Theatre, Great Omnipotent, New Facets of 2023
As a director and actor in theater and film engaged in these dual arts since my youth, I have always been an advocate for physical contact in theater. This is because theater is one of the few, if not the only, forms of art where the final product is created instantaneously, second by second, here and now, in direct contact between the artists on stage and the audience in the hall. There is probably no other art form where a take cannot be recorded on film, video tape, or microchip and replayed hundreds of times to correct or edit something. Here, everything happens in the moment; there is no opportunity for editing.
The actor is responsible for the contact with the audience, for the level of energy in the energetic exchange that occurs between the audience and the artists, using their sensory systems to the fullest, as openly and individually as possible. Therefore, when in 2023, for the project “Theatre in the Palm,” I was invited to be a mentor for a digital residency where 12 troupes from different countries were to create a joint performance based on Sophocles’ work, Antigone, I faced a choice that probably all 12 companies had to make: to create a performance and play it live or to record the best version of the actors’ performances and broadcast it as a video recording.
Many of the 12 partners chose the latter option, which in my view was safer but more suitable for television broadcasting than for live theater. Thus, together with the resident artists in Brussels of the first digital residency project, we took the risky choice to perform our show here and now, live, streaming it through webcams to all the other project participants.
This required us to engage in technical self-education, as the microphones transmitting sound through the webcams are not designed for polyphony; they are tailored for an individual speaker speaking directly into the camera while engaged in dialogue with people in other windows with other webcams. We had to configure the microphones and webcam systems for our performance, using sound from musicians and musical orchestras so that the singing, playing of musical instruments, and the text spoken by the artists would not get lost or drowned out by technical issues. Zoom was a challenge, but it seems we overcame it.
The second experiment involved a multilayered projection player where the very streaming of the performance itself acted as a projection, and within our show, we created a design using projections on screens that became the bodies or clothing of our participants—projections on projections on projections. In this way, by creating a series of obstacles and overcoming them throughout the week, we managed to create an interesting environment for exploration and discovery, producing a multilayered performance not only from a design perspective but also in terms of analyzing the text of Sophocles’ Antigone, its relationships with reality and what is happening in the world in 2022 and 2023—post-pandemic reflections on the interaction of political power and families.
All of this formed the basis of the performance which, if not something we are proud of, at least does not leave us disappointed.
Thank you to the “Theater in the Palm” project for this experiment.
Vladimir Bouchler (ETFI, artistic director)
