"I've developed a deep suspicion of those who turn to technology in lieu of good ideas," said David Sefton, UCLA Live's executive director, on this weekend's LA Times piece on technology and the theater. In the upcoming REDCAT production "AH!", described as an iPhone opera, viewers' own poems and letters will cascade onto the space of the play and morph into words. The story will incorporate 20 languages (non-computer ones), 13 stories and will feature a live video feed. There will also be a "diamond tetrahedron" and other devices that allow for modulation of sound with the wave of hands.
For "Sigfried", the Los Angeles Opera will install a 3-D flying system that moves people and props in all directions and will have Star Wars-like LED tubes. Perhaps more interestingly is Cloud Eye Control's approach in "Under Polaris", which will combine video, animation and puppets made out of llama hair. It is described as an "epic story" and a "mix of cinema, theater and a rock concert". The hiding of the technology's mechanism is not a strategy here. The play will not hide the puppeteers, projectors and projectionists. "Under Polaris" is described as an "epic story" and a "mix of cinema, theater and a rock concert".
For anyone who has attended theater/dance performances that integrate video, it is easy to cringe at the prospect of so many projections on stage. Very rarely does video technology not become a substitute for good ideas or a way to ruin them in live performances. Mastering the art of the body in live motion and recorded art (or the art of the pixel) into a seamless combo seems as hard as creating media theory-practice hybrids. Plus anytime someone describes their event as a "mix of cinema, theater and a rock concert" chances are it's probably not. The notion of an "iPhone opera" also sounds as delicious as 5-year-old kids mixing 5 types of soda in the same cup to see what it tastes like. Interesting in concept, not in taste.
It's also hard not to think of these plays as springing out of the very American obsession with spectacle, grandiosity for grandiosity's sake. "20 different languages! 13 different plays!" suggest an assumption that great quantities equal great quality. It isn't much different when it comes to museum display, when one compares exhibits in America and Europe. Here we seem to take the populist route and choose the enormity of a Richard Serra over Sartre's manuscripts, or anything that isn't graspable "in a glance". So perhaps the notion of interactivity -- in the theater and not -- may hold a promise of transcending the constraints posed by Guy Debord's maxim: "The more he contemplates, the more he isn't." But it is interesting to think about differences in individual interactivity (user-lap top) and spectacular/communal interactivity (iPhone operas). What is it that miniaturization can bring to the interactive that the grandiose cannot and vice-versa? Does one lend itself more easily to certain approaches than the other?
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