[-empyre-] Theatre and the Bureau

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

There's mass performance online. Mass audiences. Theatre
has an obligation to occur among these audiences
and articulate their worlds.

The problem is that art has become bureacratised. The
grant writing precedes the writing of the work, networking
with the middle managers of meaning (educators and art 
managers) precedent over consideration of the audience to 
be formed around the work. Hence curators make art:
Lucy Kimbell in the UK (I am responsible for putting her online 
in 1996-mistake!) and Sarah Diamond in Canada are great examples, 
the logical outcome of the bureaucratisation
of art: The grant proposal is the work of art! 

Mass drama happens on Internet, mass performativity. The
opportunities for mass audience for drama and theatre
have scarcely been touched upon. Of course, your local
theatre company won't like online theatre because they 
have been used to a few hundred theatre goers and heavily 
subsidised production. Its a perennial in artistic or critical 
work online that the university, gallery, or theatre doesn't 
like that sort of thing. It doesn't make administrative sense, 
it tramples all over carefully won and protected institutional
territory and excites remarkable piratical response by
colleagues and institution, as well as colleagues who overidentify 
with their institution or fetishize their identity with it.

There's nothing to be done about it, really, other than
to suggest that if you really want to make art, and I assume
that artists can't help but make art, in what is the 
greatest potential forum for aesthetic adventure then
you should go ahead and make it. If art is one way our
societies and cultures articulate those things for which
there is no ready-made expression, ie to make a language
and to make a discourse to articulate the world and our 
places in it. For some this is a bureacratic affair, 
an administrative matter, for others it is a need to
make known ones relationship to others.

I was interested in Valerie's assumption that the contexts
of presentation of internet based art are similar to the
contexts of reception of video. This is not so, though
obviously there had to be some place to discuss the issues
Internet raised, and obviously 'technology' or representation
has a history in film and video studies. 

The distribution, numbers, diversity of the 'audience' for
online art (txt, image, moving image, and performance) are
very much greater than audiences in gallery contexts. 
There may have been a time, up to c. 1998 when the audience 
for online work was greater in its gallery context, but surely 
not since then. We still seem to have very great difficulty with
the idea that there are a couple of hundred million people
online whose composition is changing daily to become the
most culturally diverse 'audience' one can imagine, while
the discourses that govern their online world are still
narrow minded and North American.

There's nothing to say that internetworked art doesn't involve
bodies together in place. 

Looking forward to your Hamlet. 


Lachlan


>there isn't a lot of performance being done online. & as a theatre
practitioner, i have found a certain amount of resistance to the idea
of performance on the internet amongst my theatre colleagues. when i
gave a cyberformance presentation at the odin teatret in january last
year, it inspired defensive cries of "you can't call that theatre!
there's no Body & no Emotion!" ... from this experience i developed
the[abc]experiment, http://www.abcexperiment.org & now i'm performing
with Avatar Body <italic>Collision</italic>,
http://www.avatarbodycollision.org.


my original entry into online performance was through adriene jenik &
lisa brenneis of desktop theater, http://www.desktoptheater.org. there
are various others doing performance related things, i think there are
quite a few people in australia (haven't got any urls off the top of
my
head) & people doing dance-related stuff.


h : )


>

>I am curious as to what kinds of online performances are bring done 

>presently. This is the other half of my persona - performance. I have


>a Website which I've been playing around w/ online personae called 

>The Advice Bunny (http:/www.mobilegaze.com/advicebunny) An scoop on 

>how performance is being presented online? Is anyone involved in 

>this? I am not seeing much performance on the Web although 

>performance seems to be exploding (at least in Canada) as THE artform


>of the early 21st century. Which seems curious - because performance 

>can be so essentialist. I'd appreciate any thoughts on the subject, 

>if I can make this short detour in the conversation.

>

>Valerie

>-- 


----- Original Message -----
From: "Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 21:18:41 +0000
To: lachlan@london.com
Subject: theatre


> 
> 

> 
> 
> Lachlan Brown


Lachlan Brown
T(416) 826 6937
VM (416) 822 1123

-- 
__________________________________________________________
Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup

Save up to $160 by signing up for NetZero Platinum Internet service.
http://www.netzero.net/?refcd=N2P0602NEP8