“Increasingly, our digital work is crossing the boundary that separates secondary source from primary source, that separates second-hand criticism from original creation. In this our work looks increasingly like art.

“The notion of digital humanities as deformance or performance extends beyond what Steve calls “algorithmic criticism,” beyond the work of bringing computational processes to bear on humanities texts. Increasingly digital humanities work is being conceived as much as event as product or project. With the rise of social media and with its ethic of transparency, digital humanities is increasingly being done in public and experienced by its audiences in real time. Two recent CHNM projects, One Week | One Tool and Hacking the Academy, point in this direction.”

Well, sure. As I’ve written here and here, theatre and performance often map onto digital technology and its use in compelling and revelatory ways. This also a key premise within Diana Taylor’s 2009 lecture “The Digital as Anti-Archive?” at Duke (see also, Whitney Trettien’s response at HASTAC) and Tara McPherson’s more recent ”After the Archive: Scholarship in the Digital Era.” Although McPherson makes the argument that the group best prepared to negotiate and create this new scholarship are those trained in texts, i.e., academics working from the traditional humanities, this is also an excellent opportunity for performance studies and performance scholars to follow Taylor’s lead to become more engaged in questions of digital scholarship and reception.

Those of us working in theatre and performance studies know how to wrestle with the problems of disappearance and ephemerality and technological innovations that sometimes wipe out dominant models of production and reception. We know what it is to collaborate across diverse vocabularies and how to negotiate the making of stuff for others to see, hear, touch, and manipulate. We’ve been working on interactivity, haptic response, and social media for more than 2000 years.

As the digital humanities skew toward performance, it’s time we joined the conversation.

The New York Times called reported it as “January is the coolest month onstage” and indeed it was. Coinciding with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters 2012 Conference (APAP), 3 downtown theatres and performance centers mounted spectacularly diverse and compelling festivals: PS122 curated the Coil Festival; the Public Theater presented its annual Under the Radar Festival; and the Abrons Arts Center organized the American Realness Festival. Although not every performance worked in and off of media, the trend of recording, projecting, projecting records and recording projections was unmistakable across the three festivals. I wasn’t able to see everything (I missed, for example, Temporary Distortion’s latest “Newyorkland, although hopefully  video documentation from the Seattle performance at ontheboards.tv will be available soon), but saw enough to register some thoughts about the profound influence, even inescapable, influence of media on contemporary performance. I’ve written a bit about two productions in terms of history and historiography already in a post for the Digital Humanities Initiative blog at UB, so I’ll focus here on two productions that engage the media in ways less concerned with history than with the experience of life in the contemporary moment.

"Broke House" at the Abrons Art Center. Photo: Caden Manson

In many performances, the influence of media is clearly a structuring principle and explicitly marked. One of my favorite performances from the excessive show attendance was Big Art Group’s newest show Broke House (2012), presented as part of the American Realness Festival at the Abrons Art Center.

The performance is in keeping with other Big Art performances that draw from popular culture (often “cult”) references within a narrative structure dictated and realized by and through media. Broke House, for example, ruminates on the American economic and housing crisis (the house is “broke” as are the people in it) through one long video feed that manages to invoke not only reality TV and its perverse notions of the domestic spaces (e.g., “Big Brother” and the like), but also references to Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Grey Gardens, two other famously “broken homes.” For example, the characters include echoes of Chekhov’s sister, including Manny (Masha), Rey Rey (Irene) and Olga locked in the attic throughout and appearing only in the closing moments as a face projected on cardboard attached to a moving dolly.

