Week Two - Theatre and Virtuality

Telematic dreamin Complex

‘Human history is a succession of technological extensions of human communication and perception where each new medium subsumed the previous technology sometimes as an art form’

(McLuhan 1964, cited in Hill)

This quote byMcluhan introduces what i am about to learn and talk about, that sometimes technology and media in the digital age influences and becomes an extension with both art and in particular Theatre.

Recently I saw a production called somplex where they has reinvented and modernised Electra, the timeless Greek story in a stunning perfroming that fused movement, multimedia and epic text.

This gave me a real insight into how theatre is being staged in the digital age, their mission statement was “to create meaningful, imaginative theatre that is strongly connected to us and the world around us.” (Gersch 2007) and they certainly did that by mixing live perfrom with mediated performance.

A production called telmatic dreaming - tells of the celibacy of the machine brings about the celibacy of "Telematic Man". He grants himself the spectacle of his brain and of his intelligence as he sits in front of the computer or word-processor, the "Telematic Man" gives himself the spectacle of his fantasies and of a virtual "jouissance". The secret of the interface is that the Other is within it virtually the Same - otherness being surreptitiously confiscated by the machine."

'virtual theatre becomes the place where the subject sees itself as “out of joint”, the user finds themselves in a specific inter-subjective relation with his/ her double.’ Gabriella Giannachi (2004 p.12)

So why the Virtual?

To be honest I found it really hard to comprehened that the virtual and the theatre could comined as one, Ive always looked at them as separte things and virtual performance such as Youtube video posting as not true perfromances. I am very passionate about drama and love seeing live performances 'true in the moment theatre, that cant be recreated to be the same again', that what makes it so special! - it took me a while to get over the fact that theatre is slowly diminshing because people dont go there anymore its easier to watch a film on sky box office rather than ring up a theatre box office taking time to get to the theatre, leaving home- have we become to indoors to appreciate culture?

Philip Auslander

Explains that today there remains a strong tendency in performance theory to place live performance and mediatized or technologized forms in opposition to one another.

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