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._______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre