RE: [-empyre-] poetics...

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

again thanks Aleksandra, this is all highly relevant. I'm glad you mention Svoboda and of course the history of pre-cinema and media performance is amply documented. I'm just wondering how far your lineage is focussing on the notion of screen projections as opposed to other kinds of staged activities where humans act as mediator/ medium, e.g. involving physical rather than projected objects/ bodies, e.g. automats. I find Svoboda particularly interesting when you go beyond his "mixed realities" (sorry, another term a la mode) of screened and staged action as per the Laterna Magika, to the complex (baroque?) stage machinery of his later work like the Convent Garden Ring Cycle. 
 
best
sjn
 

________________________________

From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Aleksandra Dulic
Sent: Mon 09/01/2006 00:55
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] poetics...



.... oh yes, dear Sally, the Balinese shadow play is only one strand 
of the complex media performance genealogy  braid. It is currently 
the most fascinating for me because i had the opportunity to be 
immersed with this living tradition.

The European Shadow Theatre and Magic Lantern shows are definitely a 
form of media performance and are considered to be precursors to cinema.

The early films, before the introduction of recorded soundtrack, were 
highly performative. Silent film never really existed, as Michel 
Chion (1994) points out in his book, Audio Vision Sound on Screen. 
Cinematic presentation was accompanied by a number of performers 
making music, sound effects and reciting dialogues.

Early on with developments in cinema, various kinds of theatrical 
performances began to incorporate moving image into their spectacle-
mixing moving-image projections with performance and live music. 
Lanterna Magica, first presented in the Czechoslovak pavilion in 
1958, for the World Expo in Brussels, combined dance, theatre, film 
image and sound. Stage-designer Josef Svoboda and theatre director 
Alfred Radok created this "polyphonic" work-a synthesis of the live 
action of theatre and virtual world of film. In this work the 
impression was that the film image came to life through the fluid 
transition between the stage and the film projection. The actors 
would disappear from the projection to reapear on the stage, creating 
the unity of the real and the virtual.  The automatic image of film 
interacts with the action on the stage to give a sense that the 
virtual projection responds to the events that are performed on the 
stage. Some hundreds of years later, magic lantern performance, now 
extended by the film image, still enchants the audience, this time 
with the illusion that the film image can come to life, can respond 
to real life events.

Thanks for your comments and further references Aleksandra

On 8-Jan-06, at 3:37 PM, Sally Jane Norman wrote:

> 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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>
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