A theatre is not the place for these pieces

The theatre space paradigm is wrong for the setting of these pieces. I need to work more with the Palassmaa-ness of staging, finding site-specific spaces that inform the sense of place within the opera; e.g. CJA in an ice rink or meat locker, ASJ in hotel lobbies, Illiad in war cemetery or paintball arena.

Taking these into consideration would free up the individual media to speak their message - the CJA video projection is not, nor was it overdone, but it was trying too hard to be something more than it is.

I am reminded of Infra http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7588062453697698538# by Wayne McGregor and how I perceived the video element to be a projection from the minds of the dancers. In CJA the musicians should be allowed and seen as musicians embodying the material and their instruments and the projection be 'from them' in a way that we percieve it to be so (perhaps projected on a screen above their heads). This is different to CJA @ Shift Happens which tried to immerse the 'characters' in a virtual place - and miscounted the fact that these are simply musicians in a theatre - thus making trying to decieve the audience through visual representation instead of feeding their mind with another vague sign.

The employment of my iPhone streaming will help this site-specificity greatly, and more-so the added media of 'being in a space'. It also brings into the equation the work with Seven Sisters and cyber-SFM.

These decisions still relies on the creative minds of theatre makers, but circumvents the 'old' meanings of the theatre hall and its pros arch.

Prof. Juhani Pallasmaa – Eyes of the Skin:

A walk through the forest is invigorating and healing due to the constant interaction of all sense modalities; Bachelard speaks of ‘the polyphony of sense’. The eye collaborates with the body and the other senses. One’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this constant interaction.

Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue and muscle. Architecture strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense off being in the world, and this is essentially a strengthened experience of self.

The body is not, however, a mere physical entity; our perception is enriched through memory and past experience, of vivid imagination and dream, of the past and the future. There exists an exchange between the intellect and the intrinsic, mediating the senses with the imagined, the existential and the metaphysical.

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creases an experience of interiority. I regard an object, but sound approaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives. Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return our sounds back to our ears.

Pallasmaa J., (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Wiley Academy, Chichester.

SWOT analysis with Aine post CJA at Shift H

Overview
- Although I am dealing with issues that can be seen to relate to postdramatic theatre, CJA is very dramatic
- the black footer focused the eyes ion the human NOT the performer
- It obscured the technology and therefore 2 of the performers
- due to pros-arch the audience were forced into their normal role;
- there was no immersion as no surround
- normal density of signs (Lehmann)

STRENGTHS

• scale
• attractive visuals
• 'slick'
• normal density of signs ~ no confusion with spectators role and engagement
• not handed a pre-digested narrative

WEAKNESSES

• Audience removed from the performers
• framed - lacked immersion
• audience relegated to the normal engagement role
• watching something/ looking at something
• the gaze went through the 4th wall at/upon an event
• recieving the visuals and THEN the aural

OPPORTUNITIES

• mind and music PRIMARY mediums
• did the lack of visuality give the lighting designer a lack of confidence which forced him to fill the void?
• any visual statement is TOO powerful ... they need to make room for the mind
• IS THEATRE THE RIGHT PLACE FOR THIS?
• more immersion
• What was it about Farruquito at Sadlers Wells in 2004

THREATS

• The visual void - do not fill it
• Is the black box/ pros arch paradigm the place for this?
  

REFLECTIONS:

If we are to pursue this investigatory line with Ciaran as Lighting Designer then he needs the opportunity to explore the meaning of the work and his engagement with it.

Furthermore: if we are going for the 'cinema meets theatre'-ness (Cruden) then we need to employ televisual projection of the je and cv.
The big question here is were is this taking this research project?
Am I satisfying others need to make it visual?
Does this digital performance territory help inform digital opera?

prelim results from streaming

Yes - its an excellent facility to have "out there" and' in here", complementing the diegesis (or virtual diegesis).

The commercially available technology is not yet reliable to allow a three way relationship but by means of delaying live output to speakers we can get close with opnly 2 of the stratas:
over there and in here. I used nicecast as my server

Results from streaming tests
Software : delay (secs) : reliability of sync
itunes radio : 0.2 : 0-0.01
fstream : 0.23 : -1 – +1.5 secs
Flycast : x
Shoutcast Radio : x
Streamitall : 8 : +-5 secs
iPhone Safari (LAN) : 0.56 : +-0.1 secs [but not pause the stream but the playback]
iPhone Safari (Internet) : 0.62 : +-0.1 secs [but not pause the stream but the playback]

REFLECTION
- For ease of participant engagement I will use the Safari LAN option as this avoids download app issues and might work with blueberry devices or other smart phones too. TO BE TESTED
- The Safari option delay is huge compared to fstream but the reliability and ease of use is better
- The delay is compensated for by delaying the output to speakers in MAX - have to test using many devices and distances TO BE TESTED
- Have not found a reliable way of syncing the 2 audio streams (live and iphone) making the 2nd strata - "out there and in here" - difficult to achieve... shame because it works really well.

Audio streaming to iPhone live - where is Opera.

Now the dust has settled from Shift-Happens, I can reflect free from goal-orientated desire. I suspect that the visual opera paradigm is getting in the way of my research development and have decided to look sideways (and backwards).

