RE: [-empyre-] poetics...

["Sally Jane Norman" <S.J.Norman@newcastle.ac.uk>]

Dear Aleksandra, Kenneth,
 
Many thanks for your deep and rich responses. The leaves piece looks fascinating and it's interesting to learn how engagement arose via the benches opposite the projection space, and how you're striving for the partakers. 
 
Aleksandra, I think I see how you're defining "media performance" and relevance of the links to Eco's Open Work. I suppose my wish as an inveterate lover of fabrics woven by multiple and disparate historical braids would be to see other forms of performance also included in your pre-computational braided processes, i.e. other forms of performance where it is the event orchestrated by a "medium" that serves as the audience focus. I could imagine this definition of media performance including baroque theatre's changements a vue or Hugo Bahr's optical projections or Schlemmer's Figural Cabinet or Pepper's Ghost, Robertson's fantasmagoria and a host of other "mediated" performance actions, in additional to the umpteen forms of puppetry and more specifically shadow puppetry that have haunted the world. But perhaps your focus and definition of the medium (also) has to do with the actual screen that shields the dalang/ medium from view?
 
I'm always intrigued by Artaud's account of the Balinese dancers and his enthralled description of the abstraction of codified gestures with which he was totally unfamiliar. Irrespective of Artaud's genius, might this not be how we sometimes experience the unfamiliar? Barba's theatre anthropology I think shows how strongly known gestural repertories condition our cultural readings of their unknown counterparts; I wonder how alien a 14th century French court dance would appear to a non-initiate? I'm probably off subject and your last paragraph includes too many names which for me represent whole separate universes of theatrical thinking so I guess I'll leave it at that. 
 
The Wija story and the account of his use of new materials is fascinating. 
 
Enjoying the posts with thanks and looking forward to future braids
 
best wishes
 
sjn
 
 
 

________________________________

From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Aleksandra Dulic
Sent: Sun 08/01/2006 22:24
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] poetics...




Dear Sally,

Thanks for your stimulating questions... My reflection is partly 
aimed at trying to articulate some strains of the tremendous 
influence that Balinese shadow theatre left on my artistic practice.

While numerous parallels drawn between shadow play and cinema inform 
my research into shadow play, my key concern is the dramatic 
principle that underlies animated performance of shadow theater, 
which enables one to make an inanimate non-moving object come to life 
by body movement, while the performer, or dalang (puppeteer), stays 
outside the audience's focus. This situation is what i refer to as 
media performance. The audience focus is centered on the animated 
events taking place on the screen, and in Balinese terms the 
characters speak for themeless, while the dalang acts as a medium. 
Again the comparison is focused on what happens in the 
improvisational context of the performance with (electronic, 
computational or non-electronic) media.

This concept of braided processes is aimed at supporting the 
improvisation and real-time animation driven by the body of the 
performer, or participant. The composition and presentation of 
electronic media, using capabilities offered by computation,  
provides an extension of the cinema by braiding encoded process with 
various media, narrative elements and participants interaction in the 
real time of the performance.  The "interaction" of performers, 
partakers and the elements of the work brings media perfomance form 
close to shadow play.
This flexible character of media performance employs the dramatic 
structure that can be articulated as a system of braids of several 
strands of activities that bring performers and partakers together 
here and now. This situation is analogue to Eco's notion of he Open 
Work. In a series of essays published as "The Open Work" Umberto Eco 
(1962) articulates the concept of "openness" of the work of art, 
where the arrangements of elements of a work are open to different 
interpretations on the part of the performer, audience and reader 
that are made a significant part of the completion of the work. 
Openness of the work of art is in leaving the work unfinished and 
flexible in order to be completed by the participants. Eco notes 
that, although a certain level of openness is intrinsic to every work 
of art in the flexibility of its interpretation by individual 
spectators, these new works are intentional, and explicit, in 
allowing a new level of interpretive potential.  These works are 
based on a semantic plurality that makes them larger than any single 
instantiation, performance or reading can contain.



In the open work the participant is placed at the focal point of the 
variety of interrelations that make up the work and therefore it 
demands a creative response from the participant. The action involves 
constructing an experience from a disparate number of elements that 
do not exist in the absence of the participant whose role is to 
articulate closure of the work.  The participant collaborates in the 
construction of a particular meaning of the work, but in no way 
exhausts the potential for other meanings in the form of other 
instantiations.

The open work supports structured improvisation-a chaos and cosmos 
negotiated between the art system and a group of participants.  
Improvisation for the participant allows an instantiation of the work 
within a co-constructed context-a form of distributed dialogue with 
oneself and others-where the role of participant is both as ordering 
agent and source of novelty. Media performance is a form of open work 
that braids together spatial, time-based and contextual factors.

Another reason for looking for analogies between the shadow play and 
this emerging form of so called interactive art or more specifically 
media performance is that if we consider computational media 
performance as a continuous development of cinematic animation, and 
by extension, that of shadow play tradition, we can study a form that 
has had thousands of years of unbroken development.  This vast 
history provides us with rich and deep well of compositional 
approaches, techniques and methods. And of course Balinese Wayang 
kulit (shadow play) is interesting because it is an example of rich, 
diverse and continuos living tradition.

Wayang kulit performances function as a means to maintain and 
reinforce wisdom and the value system of the society, and to preserve 
the narrative tradition of Balinese folk heritage.  Classical 
literature, such as Indian epics, Mahabharata, and Ramayana, as well 
as stories of the East Javanese prince Panji, are highly respected as 
it preserves the sacred language of the Gods and eternally valid 
truths about the world - the tradition.  But, an innovative dalang 
occasionally invents a whole new cast of characters, creating new 
puppets based on classical Balinese mythology not previously part of 
wayang kulit performance. Some innovations live briefly and fade away 
from the repertoire. Very few of these innovations become a part of 
standard performances. I would like to discuss some recent 
innovations in narrative initiated by I Wayan Wija,  one of the most 
highly regarded Dalangs in Bali. They include Tantri episodes derived 
from ancient Indian Panchatantra stories (wayang tantri), and Shadows 
of Light and Illusion (wayang sinar maya).

Wayang tantri episodes are a variant of the "Thousand and One Nights" 
theme. Dalang Wayan Wija was the first to use these stories, and 
remains its main innovator. Tantri stories include many animal 
characters. He has devised an entirely original set of puppets. Every 
new form of wayang requires a whole puppet set, which involves 
creating as many as 150 new puppet characters per story. Wija's 
intention was to use animal characters to inspire the interest of 
young people in wayang, expand its moral lessons and spread an 
environmental consciousness in Bali. Wija's wayang tantri represents 
a breakthough in the kind of stories commonly depicted in wayang 
kulit performances. Traditional wayang is fundamentally about human 
beings and eternal struggles over land, love, disagreements between 
good and evil, but wayang tantri is about animals. These stories 
explore ecological issues and people's relationship to animals. This 
world is not created only for human beings, points out Wija, in Hindu 
religion the respect for god is enacted by the respect for what God 
has created, and God created animals, humans, all living and natural 
beings.

Wija also made experiments with sets of dinosaur puppets, created to 
depict the scientific findings of prehistoric times, and mixes these 
with traditional stories. At the time I did my research, Wija 
performed with dinosaur puppets only outside of Bali, and was still 
getting ready to present them in Bali, because he considered them too 
radically different for the purpose of temple ceremonies. Wija also 
made sets of Ramayana characters similar to the originals, but with 
more articulated joints and very flexible movement.

His current creative project is the development of the Wayang Sinar 
Maya, or Shadows of Light and Illusion, which makes innovative use of 
reflective materials and intense light sources. His mirror puppets 
make shadows out of light. They are dancing mirrors, made of 
reflective flexible plastic, on which Wija has made complex character 
drawings.  A small bright lamp points away from the screen towards 
the dalang and the puppet reflects the light  onto the screen. The 
puppet is manipulated by bending the flexible plastic material. They 
have very tiny moving parts, since the smallest bend is amplified 
drastically on the screen. "The only reason my ancestors did not make 
mirror puppets is because they could not get a hold of these new 
materials," says Wija.

Wija's innovations point up the flexibility of this tradition and its 
ability to adapt to contemporary problems. Wija's ritual performances 
explore contemporary ecological problems, realities brought to us by 
scientific studies, and new materials brought to us by 
industrialization. The dalang learns at a young age that he/she must 
continue to develop, grow and take in new experience as long as he/
she lives. This continuous development is to be shared for the 
spiritual and social well-being of the community. The new 
developments are always rooted in tradition. Tradition always 
provides the basis for innovation. This continuous development makes 
the cultures of Bali diverse, vibrant and alive. The reason to make 
something new is to offer people a reflection of contemporary issues 
within a framework they can understand. If the performances are not 
performed well, or are not engaging and reflective of people's lives, 
people will not pay attention to the philosophy. As Wija points out, 
the duty of the dalang is to lead the audience through, articulate 
movement that feeds our eyes, expressive song that feeds our ears and 
meaningful philosophy that fills our hearts.

So the classical narratives form the framework for innovation and 
allow high level of locilazed adaptation, but these narratives even 
in Bali are changing and fluxing. By extension every place and local 
community has those kind of stories that everyone is familiar with 
and those common narratives form rich framework for structuring 
interaction, participation and localization.

To conclude, the notion of braided processes is one approach for 
structuring locilazed interaction that takes into account place, 
community and context in which the work is presented. But this 
interrelationship among space - time - place - and context are well 
developed in the contemporary theatre. Following Artaud's curiosity 
for the Balinese dance theatre he was introduced to in the Paris 
exposition in the 1930s and Bertolt Brecht's approach to art, not as 
"a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it" 
the search for a "ritualization" of society began within the 
exploration of Turner's notion of liminoid phenomena - the space for 
social transformation in contemporary society . This search provides 
performance with its elementary role of political intervention, a 
peaceful redefinition of the rules of the society, cultural dialogue, 
communal bounding and social healing exemplified in the work of 
Richard Schechner's Performance Group, Peter Schumann's Bread and 
Puppet Theatre in the USA; Augusto Boal and Vianna Filho in Brazil; 
and Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Eugenio Barba in Europe. 
Anthropologists such as Erving Goffman and Victor Tuner began to 
study the importance of representation, with its ritual and 
performative aspects, in every day life. Following the form of media 
performance a particularly strong echo is found in the socially 
expressive ritual of Wayang Kulit (shadow play) - in particular the 
Balinese form with its emphasis on place, time and context in 
performance, ritual and daily life._______________________________________________
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