Philosophical situations between music theater, media performance and live image-sound environments
Performative Media Theater brings together works in which theater, music, electronic media and performance are treated as a single live situation, These projects use actors, performers, instruments, projection, sound and media systems to create staged worlds where historical figures, philosophical ideas and cultural myths are acted out, distorted and made present.
SURREANCE
A performance for two performers and a medium
Surreance investigates the relationship between media art and mediumship, between rational systems and irrational experience. The work takes the form of a performance séance carried out by two performers in the presence of the public.
The performers use a table-based occult instrument to open a channel between material presence, image, sound and the historical energy of Surrealism. Radio modulation, projected images and performative action create a field in which communication appears unstable, partial and charged with suggestion.
At the centre of the work is an act of unveiling. Blackened group photographs of Surrealist artists are gradually scratched open by the performers. Their movements resemble the logic of a Ouija board: intentional and unconscious action overlap, producing images through a process close to automatic writing.
Surreance treats the medium not only as a technical device, but as a figure between worlds. The work stages media performance as a ritual of reception, projection and historical haunting.
Performance context: Digital Art Weeks Festival 2006, Zurich.
GESPANNTE GEFÄHRTEN
A sit-com for the stage for two actors and chamber ensemble
Gespannte Gefährten, loosely translated as Strained Relations, is a music-theater work for two actors and a small chamber ensemble of bass viol, bassoon and percussion.
The piece stages an unlikely encounter between the American writer Gertrude Stein and the Soviet politician Andrei Gromyko. Their meeting takes place in a kind of virtual television space, where historical personality, political rhetoric and theatrical absurdity are brought into collision.
The work uses the format of a stage sit-com to examine individuality, ideology and survival on the twentieth-century world stage. The audience is positioned as if seated in a television studio during a live broadcast, allowing laughter and theatrical distance to become part of the dramaturgy.
Musically, the work combines lyrical humour, rhythmic vitality and chamber-theater precision. It creates a deliberately strange social situation in which two historical figures become performers of their own public myths.
Production team: Art Clay, Maira Thorgevsky, Dan Wiener and Erratum Ensemble.
Performance spaces: Gare du Nord, Basel; Palazzo Theater, Liestal, Switzerland.
SPINOZA IST
New media theater for three actors and electronic music
Spinoza Ist is a new media theater work for three actors, live electronics and a twenty-seven-part modular cube. The piece follows the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from his formative years to his banishment from Amsterdam.
The work approaches Spinoza not as a biographical subject alone, but as a figure through whom questions of thought, censorship, independence and institutional power can be staged. His work as a lens grinder becomes a central metaphor: the sharpening of glass and the sharpening of thought are treated as related acts.
Sound, video, live performance and the transformation of the cube structure create a synaesthetic theater environment. The stations of Spinoza’s life — school, city, ruin and banishment — are constructed and deconstructed through changes in the stage object.
The piece was described by critics as a “Spinoza-Sammelsurium”: a theatrical constellation of philosophical fragments, historical conflict and media-based transformation. At the end of the work, the word CAUTE appears — Spinoza’s Latin warning to proceed with caution.
Theater group: Art Clay, Urs Jaeggi and Erratum Ensemble.
Performance spaces: Städtische Bühnen Freiburg, Germany; Pumpenhaus Münster, Germany; EWZ Zurich, Switzerland; Malzfabrik Berlin, Germany.
AUTO-BIO-GRAPHY (1993)
Artificial reality for a performer
Autobiography is an early artificial reality performance work in which the performer’s movement controls a multimedia environment of image, sound and text. Developed in relation to the art theories of Marcel Duchamp, the work explores how one artist can enter, transform and perform the vocabulary of another.
The central movement, Erratum, refers to Duchamp’s Erratum Musical. Pitch, rhythm, text fragments and visual material are reworked into a dynamic multimedia composition in which biography becomes score and performance becomes a process of interpretation.
The work is controlled by the physical movement of the performer in free space, using the Big Eye video program developed at STEIM in Amsterdam. In this sense, Autobiography connects early artificial reality, gestural performance and media theater.
Performer: Art Clay.
Presented at: STEIM, Amsterdam; Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg, Germany.