Video for the performance “Woyzeck’s Introspection”. Bardaro Francesca and Marcelo Masman.
Listen to the sound throughout the video. This video also uses body as canvas for performance. The speeding up and slowing down of movement, especially the isolation of different body parts creates a disjointed world of the play. The light violin, the scratching, the breathing, the mumbled overlap of different speakers, as well as the slit of a knife all create a cohesive feeling of terror that almost makes this video hard to watch.
Check out Joan Jonas and her video/performance art work. Specifically, “Left Side Right Side” is an interesting exploration of images, body, mirror, and monitor.
Gary Hill’s Media/Video art installations are part of MoMA’s video art collection.
Hill’s video installation “Inasmuch As It Is Already Taking Place” is particularly relevant to our exploration of The Blind:
“Components of the body displayed on sixteen monitors in this video installation are without any apparent distinction. They belong, however, to the artist. The arrangement of images on the monitors, which are of various sizes and stripped of their casings, does not follow the organization of the human body. Representations of Hill’s ear and foot lie side by side; tucked modestly behind them is an image of his groin. Within this unassuming configuration, each raster invites meditation. For example, on one screen a thumb plays with the corner of a book page. By concentrating the viewer’s attention on such a rudimentary activity, Hill causes the movement to take on the significance of a much larger event. The ceaselessness of the activity is an illusion in that each component exists only as a seamless loop lasting five to thirty seconds.
Long, nervelike black wires attached to each monitor are bundled together like spinal cords. They snake along a shelf and disappear from view at the back of a recess. This electrical network emphasizes the presentation of body parts as extremities without a unifying torso. The hidden core to which the components of the body are attached serves as a metaphor for a human being’s invisible, existential center: the soul. Reinforcing the living quality of the installation is its textured composition of ambient sound.”
“Inasmuch as it is already taking place” is not online, but some of Hill’s other work, just as relevant, can be found on youtube.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER @ the ROUNDABOUT THEATRE(originated in London, extended run on Broadway)
This production dances the line between film and theatre, using the cinematic medium to break laws of physics onstage and blowing theatrical expectations to pieces. Characters in life and onstage speak with static characters on the screen. The screen not only presents a physical barrier between the exciting, explicit affairs depicted on scene, but characters move freely from the world of the living stage to the black and white screen.
The New York Times knows what’s up:
“…the laws of gravity are destined to be suspended. And two seemingly sensible, earthbound people will be, quite literally, swept off their feet and into the stars.
Ms. Rice’s production ingeniously uses distancing devices to bring us paradoxically closer to the intensity at its center. The show begins with Alec and Laura in the audience, watching a film and erupting into a quarrel that sends Laura onto the stage, where she steps, through a louvered screen, into the movie. (She then appears on film in her own prosaic living room, where her husband waits for her.) An invitation has been issued, the same that every movie makes, to walk into an alternative universe.
This production excavates that universe even as it recreates it.
And finally, this quote from the play seems apropos: “The stars can change in their courses, the universe go up in flames and the world crash around us, but we’ll always love going to the pictures and getting lost in the dark.”
…I have to see this play.
Nicole explained this as “a play that was originally a film that incorporates a film of the play” - and obviously, the original film was based on a play.
Say whaaaaaa!??!?!?!
3 Practical exercises exploring the Forkbeard approach.
Increasingly, the technology has become the show, rather than in service of the show.
