Media in Performance

20 Aug 2012

My old friend Patrick Halm recently asked me about the use of multi media in performance. I’ve known Packy a long time: we went through adolescence together, I had my first job as an usher at Plitt Orland Square Cinema alongside him, and he took my sister to his high school prom.

Now he’s an artist in Los Angeles making experimental films and leading special fx teams on Superbowl commercials and Hollywood blockbusters…

Here’s his website: http://www.patrickhalm.com

And here are some thoughts about media in performance:

I see media as another tool, something to use in service of the event I’m making. Part of me thinks the perfect work wouldn't need anything extra at all, just a person on stage, compelling an audience to listen. But I like stuff happening when I'm in a performance space, too, and when it's used right (not gratuitously, not just because you have it) then media - projection/sound/music - adds layers to what you are doing that can both keep an audience involved and push them to unexpected places. Surprising the eyes, the ears, offering alternate perspectives on what it is you're talking about, challenging people.

I perform in a show by Lone Twin Theatre (The Festival) which uses hardly anything - just five people on stage talking to the audience, announcing where and who their characters are in the story (it changes throughout the show), sometimes singing, sometimes speaking with gestures, and sometimes moving with seemingly random yet actually precisely choreographed dance.

That show is fantastic: funny, interesting, moving and it doesn't need anything besides tables and chairs and people. But I find when it's just one person, just me at least, it helps to have more going on to engage the audience.

In the first show I made, That’s Me on the Left, in the Parka, everything was accompanied live with music, but the stories were strong on their own and I used few sequences of projection - just one film and two sets of slides from an old Kodak Carousel projector. It was my first piece and I was working on instinct. The next show, Big in Japan or Three Steves & a Bob (trailer above) expanded the use significantly, and took steps away from theatre in the direction of live art. I used midi sounds and set the show in front of a large screen.

Black River Falls, my third show, uses even more, integrating projection into the set, the representation of home. The shack and fence are projected onto cut-out 2d flats in the shapes of a shack & a fence, which transform into a mosque puppet theatre. Three sheets hanging from a line overhead become three separate screens, and together with the raised flats they become one giant screen.  I also include abstract images (sheets of water, lashes of snow), combined with ambient looped sounds created live, giving time for the audience to rest from the narratives, time to experience. I like the results: part of the brain is engaged, but not the linear part. Like modern dance – something I watch a lot, just giving up looking for any kind of story. I can feel the back of my brain being stimulated, in the upper side/back of the head, like an itch there being gently scratched, and it feels great. The images allow the audiences to go there for a couple minutes too. Maybe I could just be still, silent, but I suppose I’m not that brave. Plus we're in the world of multi-screen multi-task 5 things at once, and I think people can handle more going on simultaneously: visual elements + sound + voiceovers, etc. As long as there is space for it, and it’s set up properly, and it represents ideas discussed in the show with quality and attention then audiences of course can do it.

Ultimately, when I’m watching performance I like to be challenged to figure things out for myself, and you make the art you like, so I try to create challenging work, too. I don't always like to know what's happening next. But I do like simplicity, without necessarily having to see everything that's going on behind the scenes taking me out of the moment. That's the conflict really, how to be complex and simple at the same time. They aren’t mutually exclusive, and when the balance is struck, for me that's when you get elegance, beauty, that's when you can engage people both rationally and emotionally. That's what I like.