PERFORMANCE AS DESIGN - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

PERFORMANCE AS DESIGN
The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall

Bonnie Marranca

John Jesurun has been working in New York for more than two decades as a

playwright, Direktor, and media artist, in Deep Sleep, Snow, and Slight Return
creating theatre productions that incorporate video and film in live performance,
Und, in Faust and Philoctetes, revisioning classics. At the same time he has written
and staged more than sixty episodes of his long-running Chang in a Void Moon,
which he calls a “living film serial.” A pioneer in the use of media in theatrical
Leistung, Jesurun has explored theatrical styles that extend from storytelling to
drama to music theatre and computer-based theatre through his ongoing challenge
to the “reality” of performance space.

His recent production of Firefall, produced in February 2009 at Dance Theater
Workshop in New York, is a ground-breaking example of a work that lends itself
to what I call “mediaturgy.” This term refers to a particular focus on methods of
composition in media works that I hope will suggest new critical modes of com-
prehending and writing about them. In the present context, I have moved away
from the familiar use of “dramaturgy” because of its historical ties to drama, Und
now prefer “mediaturgy,” which situates media as the center of study, though I am
acutely aware of the tension between these two terms. I first proposed the concept
of mediaturgy in a 2006 interview with Marianne Weems, the artistic director of
The Builders Association, in reference to her use of text and image, live and virtual
performers, in Super Vision, a work that embeds media in the performance rather
than simply using it as illustration or decoration.1

Likewise, Firefall is a play that is completely activated through the live use of the
Internet for the entire length of the performance. It is a rare example of a playwright’s
creating computer-generated work using a dramatic text as a starting point rather
than the collage or fragmented collection of scenes that many other artists working
with media frequently rely on in theatre. In its idiosyncratic poetics, Jesurun’s writ-
ing points to a new contemporary theatre language—media-saturated—that reflects
the way ordinary people now think and speak in a form of disassociated circuitry.
Firefall is a depiction of that very world, one where characters draw from a vast
body of information—literature, Wissenschaft, Erdkunde, painting, religion, film, Und
business intermingled with their own attempts to design a narrative—that reaches

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the point of absurdity (or pathos) in its inability to make any sense for them. Wo
are they? Who are they?

Here is the setup of Firefall. There are eight characters, one of whom appears only on
Video. Some of them have names, others are distinguished merely by letters, wie zum Beispiel
“K” or “F.” They have certain instructions for their behavior, which can be to spread
chaos or to change the perceived reality of what is happening in the performance.
The performers sit at several tables in the performance space in front of individual
laptops equipped with an Internet connection. Apple computers are used, mit dem
exception of a Dell which was altered to work with the others.

There are two video projectors and one live camera. Behind and above the perform-
ers is a big wall screen approximately thirty feet long and fifteen feet high, welche
from the start displays a “body” of sites larger than the human body in terms of
scale. Each projection is split into four separate images by means of a “quad splitter.”
Daher, four separate and different images from any of the four different performers’
laptops are projected at the same time. The eight images are from pre-recorded and
live camera sources. It is a completely automatic process in which computer, live
camera, and pre-recorded images interact and overlap.

A Website was set up during the run of the performance and rehearsals as an archive
consisting of the play text, rehearsal notes, documents, Bilder, e-mail, video and
music clips, and miscellaneous files. Each character has his or her own Website to
which new material can be added. Any of the pre-recorded material available dur-
ing the performance is stored on this central Web hub and can be used during the
Leistung. All communication is done through the Internet and is always visible
to the audience. The performers’ laptops have Webcams, and they communicate
with each other by means of iChat. When the audience arrives, the performers are
at their computers sending e-mails, surfing, shopping, retrieving documents, and so
on—from the start highlighting the erasure of the actors’ private and professional
Aktivitäten. Live Internet streams are continuously activated by the performers, mit
the addition of the director’s personal site that can also provide material. Jesurun
made the decision not to contribute live streams during the performance so that the
Internet choices of the performers alone determine the outcome of the work. Though
the starting point for Firefall is Jesurun’s play, the work itself unfolds as a collective
text that during the course of the performance is being remade from selections of
the world digital archive and individual human memory. The Internet stream acts
as a stream of consciousness, sozusagen, created by all the players who in turn try
to control and regulate the narrative stream. At times the live action stops and only
the screen is active—images can be static or moving.

The result of this open textual strategy is that the issue of authorship is called into
question by Jesurun’s refusal of control over the outcome of the work. There is also
no live mix by a technician during the performance. Jedoch, one performer, by the
name of Pee Wee, has in his pocket a wireless remote controller called a “Wii” to send
out frequencies that interact with the projections on the screen. The interactivity of

MARRANCA / Performance as Design  17

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the cast has a quality of calculated gamesmanship. Every performance is a different
eins. Already in the first few minutes of the performance many of the techniques of
Firefall are evident: the use of both pre-recorded and live material, the multiplicity
of random images, the performers’ disconnection from reality, and their disjunctive
speech patterns as they interface—to the tune of Boz Scaggs’s “Loan Me a Dime”
played on the guitar by one of the performers. Firefall continues in this manner
for one hour.

