Political Cyberformance

The Etheatre Project

Christina Papagiannouli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137577030
• eBook ISBN: 9781137577047
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Written from a practice-based perspective, this book focuses on the political character of 'cyberformance': the genre of digital performance that uses the Internet as a performance space. The Etheatre Project comprises a series of experimental cyberformances aiming to reconsider the characteristics of theatre in the Internet age.

1

A Short Organum for Cyberformance: The Internet as an Apparatus of Communication

Abstract: The chapter offers an art historical overview of cyberformance as theatre from the Hamnet Players’ debut cyberformance of Hamnet to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Twitter adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Looking at cyberformance as the outcome of the intermedial marriage between theatre and the Internet and comparing the Royal National Theatre’s NTLive Phèdre and Forced Entertainment’s 24-hour Quizoola! case studies, liveness and interactivity are determined to be key characteristics of online theatre. Drawing on Bertolt Brecht’s radio essay (1964b [1932]), Papagiannouli discusses the interactive character of the Internet to conclude that the Internet is the new agora, a meeting point for politics to be discussed and ideas to be shared.

Papagiannouli, Christina. Political Cyberformance: The Etheatre Project. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137577047.0005.

1.1Introducing the ‘cyber turn’: from #Hamnet to #Dream40

Research for the Etheatre Project began at a time when the goliaths of UK-based theatre went digital. On 25 June 2009, NTLive¹ – part of the Royal National Theatre in London – broadcast live its production of Phèdre to 73 cinemas in the United Kingdom and 200 more round the world. In April and May 2010, the RSC staged Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on Twitter for its five-week-long staging of Such Tweet Sorrow – the ‘world’s first professional Twitter-based performance of Shakespeare’ (Arts Council England, 2012, p. 11). In summer of the same year, the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT, 2014), under the new artistic direction of Mark Ball, focused on the emergence of digital technology in the world of theatre. Since these productions, a rapidly increasing number of leading art houses and theatre companies have begun using the Internet – including Tate Modern’s BMW Tate Live: Performance Room, Punchdrunk and Forced Entertainment – forming a wave of UK-based theatre ‘cyber turn’.

Besides the vigorous use of the Internet on contemporary British stage, online theatre has a substantial international history that cannot be ignored. On May 2012, Helen Varley Jamieson (2012b) posted on the Furtherfield Gallery community blog a passionate text criticizing the Tate’s launch claims about BMW Tate Live being an ‘entirely new mode of presentation’ (see Tate, 2012) and ‘the first artistic programme created purely for live web broadcast’ (see Tate, 2011). In her blog post, Jamieson (2012b) rightly questioned these claims, offering a short overview of the history of online performance. She pointed out that cyberformance dates back to at least 1994, when fine artists Nina Sobell and Emily Hartzell (1994) launched ‘ParkBench’, transforming their studio into a ‘time-based public Web installation’ by creating a weekly, online, live, video-based performance series called ArTisTheater. The RSC, too, ignored the rich history of cyberformance and online Shakespearian theatre – from the Hamnet Players’ debut cyberformance of Hamnet (irc Theatre, Live!!!, 1993), to the SL Shakespeare Company’s (2007–08) efforts ‘to bring to “Second Life” live productions of all of the bard’s plays’, to the Plaintext Players’ (1994–2006) ‘live online and mixed-reality performances since 1994’, to Maria Chatzichristodoulou’s (2006–10) writings and collaborative projects on digital and networked performance – and ‘with a little help from Google+’ advertised #Dream40, its 2013 Midsummer Night’s Dream production, as an ‘innovative digital project’ and ‘a new kind of play’ (Royal Shakespeare Company and Google+, 2013).

The history of cyberformance, as outlined by Jamieson (2012b), highlights the disregard of leading art institutions (for the online performance space) concealed in the advertisement of their digital projects as ‘pioneering’. Despite Twitter, Google+, Second Life, multi-user object-oriented (MOOS) environments and Internet relay chat (IRC) channels being different online communication platforms, their theatrical uses share a common raison d’être: direct, real-time communication between theatre and its remote, geographically distant audience.

Since 2010 and the Twitter adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, the RSC has tried to investigate ‘new forms of creating narrative expression’ (Collinge, 2011), following a path more interactive than its classic productions by experimenting with digital technology. Six actors, coached and directed by Roxana Silbert, improvised the dialogue of the central characters for Such Tweet Sorrow, following the framework of an overall scripted grid that plotted the action of each character. Bethan Marlow and Tim Wright wrote daily missions for each actor, who could then ‘act’ from wherever they could get online. The missions were delivered each morning, telling the actors how the story would evolve that day, and the actors had to improvise and decide what to say by posting tweets of up to 140 characters (Mudlark, 2010). The tweets, merged and archived in the Such Tweet Sorrow public list on Twitter (https://twitter.com/such_tweet/lists/such-tweet-sorrow), compromised the script of the adaptation. However, the live version of the play was created and completed by both the actors’ and the audience’s tweets. Nearly 6,000 people followed Juliet, and an average of 4,000 audience members followed and interacted with the other characters through real-time hypertext updates and tweets, including videos, pictures, web pages and text logs, posted on Twitter over a period of five weeks (Collinge, 2011).