There are two projects that are important to this research programme but have yet to be synthesised:
- cyber Superfield [Mumbai]
- Podwalker at NRM

Furthermore, I am beginning to understand that the audio material is also the visual language - through dimensionality- , not the performers (as this would be a bit 'old school'.) I wonder if http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/ would be interesting visual language?

I am hoping to use the mobile phone as a method of communication for the musicians and Yorick.

The importance of Podwalker was about being present in 2 spaces at once: the mind and the NRM, each effecting the experience. As such I am curious to explore the effect of live streaming to iPhones AND the projection of sound through loud speakers. I suspect that there will be a corresponding diegetic phenomonon of sound - and therefore our perceptive understanding of its meaning - coming from
- inside here (solo iPhone stream)
- out there (iPhone and Speakers sync)
- Over there (solo speakers)

These may correspond and relate to stage based diegesis of
- non-diegetic sound/ music/ voice
- diegetic sound/ music/ voice
- meta diegetic sound/ music/ voice

I will implement this into the 'The Unchanging Sea" project and 'Kitchen Sink'

Reaction to Causey's book in relation to above post

"The more interesting work in contemporary performance is concerned with the problems of digital culture, and are in fact not disturbed by the illusions and aesthetics of the virtual, but rather dealing with the material and bio-politics of embeddedness." (p4)

cv>>> I think this applies to me. My overarching focus is not the aesthetics of the music technology but
a book (or report) embedded as a musical score
the music embedded in the musicians horizons of play
the musicians embodying the situation, getting to grips with it
The audience embodying the wholeness of the performance: the wholeness of an idea of the book!
Q: is there room in all of this for a visual element?

"The anamorphic projection of television in freeze-frame, slow motion, fast forward and reverse, through a kind of being in technology with morphing identities that exist within the fragility of digital space, present the technologically triggered uncanniness of technoculture subjectivity. The experience of the uncanny within the space of technology seems easily constructed." (p18)

cv>>> yes it does, so what do we do with it and why? Perhaps there is something here in the 'uncanny' that helps me to understand the performativity and spectator response to my musicians. Does our audience understand the musician-embodiment as 'out-there'; the musicians are already aware of ourselves as 'out there' projecting a voice into the space... in a sens we are already controlling the uncanny.

"Questions: First, how has the ontology of the performance (liveness), which exists before and after mediatization, been altered within the space of technology? Second, how do we understand the processes of performance which converges with mediated technologies of representation? [...] One way to start to answer both questions is by conceiving of theatre as a medium that overlaps and subsumes or is subsumed by other media including television, film, radio, print and computer-aided hyper-media. Such a process will change, considerably, our definition of the boundaries of the theatre and the ontology of performance." (p29)

cv>>> This is my PhD question, only as applied to music and sound within theatre performance.

Response to CJA at Shift Happens

Monday 5th July 2010

CJA performed at the Shift Happens conference for 'Art Learning and Technology'. This was the first time a visual element had been composed and implemented by visual artists live during the performance: Ciaran Bagnall (lighting designer) and Damian Cruden (director).

Some thoughts from the 'inside'
I suspect that the visual language was too strong to focus the eye on the ear and instead the ocularcentricity of Western audiences understood it from a primarily visual context, placing the aural realm as a 'backing' to this low-key projection. My fear with this scenario is that it would fall into hybrid of no particular focus and, if I witnessed someone else attempt it, I would hate it.

This is not a reflection on the people involved, but it says more about the working process - flying people straight into a gig with no rehearsal.

Furthermore, the musicians were heavily masked allowing their heads to 'float' above a black footer. For me, there is something special about witnessing a musician a) embody an instrument and b) embody a sense of place, the sound theatre. As I understand this - backed up by Nicola LeFanu's statement about the studio performance - there is a double empathy induced in the spectator ... a deep and complex understanding of what 'they are doing' and what 'we are hearing'.

I extend this to all the natural gestures within ev2 as we are double embodied in the wholeness of the music: we are emboying an instrument 'playing' with embedded material, whilst using our ears to make sense of the whole thing ... in MP words we are embodying the perception to get to grips with the phemononology.

Aside from this I experienced a double empathy for the first time recently - watching a run of Railway Children the character Peter gave Schapanski a boy-to-father-figure hug as he said goodbye. I felt myself projecting my own son's empathy on this experience; in a sense it wasn't me who was 'feeling' the hug, but I was seeing through my sons eyes, what it would be like to witness this theatrical act and 'feel' the hug.

I mention this because it is something akin to how I imagine people are experiencing ev2 performing CJA ... so why hide us behind a black footer? The answer is simple "to tidy us up" as Damian joked (no he was serious). There is something really important here:
1) we need to be seen, ev2 ARE the performative element that makes it stand out from an ordinary EA gig with a VJ
2) our gestures are natural and unforced separating from 60's music theatre. It is not a theatre of gesture and spectacle but of embodiment (Mike Kenny knew this)
3) The visual should not be 'around us' but from us, it must work to accentuate these central characters (or meta-characters), extending in ways ev2 can not (as we are not trained actors but something different) our personality and mood.