Following this seemingly improvised family (the relationships are self-consciously queered but never clearly explained) the camera haunts the house both as a character (the camera operator interacts mostly as an invited and even desired guest) and as recording device that tracks the inhabitants of a home clearly falling apart. What begins as a kind of introduction to the living quarters–rooms constructed on a wooden frames and densely augmented with plastic, cardboard, and other elements suspiciously similar to trash–eventually transforms into the emotional journey of a family torn apart by unfulfilled emotional need and financial despair. Indeed, there is little daylight between these ideas as, for example, one character’s obsession with her Nigerian boyfriend (whom she mistakenly locates in Niagara Falls) and the online money transfers that will bring him “home” any moment. The emotional saga of a family displaced (they are eventually but not surprisingly evicted) and dislodged (the emotional relationships similarly flail and falter) is lit against epic signs that broadcast above the space titles such as “Economy vs. Empathy,” “The De-Realization of Politics,” “Class Struggle,” and “Accumulation.”

Signs in "Broke House." Photo: Caden Manson.

This last title articulates the visual embodiment of the painful paradox of American consumption. Forced to leave the house, the characters begin to collect all of the “stuff” they can find–cardboard, plastic, tape, plastic sheeting–literally dismantling the house and transforming themselves into snail-like creatures staggering around under the weight of their consumption. Like many Americans burdened by housing debt, they literally are forced to carry their homes on their backs. It’s a brilliant visual metaphor for the American cycle of desire and accumulation: mass consumption transformed into burdens which cause one to lose a home, but continue to carry the burdens of wanting (i.e., debt, unnecessary stuff, emotional baggage, you name it) in perpetuity.

Interspersing this inevitable decline are brief live-video vignettes, energetically (even manically) staged “in the style of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls!” These short sequences have little to do with the narrative with the sound and visuals here are calculated for maximum visceral impact, not clarity of information. The context of Showgirls is unmistakably related, however, since that film also plays glamour against reality with the boom-and-bust cycle of Las Vegas (still an epicenter for the housing meltdown) and an endless cycle of desire, competition, and human carnage (the plot of Showgirls! [1995] is basically the plot of  Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 All About Eve with strippers). Playing out against the “American realness” of their failures and the loss of, well, everything, the characters’ are carried on only by their media-inspired delusions and fantasies, never really coming to terms with the true cost of their accumulated wants and needs. In the final, dizzying moments of the performance, the video projections shift and extend into the house, filling the theatre’s audience (which is to say, our house) with technicolor glory, while the now-destroyed and unoccupied stage home sits as an empty wooden shell, stripped(!) of even a single shred of mylar.

It’s a poignant allegory, one made all the richer for the prior playfulness of the performance. There’s a double delusion here in which the media-saturated spectacle turns representations of human suffering (i.e., the family’s decline in Broke House or the distressingly gratuitous rape scene in Showgirls!) into easily consumable entertainment. That we take such aesthetic pleasure in the decline speaks not only to the ways in which those of us in the audience also occupy a broke house.

To be continued…next up TEAM (Theatre for the Emerging American Moment)’s exquisite new musical, Mission Drift.

So, the experience of art that so annoyed theatre director, Anne Bogart back in 2008 (see here) has now become an integral part of the exhibit. I’m looking forward to seeing this soon both in its “live” incarnation and many times via the mobile app.

Photo by: Lukia Costello, 2011.

Almost 150 years after Nietzsche pronounced, “God is dead,” we are hardly without our rituals. Some religious, some secular–repetition, community, and belief in something larger than oneself remain proven hallmarks of a satisfying life. Theatre, of course, got the early jump on this when it turned the rituals of Dionysius into community events that over time sharpened themselves into studies of the individual, society, and the tangled connections between them. Now, in a media-infused culture it can be difficult to see these ritualistic origins through webs of self-referential irony and the nearest glowing screen flashing away.