The ‘new forms of creating narrative expression’ (Collinge, 2011) that Such Tweet Sorrow attempted in 2011 has been existing since 1993. The Hamnet Players – founded by ‘semi-professional’ actor and computer professional Stuart Harris – ‘debuted the concept of participatory Internet Theatre’, performing text-based adaptations of classic plays on IRC channels (Danet et al., 2006; irc Theatre, Live!!!, 1993). Brenda Danet et al. (2006) used the term ‘semi-professional’ to emphasize Harris’ former experience as an actor on the festival circuit, raising questions about the underlying causes of his IRC experiment.

Harris recognized the dramatic potential of IRC and successfully brought together amateur and professional actors from all over the world – mainly London, Tel Aviv, Durban, Slovenia and Oslo – to produce the world’s first online version of a Shakespeare play: Hamnet, an 80-line parody of Hamlet staged on an IRC channel called #hamnet (Danet, 2002). The Hamnet Players, perhaps unaware of the publicity potential of such a pioneering enterprise, managed to gain a remarkable amount of attention from conventional media, such as USENET newsgroups, American National Public Radio, local television interviews and newspaper coverage in the Los Angeles Times as well as the London Times. Harris collaborated with Ian Taylor of the RSC for the second production of Hamnet in 1994, with Taylor in the lead role (Danet et al., 2006). To mark Shakespeare’s 430th birthday, the Hamnet Players performed PCBeth: An IBM Clone of Macbeth, a 160-line version of Macbeth with visual images (irc Theatre, Live!!!, 1994a). In the second version of PCBeth (in July 1994) and in the last project of the company, An irc Channel Named #desire (which premiered the same year), based on Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, the Hamnet Players included sound files: ‘Sound-bits pertaining to the show will be offered to ppl with sound-capable equipment (i.e. with sound-cards installed)’ (irc Theatre, Live!!!, 1994b).

From 1994, the Plaintext Players, an online performance group founded by new media artist Antoinette LaFarge, also performed direct textual mixed-reality improvisations on cross platforms (such as MOOS) to explore new ways of interactive play-writing. Their LittleHamlet project, for instance, was a ‘reworking of the Hamlet story that inverted text and subtext’ to allow ‘all of the characters’ formerly unspoken needs, fears, and desires [to come] to the fore’ (Plaintext Players, 1995). Like Harris’ parodies, the Plaintext Players used hypertext to explore classic plays in a comic way:

CLAUDIUS: Laertes, my dear boy, there’s been an unfortunate, er, misunderstanding ...

LAERTES: I demand revenge! ... Who and how was my father killed?

[psst ... it wasn’t cancer]

BLOODYGERTRUDE: No one lives forever, Laertes ... jeesh ... grow up.

CLAUDIUS: ... involving a, ah, curtain, and uh ...

[killed by a curtain? But that’s absurd!]

LAERTES: Yes, yer Malady?

[psst, he wasn’t hit by a bus ... heck, we don’t got no busses yet]

CLAUDIUS: ... and a no ... He was very nosy, your father.

BLOODYGERTRUDE: Anyway, think of the insurance money.

[Or do we? Are there Danish busses?]

CLAUDIUS: And I didn’t do it!

LAERTES: Look, I’m seeking ABSOLUTE TRUTH!

CLAUDIUS: I didn’t do the other thing either!

– From LittleHamlet (Plaintext Players, 1995; emphasis in the original)

Apart from solely text-based platforms, online theatre artists have used avatar-based virtual worlds, such as Second Life, and virtual stages, such as UpStage, for their performances. The SL Shakespeare Company, another professional theatre troupe, used the Internet to ‘make Shakespeare cool again!’ (SL Shakespeare Company Blog, 2009–10) before the RSC used Twitter for the same reason. According to Geraldine Collinge, the production manager of Such Tweet Sorrow, Twitter is ‘one way that the story [of Romeo and Juliet] might be told today’ (quoted in Cavendish, 2010). The Internet does indeed offer both the opportunity to approach and engage new, and mainly young, audience in theatre as well as the scope to use creative and futuristic tools for storytelling.

Not only professional and amateur artists but also researchers and scholars look at the Internet as a theatre stage. In 2007, artist, researcher and scholar Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X), among others, performed Ophelia_machine as part of the 070707 UpStage Festival. The play was a textual collage based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Heiner Müller’s Hamlet Machine and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (Chatzichristodoulou, 2010, p. 248). Despite the complexity of the avatars, which functioned as puppets in the hands/computer keyboard of the artists, the communication with the audiences was centred on a simple chat-based relationship.

