Hannah Nicklin

The Forest Fringe Microfestival

Last night I finally got to see some of the work coming out of Andy Field’s Forest Fringe. The microfestival at BAC was a vibrant and buzzing combination of short experiences, fuller scripted pieces, sound work, music, installations and intimate performances. Some of the pieces were more ‘finished’, whilst others just setting out on their first period of R&D. The whole event fitted into the nooks and crannies of the BAC building, and filled the spaces in between with live music and discoveries aplenty – one highlight being the items of clothing dotted around, inviting you to take them in exchange for you’re an item of your own, and it story. Like any good festival, there was more than you could see in one night, and each attendee built their own experience.

Pieces I encountered included Search Party’s Growing Old With You, in its early stages of an R&D process investigating how our society is changing with its aging population. The issue was approached on a micro-level in a one to one experience that exposed the performer’s approach to their aging, before asking you to exchange your own story for a small birthday cake. Though this was the ‘newest’ work that I experienced, it was also the one that affected me in the rawest manner. I’m definitely going to be looking to hear about what it grows into.

Mamoru Iriguchi did the best sideways step in heels I’ve seen a man in a dress do, as he held your hand in the dark, asking you to investigate the house you share during a power cut, illuminated only by a head torch (projector affixed to a helmet, projecting a rich animation, which moved with you.)

Tania El Khoury’s Fuzzy asked an audience of up to 5 to act as her and her (absent) partner’s therapist. The piece felt like it was erring on an interesting clash of cultures as seen through the relationship of a Lebanese woman and a man from the Midlands. Though the performance perhaps felt like it was playing to a larger crowd, how we adjust to more intimate performance styles (does a more expressionist approach alienate in a useful or destructive way in intimate performance?) is definitely something that bears investigation.

Charlotte Jarvis’ video installation All American Hero wafted the smell of cold Chinese takeaway and stale popcorn towards you as you slumped on a sofa, watching the video diaries of the world’s first All American Hero. Something between X Factor and the Million Dollar Man, it felt all too plausible.

Throughout the night, I dipped in and out of the Travelling Sounds Library (pictured), which featured the work of Blast Theory, Unlimited Theatre, Duncan Speakman (and more). The library invited you to settle onto a sofa, open up a book, and discover an mp3 player and headphones containing a selection of several phonic experiences lasting from 2-40 minutes. Kaleidoscope by Abigail Conway was a particular highlight for me, a piece that asked if you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?

Finally, I investigated the Waiting Room, where you were able to peruse the emails that scored the process of putting the festival together. Stressed, funny, and often personal, this view into the ‘back channel’ of the event gave the whole evening the feeling of ‘opening up’ rather than ‘presenting’, which fitted perfectly with the fringe ethic.

What if…

You may have spotted a brief rant by me on Twitter the other day (1, 2, 3) in response to this article on the effect of the internet and other digital technology on theatre audiences. The article itself is balanced, reasoned, and puts forward a point I very much agree with:

… ultimately, we should avoid looking at the net as either intrinsically good or bad. Rather, we should see it as a tool, and like all tools, it is only as good as the person or people using it. (source)

The piece was responding to criticism of how the “constant feedback demanded by interactive technology can, in effect, become like a “giant focus group” that challenges “the autonomy of the artist”.” (ibid) and that “these digital and virtual connections, [… are] not particularly human.” (ibid) by which the artist being quoted means not of interest or destructive to theatre/artists.

There is a misconception, I believe, that technology is driving us apart. In fact (and as I put more thoroughly in the paper I recently delivered at the recent TaPRA postgrad symposium) I believe we are living in an era that is coming to be defined by the removal of the interface. Of the removal of the sanctioning of knowledge and of the mediatisation of our relationship with the information and entertainment we consume.

Likewise with 100% of 6-10 year olds gaming (Source (PDF)), and as a nation our spending 30% more on video games than on the consumption of film, we are also now a generation of people becoming much more used to being closer more embedded in its stories. This is political as well as social, adverts and didactic politics are also able to embed themselves in the player or person at the centre of these stories, and less perceptively so, so we also need tools to allow us to interrogate that embeddedness. Theatre, is a powerfully political form, it embodies the question what if. The question that has been so evolutionarily important to us, and the question which is the basis of all politics. For theatre to preserve it’s political power/relevance (see The Player as Poltical for more) I believe it needs to be wading into Technoculture, examining how it is changing the way we live, and who we are.