Enter Torn Space. Or, in this case you’ll enter Procession, TST’s newest offering tearing up the inside of Buffalo’s Immanuel Church of Christ, home to the Theosophical Society in Black Rock. As revised and re-imagined by Dan Shanahan and his collaborative team, the previously unused sanctuary of this 100+ year-old church has been transformed into a pageant of late 20th-century American pop culture iconography. Think the original Lollapalooza goes to Sunday School. Devised for and set in and among the original architecture (there are even dusty hymnals in the pews), the production includes everything from krumping as sermon, to gorgeous videos flashing on vaulted ceilings, and exterior lighting designed to make the stained glass windows pulse. In one triumphant moment, a giant, lit-up vacuum cleaner takes center stage. It’s everything your typical Sunday morning visit isn’t.

Which is not to say that the theatrical images Shanahan presents are at odds with their sacred setting. On the contrary, nearly every aspect of the show is reverential. The objects of reverence, however, are drawn from late 20th-century alternative pop culture and a palpable obsession with theatre (a goat fetus is sacrificed in the opening moments as a nod to the original meaning of tragōidia, or, “goat song”), grunge-punk, and the unheimlich, or “uncanny.”  Bodies are tested and tortured–a similarity between theatre and religion that emphasizes their mutual origins–and higher powers are frequently invoked. Instead of saints, however, the tortured bodies beaten belong to compulsively smiling teenage girls gone awry and a goth-like figure in combat boots and dark eyeliner. The higher power manifests itself as a green laser beam, and a church singer accompanies herself with a series of distortions and waa waa pedals in lieu of an organ. A crucifixion-like climax happens not once, but three times, one of which includes the black hood that will forever be associated with the horrific images from Iraq’s Abu Gharib prison. Those flashing, abstract images overhead? No, not angels; it’s a skateboarder performing a kickflip.

In many ways, Procession owes a debt to the Italian director and provocateur, Romeo Castellucci. In 1981 Castellucci with his sister Claudia and their collaborators Chiara Guidi and Paolo Guidi founded the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, which is widely recognized as one of the most radical theatre groups working today. Their interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy at the Festival d’Avignon in 2008, for instance, featured a nearly naked man climbing the interior of the Palais des Papes, Castellucci himself attacked by wild dogs,  a son imagining his abusive father trapped in a forest of frighteningly scaled flowers, and a piano surrounded by water in a 14th-century church ruin.

Whereas Catellucci draws on his Italian Catholic upbringing for inspiration–imagining, for instance, purgatory as a stultifying bourgeois family–Shanahan filters religious iconography through the grunge-punk aesthetic of the 1990s. Well known for his fascination with staging unusual bodies, Castellucci’s influence radiates through TST’s eclectic and exciting cast, which includes both hauntingly precise movements and chants,  and a man painfully dragging himself down the center aisle for most of the hour-long show.

The other notable influence appears to be Torn Space’s own annual fundraiser, Prom of the Dead (scheduled this year for October 22), which transforms the familiar, if painful, rite of the high school dance into a kind of revenge fantasy party. (Trust me, it’s a wicked good time.) In Procession there’s a similar shift that transforms the familiar gestures of life–holding hands, vacuuming the rug, going to church(!)–into weird mediations on popular culture.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a member of the Torn Space board and I came of age during late 1980s and 1990s while attending Catholic school. So I’m hardly objective when I say that the fusion of these elements work to create an exhilarating hour of performance. If you see the show (which I recommend), don’t expect a narrative. Of course, you’re welcome to read one into it (and the program suggests a kind of life cycle structure to the evening), but I would suggest watching the performance like a Hans Richter film. Don’t worry about meaning; just enjoy the images. Watch the bodies and figure out the details later. And, if all that fails, just watch Brian Milbrand’s fantastic video images overhead. After all, you are in church. What better place to look than up?

I’m pretty sure it’s what Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro would do.

