64

New media dramaturgy

Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan, and
Edward Scheer

We coined the term new media dramaturgy (NMD) to investigate the transformations
underway in live performance in relation to and in response to new media and vice
versa. New media constitutes a turn to visuality, intermediality, and dialectical
moves between performance and installation arts that show these expressions
embodied or visualized in live and virtual performance spaces. We are interested in
how these expressions might be understood compositionally and dramaturgically.
This is a field of performance that is situated inbetween theatre, dance, music, and
visual arts. In this project we engage with a range of works by artists and companies
such as: dumb type, the iCinema project, Back to Back Theatre, Kris Verdonck and A
Two Dogs Company, Kornél Mundruczó, and Hotel Modern. New media dramaturgy
is a concept linking dramaturgical innovations in the globally distributed field of
contemporary theatre with theories and practices in media/visual arts.
We focus on the key word dramaturgy. Understood as a transformational, inter-
stitial, and translation practice, dramaturgy bridges ideas and their compositional
and embodied enactment. We understand what Eckersall has called “an expanded
dramaturgy”1 to be one that in the production of art is always showing expressions
of the idea or trace of its process, something that performs a relation between idea/
concept/statement and form/enunciation/reception. Thus it is a dialectical process of
creativity that is also practical and based in an understanding of performance as a
process of and in work.
Interactivity is a key concern of NMD. This is not, however, a superficial idea
such as audiences “interacting” in the development of performance by choosing
story arcs using screens or pushing buttons in the theatre in realtime. Nor do we
mean experiments using visual-screen headgear and interactive software to create a
more porous sense of space and time in theatrical form (although this is a more
fruitful area of investigation than the push-button theatre, above). Instead, as Rosie
Klich and Ed Scheer argue, contemporary performance uses new media as a means
of aesthetic innovation. It is what they call “a training regime for the exploration of
contemporary perspectives” on “AV and information technologies.”2 New media is
a potentially destabilizing force in their summation but so is live performance –
“they are continually reframing and colonising each other.”3 NMD is not about

375
 PETER ECKERSALL, HELENA GREHAN, AND EDWARD SCHEER

worrying about the status of the live in performance – or about the virtualization of
theatre. Rather, questions of destabilization, colonization, informational economy,
and affective and ethical understandings of communication are considered as NMD
material. It is about the technologies and techniques of new media in relation to the
dramaturgical function of translating ideas into practice and compositional awareness.
It is a nexus between context, content, form, and audience, what Marianne Van
Kerkhoven calls “listening to the bloody machine” of theatre4 or, as Yukiko Shikata
describes in relation to dumb type’s work, media performance as “image machine.”5
In effect, NMD is the name we use to designate both the composition of this kind of
performance in and through new media art works, and its effects on an audience.

To participate, to respond: rethinking spectatorship and new media

dramaturgy

“In a world where everyone can air their views to everyone we are faced not with mass
empowerment but with an endless stream of egos levelled to banality.”6

Claire Bishop argues that in the current media-saturated landscape there is a merging
of spectacle and participation, and this merging engenders a new proximity that
“necessitates” the need to sustain the “tension between artistic and social critiques.”
She explains that as participation has progressed through the twentieth century it has
changed and morphed in “each historical moment.” And that until recently the
audience enjoyed “its subordination to strange experiences devised for them by an
artist,” but we are now in a situation where each audience member is “encouraged to
be a co-producer of work.”7 While her focus is on “participatory” art and ours is on
NMD our concerns are similar. One key question that animates this project is what
does it mean to respond within the landscape of new media (performance) work,
what job can or does the spectator do? Given that the works we focus on in this are
often concerned with or negotiate relationships or situations where technology and
the body operate in a process of exchange and where the technological elements are
integral to the work’s meaning, our role is also to wonder about or explore how this
alters the involvement of the spectator, be they participants who are, to follow
Bishop’s schema, willing to be subordinated or those seeking an involvement.
NMD changes everything for the spectator. The landscapes of production and
reception are unrecognizable in the sense that the use of space and the demands on our
attention as spectators are radically different than they have been up until now. Time
spans merge through filmic and live performance; spaces both virtual and real (or both
virtual and performative) are negotiated; performers can become phantasmagoric –
both present and absent, live and mediatized; things (stories, bodies, screens) are
remediated; machines, robots, soundscapes, and tools operate within or often control
the performance landscape. As a result the act of responding changes and it must.
For example, if we are situated in a media-saturated world, how does work that
employs media as integral to its dramaturgy do this in a way that still allows the
work to affect the spectator – ethically, bodily, emotionally, and at the same time to
avoid cannibalizing itself? There are of course many answers to this question.