UpStage is a cyberformance stage software produced in 2004 by Douglas Bagnall for the Avatar Body Collision (Helen Varley Jamieson, Karla Ptacek, Leena Saarinen and Vicki Smith) cyberformance group (UpStage, 2004). On 7 July 2007 the first cyberformance festival, 070707 UpStage Festival, was organized as a celebration for the launch of UpStage v2. This has since become an annual cyberformance festival, with the 080808, 090909, 101010 and 11:11:11 UpStage Festivals attracting many artists, students and researchers to collaborate and experiment with this platform. The festival’s format was broken in 2012 to mark the last possible year the date sequence could be followed and the beginning of DownStage, a new engine to replace the UpStage platform (Eisenbarth, 2012). The 121212 UpStage Festival took place between 5 and 12 December and consisted of two parts: in the first part, called ‘Walking Backwards into the Future’ (5–11 December), cyberformances from the previous five festivals were re-performed; in the second part, called ‘Testing – 12,12,12’ (12 December), new works were produced on UpStage and other online platforms, including VisitorsStudio, mosaika.tv, Waterwheel Tap, Livestream, eTV and the Second Life social environment. The ‘Walking Backwards into the Future’ section of the 121212 UpStage Festival also served as a stimulus for the Avatar Body Collision group to again perform together after five years (they had not performed as a group since 2007; see Jamieson, 2012a).

Prior to the 121212 UpStage Festival, an online global symposium on cyberformance hosted by UpStage, Waterwheel Tap and independent researchers and artists also highlighted the importance of past cyberformances. The ‘CyPosium’ (as it was called), held on 12 October 2012, aimed to discuss, question and analyse the history of online performance (CyPosium, 2012), by bringing together artists and researchers from different genres – dance, music, theatre, installation and media art – to talk about their cyberformances. This chapter studies cyberformance as theatre, as this originates from the constant effort of theatre artists and researchers to direct and produce Shakespearian performances online and the British ‘cyber turn’, to determine its key characteristics and define it within socio-political implications and interactions.

1.2All the world’s a (cyber)stage: cyberformance as theatre

In 2000, theatre-maker, digital artist and researcher Helen Varley Jamieson coined the term ‘cyberformance’ to define the form of ‘live performance that utilises internet technologies to bring remote performers together in real time, for remote and/or proximal audiences’ (2008, p. 34). Borrowing Jamieson’s term, this chapter examines how the Internet and the World Wide Web inform the way in which theatre is made in cyberculture – what Andy Lavender defined as ‘techne’ (2006, p. 551) – by exploring the characteristics of cyberformance and the boundaries of theatre those characteristics negotiate.

Cyberformance is a genre of digital performance that uses the Internet as a performance space or a cyberstage: ‘a socio-political in-between space and non-space, where the participants are present and absent at the same time in a live and mediatised experience’ (Papagiannouli, 2011a, p. 61). For their 2001 Digital Performance Archive (DPA) research project, Steve Dixon and Barry Smith defined ‘digital performance’ to include ‘all performance works where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, techniques, aesthetics or delivery forms’ (quoted in Dixon, 2007, p. 3; emphasis in the original). The ‘spaceless’, ‘bodyless’ and ‘liveness’ characterization of the cyberstage references the binary nature of the materiality and immateriality of cyberspace, whereas its socio-political character references the global nature of online environments (Papagiannouli, 2011b). This dual hypostasis of the cyberstage comes in coherence with the binary computer code (0,1 binary digits), which allows dissimilar features and oppositions to exist at the same time, changing the question from ‘to be or not to be’ to ‘to be and not to be’. The in-betweeness of the cyberstage reveals the intermedial character of cyberformance – a metaxy, Plato and Aristotle’s notion of in-betweeness, that is, a situation in-between different mediums such as theatre and the Internet, theory and practice, and live and mediatized performance:

The use of computers in the performing arts does not merely add a new tool to an old discipline. It challenges some of our most basic assumptions about performance. First, it blurs the boundaries between performance disciplines. [ ... ] Second, it blurs the boundaries between scholarship and creative practice. [ ... ] Finally, digital technology is challenging the very distinction between ‘liveness’ and media. (Saltz, 2004, p. 129)

The term ‘intermediality’ first appeared in print in 1989 to critically describe the use of other media, such as cinema and television, in theatre (Anstey, 2007, p. 2). Since then, the word has been widely used in different contexts and discourses, resulting in the creation of the Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Working Group withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  A Short Organum for Cyberformance: The Internet as an Apparatus of Communication
• 2  Towards an Online Community-Engaging and Participatory Theatre: Participation, Interaction and Engagement
• 3  The Etheatre Project: The Director as Discussion Facilitator
• Conclusion: Political Cyberformance. Past or Future?
• Bibliography
• List of Websites
• Index