1. Know the Game Plan

In basketball, we had a notebook of plays that we had to memorize (and, seriously, we were quizzed with line-drills as punishment). We also had scouting reports on the other team, strategy meetings, and reviewing of taped games. In school, it also makes sense to have some kind of plan for the year and, more specifically, for each of your courses. What are you trying to achieve this year? How will you define success? What are the steps you need to get there? Every good planner, researcher, student, or coach will tell you the same thing: figure out the big goal and break the process into manageable chunks. Know what you want and why you’re there. Be prepared to follow your plan and if you deviate from it, be disciplined about getting back on track. Things will happen to deter you, but it will be easier to manage if you are focused on a larger purpose and plan for your work. And always…

3. Read the Defense

For the team sports folk among us, you’ll recognize this from your playing days. You’re coming down the field or court or pitch and as you look up from the ground, you’re scoping out the other team. How are they positioned? What do they expect? Where are they stronger? Where are they weaker? Has their strategy changed since the last time you came this way?

In academia it need not be nearly so confrontational, but it’s useful to remember to read each situation for what it is, not what it was or what you thought it would be. If you’re not doing well in a class, look around. Stop doing the same thing you’ve been doing and scope out the obstacles. What’s going on here? Who are the players (teachers, classmates) and what do they expect? In every conversation, really listen to the person talking. Too often, we tend to think we know what’s coming next and tune out. Then we risk responding to something the way we imagine it is or the way it was last time, instead of the way it actually is right now. Take the time to really study and see things for what they are–right here, right now–and you won’t miss important changes and possibilities for success. When the defense does change–as it inevitably will–be prepared to…

3. Adapt and Adjust

In basketball terms, this meant everything from calling the right play to crack the other team’s defense to figuring out how to fix a broken play midway through. In academic terms, it means reading each situation, encounter, and exchange for what it is and figuring out how to adjust your behavior to take advantage of the situation. If your system of taking notes isn’t working (based on quizzes, tests, or something else) be prepared to find a new way of working or studying. If you’re not doing well on papers, change the way you write. This might mean working at a different time of day or getting feedback from different sources. Working by yourself not producing the grades you want? Try the writing center. Writing center’s too crowded? Find a friend who can help you edit. Friend’s not doing well either? Go to office hours. Too often, I see students try the same thing over and over and wonder why their grades aren’t improving. Or, sometimes a student will try one or two new things, not do well, and then give up entirely. This is a mistake that everyone can avoid. Even if you’ve got clear goals and a clear achievable plan, you will need to adjust aspects of your plan based on unexpected events and outcomes. Be prepared to keep trying new things until you find something that works for you. Keep working, and remember….

4. You play the way you practice

This was an important lesson for me since I loved games almost as much as I loathed practice. Particularly in high school and often in college, I was the kid who wanted to coast through practice assuming that the magic of game day would produce the results I wanted. Of course, this is nonsense. What you do when it really matters–in a game, on stage, on an exam, writing under pressure, in a job interview, in front of your first class of the semester–is always and *only* what you’ve prepared up to that point. There’s always a little shot of adrenaline for the big day, but what’s underneath that is what you’ve already done a million times before. If you practice sloppy and casual, at some point it will come out when you play usually when you’re tired, the adrenaline is gone, and your body just wants it all to be over. Those are the moments when the well-trained, well-practiced players shine and the rest of us can only watch with envy.

Happily, we can all be the well-trained, well-practiced, well prepared player. The kind of person (student, actor, designer, researcher) you are depends solely on you. No one can control their innate level of talent, material resources, or thousands of other variables. (I always wanted to be taller; think what I could have accomplished with a few more inches!) But we all have power over our own work ethic and choices. Sometimes the short, hustling players get rebounds from slower, taller players. If you read consistently, study well, make and follow a plan, and work hard even when you’re tired or it seems like it doesn’t matter, chances are you’ll be successful when it counts. For my students in theatre, this means treating every rehearsal with the same attention, discipline, and commitment as opening night. Treat each project or writing exercise as a final project. We all get overwhelmed and we all need to take breaks sometimes, but if you’ve practiced diligently, you’ll be better prepared when the important stuff comes along. Which brings me to Coach K’s final and best piece of advice in the top 5…