376
 NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY

A work can become a sensorium where the spectator is enveloped and overwhelmed
by sound image and vision/footage – where the pain of engaging becomes a deter-
mining factor – should one leave or risk losing an eardrum? What kind of state is
this performance attempting to induce? And how does the visceral experience or the
physical pain endured relate to something beyond its impact on a single body?
NMD work can be unsettling or alienating in its attempts to prick the ethical
consciousness of the spectator, as in the production Hard to Be a God by Kornél
Mundruczó in which a concern with sex trafficking and political inertia animates the
performance. Spectators are confronted with performers as garment workers and sex
slaves who are projected via live film feed being brutalized in a seatainer on set, only to
emerge with gaping (fake) bloody wounds and break into Burt Bacharach numbers
(such as “What the World Needs Now Is Love”) with their oppressors. Spectators
are in effect forced to become voyeurs watching this shaky hand-held footage of
violation and abuse and eventually witnessing a murder – they are implicated. They
leave the space with questions about consumption, spectacle media saturation and
participation looming large, but they also leave potentially furious, unsettled, or at
least confused. There are also works, such as Hotel Modern’s KAMP, in which the
eye of the spectator/participant is drawn between projections of puppets in a con-
centration camp and the actual camp mapped out on the floor of the performance
space – where the footage of these puppets/figurines (plasticine people) at work
sweeping, cleaning, and then being hanged, electrocuted, and gassed provokes spectators
to imagine these known stories anew – the work’s dramaturgy through the filmic repre-
sentation and manipulation of plastic figures that we watch and see (on screen and
on stage as they are moved around) – both rehumanizes the figure of the victim and
makes a visceral or bodily claim on the spectator to respond.
These are just some examples of the ways in which NMD performances operate to
involve the spectator and to tread the fine line between participation and unsettlement.
In effect these works create what Viktor Shklovsky was seeking in 1917 when he
argued that art’s “technique” is to “to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty
and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself
and must be prolonged.”8 NMD works are difficult. From some of the examples
discussed here we can see that the difficulties experienced by spectators are mani-
fold. They range from the sense of an eardrum on the verge of explosion and a
question about the limits of endurance to the realization that plasticine figures
beautifully curated through horror can remind one at a profound and emotional
level of the figure of the human. All of these examples impact on the spectator
bodily, viscerally, and meta-politically. What happens is that through the combina-
tion of formal, aesthetic, and political elements – through an “expanded (new media)
dramaturgy – such works break through the shell of information overload in a
media-saturated society to create a disturbance or, as Shklovsky would term it, to
“increase the difficulty and length of perception.” As a result of the combination of
an important question or provocation at the heart of each work, its use of media or
technology in some form, and its dramaturgical realization, NMD works demand
attention, interaction, or response from the spectator as participant. Ultimately
these works open up the space of responsibility where the spectator as participant
must think about where or how they might mobilize their response, but where

377
 PETER ECKERSALL, HELENA GREHAN, AND EDWARD SCHEER

not responding becomes increasingly difficult or indeed impossible – there is no

space to hide.9

NMD and the image machine

NMD describes a performative space which has become an “image machine” as in

Shikata’s description of dumb type’s mediated scenography. The term image machine
denotes the extent to which such spaces have become populated with digital projections,
animated with digital light shows and sound scapes, and more generally mediated.
A consequence of this focus is that screen-based installation environments for
performance must also be considered in the production, description, and analysis of
the “image machine” of contemporary performance culture. It is no accident that a
number of key dumb type performance works such as S/N (1994) and OR (1997)
were remediated as installation works. Lovers (1994) was produced as a collaboration
between dumb type co-founder Furuhashi Teiji and Tokyo’s Canon ArtLab. It
involves timed slide projections on to the walls and floor of a cubic space. Here the
bodies of the company’s dancers approach the viewer with arms wide open before
falling back out of reach, like the dancers in S/N on which it is based, performing
the unattainable virtual body and also the ghost of Furuhashi.
In the OR installation, commissioned by the Tokyo ICC, the cybernetic experience
is pushed and amplified into the body of the spectator, who stands above a row of
flat life-size screens placed on the floor while images of the dancers appear and
disappear, still and silent, like beautiful corpses on a mortuary slab. The image
machine of these pieces focuses on the intimacy of the encounter with death and
disappearance, and on the many ways we are completely reliant on technology to
manage the interface between life and death. This refocusing is an effect of the
dramaturgy of the installations, the way the spatial and intermedial composition
translates the idea of the impermanence and fragility of life at the threshold into an
affective encounter between the image and the viewer.
Such works also refocus the problem faced by many theatre-makers that the most
intensely embodied experiences are best conveyed virtually or, to put it another way, that
media art provides a way to more fully experience an event at the level of the body. This
mutual intensification is what Scheer has called “performative media.” This term refers
to “media that in their mode of production and reception involve meaningful gestures,
symbolic acts and significant behaviours on behalf of human actors.”10 NMD is a way of
analyzing performative media in just this sense, by proceeding with the understanding
that the body/technology nexus in performance functions to amplify not to negate bodily
and affective experience or, to put it another way, that the interaction between live forms
and mediated experiences re-intensifies both (media and performance).
This type of work clearly raises questions about the limits of live performance, since
the only live component here is the spectator and the remixing of the elements of the
recorded performances. This dislocation of the familiar roles assigned to viewers and
performers is not an evolutionary sideshow in aesthetic terms; it is for media artist Jeffrey
Shaw the core of contemporary art practice as he understands it. Shaw describes a kind
of “euphoric dislocation” arising from the perceived friction that occurs when our

