what happens also in the electric hotel.
“(…) 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.” (Giesekam, 2007 p.6)
In the case of the Electric Hotel, the performance is not ‘confined to logical, continuous space’. Discontinuous spaces appear like being continuous.
SoundThe soundtrack is the link between the viewer and the action behind the glass. The use of headphones emphasizes the solitude of each spectator and consequently the act of voyeurism. Each person is isolated from the other and this heightens the individual immersive experience.