5. You create your own opportunities

It’s easy to say that the other team got all the breaks, better calls from the officials, and that our team just didn’t have the luck today. But this is [If Coach K had allowed cursing (which she didn't), there would be an expletive here]. The fact is that everyone has to face certain opportunities and obstacles. The difference between successful people and others is that the successful among us are better positioned to take advantage of opportunities when they come. Through hard work and diligence, they create their own luck. This isn’t difficult to accomplish, but it is hard. It’s simply the product of being prepared, working hard, and always looking for the right opportunity. There’s another piece of advice here that I can’t attribute directly to Coach, but was written on the wall of the team room: “Good things come to those who wait…but only the things left by those who hustle.”

If you’re waiting to be discovered or for the “right moment,” you’ll be waiting a long time. If you’re tempted to blame the professor, your collaborators, the director, remember that at the end of the day, it’s still your work that’s on the line. Always focus on what you’re doing and what you can do better. The next time you’re tempted to think that other people just have it easier than you, look around. What are they doing that you’re not? What could you do differently? If you’re not getting cast in other people’s shows, can you make your own work? If people aren’t giving you a shot, are you making opportunities for yourself?

I love living on the academic calendar because every fall feels fresh and new. The beginning of every term is always a new start. For me, it means I get to start over every fall with a clean slate and new projects, challenges, and goals. And, as of today, I haven’t messed up in any of my classes (they start tomorrow). So, to my students–new, returning, and former–have a great new year. Whatever your goals, adventures, and pursuits, good luck!

For the most part, I agree with the Root-Bernsteins’ reasoning and I certainly appreciate their message. I am concerned, however, that this continues the argument that for the arts to be worthwhile (and worth investment), they have to lead to a concrete, tangible, economic benefit. This is an argument that people have been making for years and I just don’t think it’s doing much good. You can’t treat art like a commodity with a specific return on investments. The cause-and-effect is either too long (e.g., the case for its role in education) or too diffuse (e.g., as in urban development).

The solution, of course, really isn’t apparent. The US seems unable to do any long-term thinking and investing for a while now. Those with means have certainly worked hard to protect and enhance their resources, but as a society, we’ve short-changed many  long-term investments for the quick cash, the quick turnover, and the quick fix. That’s not a sustainable environment for art, which tends to be expensive, local, and time-consuming.

I’m not sure what argument will work to support the arts, but I hope we find one soon. Just as there’s no real way to make a quick buck, I’m not sure there’s a quick fix to the current attack on arts. And, I’m not convinced that those who seem intent on destroying all public support for the arts will ever feel the effects of its loss.

Last night, as reported by the New York Times, the IBM computer, nicknamed Watson, defeated the two best human contestants on the popular trivia TV game show, Jeopardy. This was the third of three games in which the computer did progressively better throughout, not only at the naturally algorithmic gameplay and buzzer anticipation, but also in its understanding of complex and even ironic wordplay.

As someone interested in artificial intelligence from a theatrical perspective, let me just say, I’m in love.

While I do not claim to know the inner workings of such processes, I’ve worked on enough creative projects with robots and computer agents to appreciate how advanced this level of linguistic sensitivity and language processing is. Although Watson occasionally made some missteps in answers, its overall performance and negotiation of language was both superb and fascinating to watch.

It will, of course, be many years, even decades, before such a technology filters its way down to things like theatre and such, but I’m very much looking forward to this future. Does this mean, however, that performance itself will be outsourced to intelligent machines. Undoubtedly, yes. Well, somewhat, though not I suspect entirely.

I imagine that theatre will continue down its current road in which it becomes an increasingly rarified entertainment for a relatively slim, but stable segment of the population, at least in the US. I have no doubt that performing robots will show up on stages, but primarily as novelty items. I don’t think they represent any additional competition to Actor’s Equity; they’ve got enough there anyway.