After all, how is anyone who wishes to make theatre about people who live now able to do so without acknowledging that way that we are mediated and the ways that we communicate are integral to the way we live? If Michiko Kakutani is able to admit that his audiences have changed, perhaps he should consider who it is that we make our art for, about.

Acknowledging technology in your art doesn’t have to mean using it. It can, and powerfully so, but it can also be about understanding living in technoculture, about how you open up your processes, how you market your work, the processes by which you make it, and the way you approach the telling of it.

Let me introduce you to the future. We’ve always had it. It’s always been perceived to be degrading us somehow. By all means sign off on your own obsolescence, but know this: to investigate our digital technoculture is necessary. To discount its cultural relevance is at best ignorant, at worst, dangerous.

It’s time to stop having this conversation about if it’s right that theatre should embrace digital technology/technoculture, and instead start looking about how it’s being done. If you are scared of it, if you believe it is degrading how we live, that is exactly why you should be examining it.

Blog posts like this are just as guilty of continuing this conversation. So this will be the last I write on the matter for a while – of course it’s always necessary to reexamine your assumptions – but for the next few posts I do RE the arts, I’m going to stop talking about how and why the arts and tech should/can work together, and instead talk about the tools and ways they’re being used. If we should be looking at digital technology “as a tool, and like all tools, it is only as good as the person or people using it” (source) it’s time for me to stop blogging about why, and start looking at who and how.

The Player as Political

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

From the bypassing of human interface devices (HIDs) such as mice and keyboards represented by the iPhone and the iPad, to the removal of a media interface represented by the increasing popularity of social media, the current trend in digital technology centres around the removal of the interface. This trend has recently been seen as becoming increasingly prevalent in theatre and performance.

[A] key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves […] increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

In 2009 the biggest selling entertainment item on Amazon.co.uk was a video game – COD:MW2 outsold both Harry Potter and Twilight on DVD. We spent 30% more on video games last year than we did on going to the cinema and purchasing DVDs combined. And in a recent survey done by the BBC, 100% of 6-10 year olds gamed regularly.

With gaming you’re involved and in control. With other things you just have to sit back and watch. I’ve been gaming for most of my life. – Callum, aged 10 (BBC 2005 Source (PDF))

Although digital strategies and ideas have been examined in a performative context since the 1960s, this technology and these strategies have reached a point where they are ubiquitous enough to form a real trend in narrative consumption. As thus ours is a culture becoming much more used to being embedded in its stories, political as well as social. In Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture Matthew Causey discusses the political move from simulation to embeddedness, suggesting that

The site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body of the material subject. (Causey 2006, 179)

The example drawn by Causey contrasts the illusion of Gulf War I – of cut together clips, narrators, and news packages – to the rolling embedded coverage of Gulf War II. ‘This is happening now’, the spectacle says, ‘there is no room for editing, cutting, or simulation; this is reality’. In our age of so-called reality TV, 24-hour rolling news, and the advent of the ‘real-time’ and ‘social’ web, we are witnessing a corruption of the data-flow of contemporary life. We are led to believe that the data we receive is live, uncut, unmediated and true. As thus we lose the critical tools afforded us by distance and reflection. It is the ‘interior body of the material subject’ where the political battle for subjectivity must now be fought, in our selves.

Pervasive gaming and interactive theatre takes the digital idea of player-as-protagonist, and applies it to the lived body of performance. Pervasive games are ‘playful experiences’ which combine aspects of childhood parlour games and video game ethics and t to be played in groups across large urban spaces, interactive theatre moves these ideas into thicker narratives. Both forms allow the audience to become agent, and can be seen to expand their storytelling over space, technology, and/or time.

“All theatre is interactive. To call this diverse spectrum of work ‘Interactive Arts’, is only to suggest that it acknowledges that relationship and seeks, in some way, to interrogate it.” (Field 2010)

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