378
 NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY

bodily senses start rubbing up against our projections and fantasies: “Representation is
and always was the domain of both our embodied and disembodied yearnings.”11 Spaces
such as the Advanced Visual and Interactive Environment (AVIE), a 360-degree
immersive screen-based projection space developed by Shaw and the iCinema project,
located at UNSW in Sydney, Australia, are designed as much for performative
media as for more generic immersive screen-based experiments. The new media artist
and director of iCinema, Dennis Del Favero, describes the AVIE as a “theatrical
space.”12 For example, in developing his most recent work for the AVIE, entitled
Scenario (2011) Del Favero’s dramaturgy took an explicitly new media turn.
On a visit to the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, Del
Favero witnessed a video performance of Samuel Beckett’s Quadrant that was more a
study in mathematical choreography than a theatre work, and saw its potential for
further investigation with non-human performers. He saw in Beckett’s attempt to
designate the performance through geometric arrangements a prototype for a media
performance in the AVIE and took the idea to Maurice Pagnucco from the Centre
for Autonomous Systems at UNSW, where mechatronics (smart robotics) and AI
research is undertaken. Del Favero was interested in using robotic language in a
theatrical setting and worked collaboratively with mechatronics technicians and
programmers to develop the virtual performers in Scenario.13 The video performance of
Beckett’s Quadrant thereby became the base performance text to enable the iCinema
project to aesthetically re-conceptualize “the relationship between spatialisation and
group consciousness”14 in Scenario in which motion-captured virtual performers
work with the live spectators to carry out certain tasks and perform a kind of rescue
in which the figure of a gigantic lost child is brought back to life.
This kind of work simply maps in art the movement of social space into mediated
environments, but it also engages in a complex dramaturgy of response. The audience
members in Scenario are followed by their virtual counterparts, who read their behavior
in subtle ways to bring about the rescue, a denouement which is not guaranteed. The
failure of the “operation” results in a catastrophic outcome in which the child figure is
doomed to wander in the virtual forest while ash falls apocalyptically from the sky.
This NMD work promotes a group behavior that acts ethically to restitute our
collective lifeworld, not in any glib sense of the participatory art movements Bishop
critiques in her book, but in the sense she suggests at the end, when she talks about
the value of works which “elicit perverse, disturbing and pleasurable experiences
that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relation anew.”15 Such works
she argues require a “mediating third term – an object, image, story, film, even a
spectacle – that permits this experience to have a purchase on the public imaginary.”16
Perhaps the “third term” for NMD is the spectacle of performative media, used to
translate the idea of the ethical into an experience designed to critique the alienation
inscribed and produced by Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle.”17

Notes
1 Peter Eckersall, “Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on The
Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project,” Theatre Research International 31.3 (2006):
283–97.

379
 PETER ECKERSALL, HELENA GREHAN, AND EDWARD SCHEER

2 Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer, Multimedia Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2011), 1–2.
3 Klich and Scheer, 3.
4 Marianne Van Kerkhoven and Anoek Nuyens, Listen to the Bloody Machine: Creating Kris
Verdonck’s “End” (Utrecht: Utrecht School of the Arts, 2012).
5 Yukiko Shikata, “White-Out Dumb Type’s Image Machine,” Art Asia Pacific 27 (2000): 45.
6 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York:
Verso, 2012), 277.
7 Bishop, 277.
8 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory,
ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), 131.
9 For a more detailed discussion of responsibility (following Emmanuel Levinas), see Helena
Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
10 Edward Scheer, Scenario (Sydney and Karlsruhe: UNSW Press and ZKM Center for Art
and Media, 2011), 36.
11 Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press,
2006), 90.
12 iCinema, http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/.
13 Scheer, 27.
14 Scheer, 28.
15 Bishop, 284.
16 Bishop, 284.
17 Guy Debord, (1967/1994) The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Zone Books, 1967/1994).

380