But while this technology poses little threat to actors, I think is likely poses a significant threat to designers and technicians. Once these computer systems come down in price, they will allow a few artists to do a great deal more. This ‘more’ is things current done by humans, such as stage managing a show and running sound a lights. With language recognition, particularly from a script that doesn’t change a great deal (unlike the constant changing in a show like jeopardy), a computer could easily recognize verbal cues that would trigger lights, sound effects, and rigging. Overseen by only one or two humans, and you’ve got a theatre that looks an awful lot like Edward Gordon Craig’s vision of a theatre completely controlled by a single artist.

I think the actors will be able to keep their jobs for a while; if I were a designer – one without a degree in computer science – I’d be worried.

The frame for this story? Theatre. According to Krulwich, “They say their furniture is just a newfangled version of all those nature shows on television that show animals hunting in the wild. Having a clock on your wall that ‘hunts’ flies is a kind of theater.” At least that’s how the designers describe it.

“A fly buzzing around the window” says Auger, “suddenly becomes an actor in a live game of life, as the viewer half wills it towards the robot and half hopes for it to escape.”‘

According to Krulwich, no one likes this. I’d like to say that I don’t like it either. But I do. I really, really do.

In his follow-up blog post, Landesman points to the NEA’s Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation, suggesting that “people who consume art via the Internet and electronic media are nearly three times as likely to attend live arts events, that they attend a greater number of live events, and that they also attend a greater variety of arts events.”

I haven’t analyze the report as closely as I would like, but from my preliminary reading, I’m not convinced that Landesman’s equation only goes in the direction he suggests. I think it is far more plausible to read the data in the reverse: as evidence that people who attend a greater number and variety of events also consume more art via the Internet and electronic media. That is, those of us who are already invested in live art events and a variety of events are more likely than others to seek out and consume those works in electronic media.

Perhaps even more significantly according to the report, we are more likely than other segments of the population to have the financial resources to access both live events and technology. With more limited resources, technology becomes not an avenue to live performance and other arts, but rather a compensation for the lack of access to live events. At the risk of citing a few statistics out of context and with no idea what analyses were run on these, let me point out a few of the conclusions drawn in the report.

The summary data demonstrates that “Live attendance” rises steadily with income levels. For those earning less than $10k, attendance was 16.2% rising from 19.3% to 27.1% for the rise from $20k-30k to $30-40K. At $50-75k, the rate rises to 36.3%. The biggest spike, however, is from the $100-150k group (55.2%) to the $150k and over: 68.3%. What’s interesting, too, is that the higher income levels often reported higher percentage of live attendance than media consumption, whereas lower groups tended to consume greater percentages via media than through live events. This trend flipped for all benchmark activities around $30k, but if you look only at “Arts performances,” it is only at $75k and up that people are consuming more via live events than mediated versions of those events. (The category of “Visual arts,” was consumed less through media by every income level except for the less than $10k group.) You can see a chart of this data here (p. 32, Figure 3-4).

The report narrative concludes that “More U.S. adults viewed or listened to arts performances through electronic media than through live attendance (30% versus 27%)” (33). This is clearly true in aggregate, but look more closely and you’ll discover that this is heavily biased by income. In my reading, it appears that technology does not lead us to the “live event,” but rather compensates for its lack of availability. At the highest income levels, attendance at live events outstrips media by 68.3% to 58.1% for all and 44.3% for performances. This is the highest margin.

This understanding of art in media form as compensatory and reactive, rather than inspiring and proactive, is significant because it suggests that if you want more people to come to your live event, attention to cost is likely to have a more significant impact than whether your event (and others of its kind) are available via media.  I wish I were a better economics student (one semester of micro, even with the great Chip Case doesn’t do me enough good now), but my read on Audience 2.0 is that it isn’t about technology, media, or new web 2.0 marketing strategies. It’s about the money. And, in the current economic climate, that’s not a good sign for theatre.