The following is an article I came across recently regarding Mabou Mines,
and their January 1996 production which utilized many of the same kinds
of technologies we are discussing. I missed it, but did anyone happen
upon it and what was your opinion of the work? If no one has, I'm
willing to contact them and get feedback from them.
Any comments?
Twyla Mitchell-Shiner
mitchell@humanitas.ucsb.edu
************
Haines, Chris.
Mabou Mines live on in cyberspace. (avant-garde theatre group)
American Theatre v13, n1 (Jan, 1996):64 (4 pages).
COPYRIGHT Theatre Communications Group 1996
There's something paradoxical about an avant-garde theatre troupe
celebrating a silver anniversary, but Mabou Mines has never shied away
from contradiction. Twenty-five years after Lee Breuer directed Ruth
Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis and the late David Warrilow in The Red Horse
Animation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he is re-interpreting
both the production and the process. Signature Mabou Mines fingerprints
are smudged all over the latest version: They are again collaborating
with theatre artists from outside the 10-member company, exploring new
technology, employing a healthy dose of nepotism and approaching the
actor/audience configuration in startling ways.
Never one to rest on his laurels, the peripatetic Breuer is pairing
the Red Horse Animation revival with the premiere of his latest play, An
Epidog (a winner of a grant from the 1995 American Express/Kennedy
Center's Fund for New American Plays). The third installation of a
trilogy that includes The Shaggy Dog Animation and The Warrior Ant, An
Epidog is the after-death account of a dog's life told through Japanese
Bunraku puppetry. Both productions are scheduled to run Jan. 31-Feb. 11
in New York City, co-produced with the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre,
a resident company at HERE in SoHo.
In typical Mahou Mines fashion, the collaboration happened
serendipitously. Breuer was rehearsing Red Horse with what he calls
"Mabou Mines: the Next Generation" - Clove Breuer (his daughter by
Maleczech), David Neumann (Mabou member Fred Neumann's son, named after
Warrilow) and Abigail Crain - when he bumped into Gertrude Stein
Repertory artistic director Cheryl Faver on the street. They had met at
the Yale Drama School, where Breuer had taught while Faver was a student.
The director invited Faver and her husband, the theatre's co-director
John Reaves, to a rehearsal. "What we discovered," says the kinetic
Faver, "was that Lee was exploring the same territory on stage that we
were exploring with computers."
Gertrude Stein Rep - part of a coterie of New York performance
groups and multimedia companies working in what some have dubbed
"Silicon Alley" - has attracted national attention for its
interpretation of the theatrical applications of computer technology.
"Lee's mind works just like a computer, linking symbols in a series of
digressions," continues Faver, "which mirrors the processes of Gertrude
Stein that we've been using theatrically."
According to Breuer, "Red Horse Animation didn't have anything to do
with technology originally. It was conceived to unfold in two planes. The
metaphor is that the Red Horse achieves consciousness in mid-air."
When the show was first performed, that metaphor was made literal by
placing the actors horizontally against the stage floor with their feet
on the vertical back wall, as if they were cradled in an open book.
Breuer then re-defined normal theatrical planes and spaces by relocating
the audience above the stage. Twenty-five years later, computer
technology allows him to redefine space without moving the audience.
"Using the computer, we can now look at the stage from any angle,"
Breuer suggests, "which is how people think - from many angles at once.
I've always wanted to invent a theatre that mirrors the way a person
thinks. Working with this technology is the greatest step forward."
For a rehearsal observer, describing exactly how that technology
will finally appear in Red Horse Animation is like translating Duchamp's
surreal painting Nude Descending a Staircase into words: There are so
many different angles from which to view the subject that it may appear
blurry, due in part to a rehearsal process where the nature of the stage
craft constantly changes. As a work-in-progress, Red Horse pioneers the
theatrical use of some computer technologies that are so new that they
evolve on a weekly basis. The upside of this, says Faver, "is that you
can throw these new tools at Lee and they get his theatre juices going."
Three of the technologies being tugged, tested and redefined as
theatre applications are video-conferencing, Java animation and the World
Wide Web. Video-conferencing, a conference call with live images
commonly used in the business world, works like a closed-circuit
television that transmits over a telephone line. As a rehearsal tool,
video- conferencing enables Breuer to kill two birds with one stone.
While directing his actors in New York, the action is transmitted live
to the theatre students he teaches at the University of California at
Santa Cruz, thanks to the support of Edward Houghton, dean of the arts
division. In addition, the work is recorded for later use as the rough
material to be molded and refined by the other technologies. For actual
performances, another form of videoconferencing designed for computers,
known by the evocative acronym CU-SeeMe, will link the actors to
audiences sitting at their home computers who are browsing the World
Wide Web.
Java is a developing computer language that Gertrude Stein Rep uses
to transform videotaped action into animation. For instance, a
videotape of the actors running horizontally against the floor is fed
into the computer, digitally broken into pieces, pared down to essential
images (the floor behind the actors' bodies is removed), colored and fed
into a repeating loop. The final product employs a movement vocabulary
that recalls Grotowski's plastiques crossed with Hanna-Barbara cartoons.
If one considers these materials as the paint applied to a stage
backdrop, then the World Wide Web represents the backdrop itself. The
Web, the popular global interactive system on the Internet, allows users
to visit various sites and flip through "pages" of images. When viewed
on a computer screen, the Red Home site, designed by scenic artist
Karen TenEyck, unfolds like a series of curtains, revealing stylized
horse images, digitalized photographs of the original cast and animated
movement (the Red Horse homepage can be accessed via
www.inch.com/^kteneyck). In actual performance, it functions as the
literal backdrop when it is projected on a scrim behind the actors on
stage, while appearing simultaneously on computer screens around the
world. The Red Horse has reached mid-air.
As an interactive technology, the Web-page backdrop functions as a
breathing set piece that changes and responds to the actors' movements,
manipulated by a technician backstage who will determine the pace of the
"virtual set changes" with the click of a mouse. Under Breuer's
direction, the image of the cursor moving across the scrim becomes a
visual pun: The actors respond to the moving pointer as if it were a fly
swooping through the air, swatting at it on its way to selecting the next
virtual backdrop.
Faver compares the experience of the on-line Web audience to the
theatrical distinction between front-of-house and backstage; as the
audience in the theatre watches from front-of-house, users on the
Internet will see the performance as if from behind the scrim. Depending
on the technology available in late January, the actors and some Web
viewers may be video-conferenced via CU-SeeMe onto the backdrop itself,
adding a new dimension to the audience-performer relationship.
Breuer believes this kind of theatre has been performed for
thousands of years. Citing the example of the Kali of the Snakes, which
he witnessed last year in southern India, Breuer said, "The Kali dancers
paint a mandala in the sand and absorb the psyche of the goddess as they
perform. That's exactly what the actors do with Red Horse, using the
computer as a mandala. It is primitive and ritualistic. The more
primitive you get, the more modern you get."
"When Lee wrote Red Horse back in the '70s, none of us realized at
the time that he wrote the first Web page," jokes Faver. "It was just
waiting to be put on the computer." According to Reaves, Breuer's work
represents the kind of journey that theatre handles best. "By presenting
a variety of perspectives at once, you're asking more of the audience.
You acknowledge that people can handle things in multiple layers. The
best theatre has always done that."