The issue of established theatres and venues is a Pandora's box!

How does one deal with the "avant-garde" theatres that give an annual (usually festival-injected) dose of new technology to maintain their image as ground-breaking, riding on the backs of often conservative and well-heeled performers/ performances that will comfortably pack the house, and refusing to envisage anything else "because we're already doing it"?

I'm not at all sure that established theatres and venues are a remotely interesting alley to go up, if you're interested in truly experimental work, which is precisely what can make hybrid (bastard?) contemporary art spaces that mix things up quite interesting. Then you get sometimes very good and sometimes downright lousy performance work in galleries where curators and public with no theatre culture - and why not indeed - show how simultaneously salutary and prejudicial their "fresh" approach to performance can be. 

For me the real problem is over-sectorised publics, locked into monolithic cultural expectations and habits. When what's really useful is navigators, curious specialists, drifters. Theatre can actually still be really interesting - though rarely in established venues. The best live performance I've seen in ages is a 30-seater rat circus in the Paris suburbs which plays astonishingly with corporeal expression and (optical and aesthetic) perspectives, done by a tiny company of street artists who really know how and why they employ technologies and rodents when they do.

Best
sjn

 

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Curating digital art - 
>www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/ 
>[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anette Schäfer
>Sent: 22 July 2005 12:05
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] NEW-MEDIA-CURATING Digest - 
>20 Jul 2005 to 21 Jul 2005 (#2005-129)
>
>Thanks for the response, Simon. I totally agree in that new 
>techniques as such are exciting to work with because they 
>offer new creative dialogues and challenges. Also, the dance & 
>choreography scene has often taken on a pioneer role in 
>experimenting with new technologies such as sensors, networks, 
>telematics, so I'm not surprised about what you were reporting 
>from yours and Sue's working process.
>
>I guess I was talking from an observer's point of view, having 
>been out there to find work that merges performance or live 
>art with an innovative usage of new technology and the 
>majority of what I found was either brilliant performance 
>using video, often actually in a very exciting way, or pieces 
>built around the usage of new technology (eg. PDA + GPS 
>systems, streaming, mobile phone pieces etc.) which often 
>seemed to lack certain major aspects (like quality of 
>performance, the piece's artistic conept as a whole, the way 
>the work was presented to an audience etc.). But as I said I 
>also think that this process is in a stage of development and 
>the chances of a balance between the necessary aspects are great.
>What I was also trying to say though ­ and maybe I didn't make 
>that clear by mainly talking about the artist's side ­ I find 
>it still quite surprising to see how long it takes established 
>venues (like theatres that would probably see themselves as 
>'avant-garde') to allow in such new forms of work (and be able 
>to cope with it technically) and how big the 'slack' is 
>between what's new and what's programmed.
>
>best regards,
>anette
>
>_____________________________________________
>anette schäfer
>trampoline/radiator festival
>
>www.radiator-festival.org
>www.trampoline-berlin.de
>www.trampoline.org.uk
>++44-(0)115-840 92 72
>
>
>
>am 22.07.2005 9:40 Uhr schrieb Simon Biggs unter 
>[log in to unmask]:
>
>> Anette Schaefer wrote:
>> 
>>> - Looking at performers and live artists using new media 
>technologies 
>>> I think it can be said that the majority of them is actually using 
>>> mainstream media like video - the usage of which some have clearly 
>>> done masterfully an= d innovatively as such. This might possibly 
>>> change over the next few years with the advent of locative 
>media. But 
>>> at the moment it is very hard to fin= d projects which 
>manage to find 
>>> a balance between the performance aspect and the use of 
>cutting edge 
>>> technology =AD usually one compromises the other (in my opinion).
>> -----
>> A long and thoughtful post, but I just want to respond to this 
>> specific point because of something my partner and collaborator (Sue 
>> Hawksley) said the other day.
>> 
>> We are developing a new project using the Gypsy motion capture rig. 
>> This is like a complicated exoskeleton that maps all physical motion 
>> and radio's it to a computer. It seriously encumbers the wearer and 
>> makes certain types of movement difficult (full limb extension, for 
>> example) or impossible (rolling around on the floor). Sue is a 
>> dancer/choreographer with substantial experience of unencumbered 
>> interactive systems as well as visual motion capture 
>systems. This was 
>> however her first time in this type of exoskeleton system.
>> 
>> As a dancer who comes out of the release/post-modern dance scene 
>> (having worked with Trisha Brown and such-like) she responded to the 
>> constraints the technology placed on her as a compositional element 
>> (much as Cunningham has regularly used arbitrary 
>constraining systems 
>> to create movement). For Sue the manner in which the technology 
>> compromised her was the most artistically exciting aspect of the 
>> session. She has now started to work out how to use these 
>constraints 
>> to create the dance systems she will employ to generate a new piece. 
>> She will also use those constraints to choreograph movement 
>where the 
>> exoskeleton will not be worn, resulting in dance movement on 
>the unencumbered body that is conditioned by encumbrance.
>> 
>> The point here is that the ways in which new technologies and 
>> techniques can function to compromise creative intention should not 
>> necessarily be seen as a negative. Such compromise can lead to 
>> positive outcomes if the artist(s) involved are able to 
>respond to the 
>> constraints creatively and interpret them into a working 
>process that 
>> eventuates in a positive outcome. It could be argued that 
>all artists, 
>> no matter what media they employ, old or new, are constantly 
>involved 
>> in a creative dialectic with the constraining 
>characteristics of their 
>> media and that without that tension between the possible and 
>the desirable little of interest would emerge.
>> 
>> In this context the "newness" of a media can often offer the artist 
>> extra challenges to feed this tension and thus result in 
>work that is 
>> highly successful.
>> 
>> Best
>> 
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
>> Simon Biggs
>> [log in to unmask]
>> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>> 
>> Professor, Art and Design Research Centre Sheffield Hallam 
>University, 
>> UK http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/cri/adrc/research2/
>