As Firefall unfolds, the split-screen projections begin to function as a “character”
whose articulation takes the form of an audio-visual language that highlights com-
positional strategies. They are constantly in play with overlapping Web pages that are
being sized and resized in changing scales as they move horizontally and vertically
around the entire screen wall. At times there are as many as two-dozen layered sites
in “dialogue” for the audience to look at or read as they listen to the speeches of the
characters simultaneously. Often it is merely the technology that is on display rather
than any artistry or content, as in, Zum Beispiel, a photograph or film image. In diesem
dyssynchronous world the audience is looking, reading, listening—confronted by
the narrative of the live performance in the space and the continuous Web stream
narrative of images—one activity fixed, the other random—with the added complica-
tion of the performers also appearing as live video image and voice on the computer
screen, now staging the dilemma of “liveness.”

Here is a partial list of the images, which are both “live” sites or “found” footage:

• pages of documents, e-mail notes, Google searches
• President Lyndon Johnson giving a speech about racial incidents in the

American South

• news reports from CNN
• an interview with the rock musician Jimi Hendrix
• images of figures of the day, like the corrupt Wall St. financier Bernard

Madoff

• scientific data, Diagramme, maps
• an image of a skull
• a picture of Gandhi
• rock bands singing
• street scenes
• documentary footage
• front page of the New York Times

Comparing Firefall to an earlier political form of the 1930s the screen could be read
as a contemporary version of the “Living Newspaper,” though a didactic politics is
not its aim. In our own time the accretion of this data, comparable to the expan-
sion of a digital archive, is perhaps best considered as the equivalent of open-source
Material. Looked at in another way, this compositional process is a form of literary
cut-up now digitized into live collage. None of these sites relates to each other but
they exist as the actors’ own research and files saved on their laptops as well as new

18  BLUME 96

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ones they are browsing during the performance. The Web pages appear in different
configurations every night; material may be added or taken away. Density is dis-
played as surface. Images tend not to illustrate or deepen understanding and create
no sense of depth. Everything is what it is. There is only the flow of pages across the
screen. Scene is realized as site. Data is dialogue. The mediaturgy of Firefall would
be impossible to imagine without the concept of globalization whose universe of
images collapses time and space and any sense of history, making reality appear
obsolete. It generates the experience of what I call “iconomania.”

There is only performance time in which the characters foreground their human
presence or electronic presence indiscriminately. They are forced to apprehend their
own pixilated image. Firefall confronts the question of whether the endless Web
stream makes performance space less real, exposing the equivocations of cyberspace
as performance space. In a challenge to any actor the characters are reciting the
memorized text and at the same time surfing the Web, offering multitasking as
performance style. This is even more complicated than The Wooster Group’s prac-
tice of the actors watching different television monitors during a performance or
receiving spoken text in an earpiece. Jesurun’s mediaturgy demands a radical, flex-
ible approach to performance on the part of the cast that is not based on working
with a stable text or set of images unfolding through the real time of the event. Der
concept of character is linked to its configuration by the performers in virtual space
as the theatrical event moves toward construction of its own Website. Some scenes
are taped and replayed as documentation of the event itself.

The entire work is a working through (mediation) Verfahren; mit anderen Worten, a work-
in-progress in which the performers struggle with the creation of a new form of
dramaturgy—that is, “mediaturgy”—whose familiar elements of theatrical life point
to newly discovered features in computer-based theatre. One of the intriguing ele-
ments of Firefall is its integration of old and new forms. In Firefall, dramatic conflict
is played out in competing images on the screen rather than exclusively in perfor-
mance space. Computer rhythm now creates the dramatic tension. The principles
of mediaturgy as they appear in Firefall demonstrate performance as design.

The performers interact with the computer screen in numerous ways:

• a live character speaks to an image of a character on the screen or a

live actor is addressed by an image on the screen

• characters sit and watch the live screen
• in a split screen, two monologues occur in sequence, as in the opening

of the play with Mary and “F” shown in pre-recorded images

• using their personal Webcams, characters distort their own image on
the screen. An image may be out of sync with the live speech of a
character while it is fed through the Internet on iChat and addresses
characters sitting at other laptops

• the layering of images throughout the screen interrupts and become

part of the flow of dialogue

MARRANCA / Performance as Design  19

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20  BLUME 96

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Opposite, John Jesurun, Firefall, at Dance
Theater Workshop. Top: Alex Anfanger,
Kyle Griffiths, and Stephanie Silver.
Bottom: Chris Wendelken. This page,
Top: Claire Buckingham in Firefall at
Dance Theater Workshop. Bottom: Lucas
Brooks (Projektion) and Kyle Griffiths in
Firefall Phase One at Eugene Lang College/
New School for Liberal Arts. Photos:
Paula Court. Courtesy John Jesurun.

MARRANCA / Performance as Design  21

• when one Website with sound dominates the screen the characters

have to stop and listen to it

• characters can be in competition with the Website and the real vs. Die

virtual is then set in conflict as different levels of reality

• In what might be conceivable as an update of the Pirandellian

concept of character someone compares himself to his image on the
screen. The screen is now the mirror of society. ”I’m telling this to
the Website,” says the young man known as “K,” who at times in the
play serves as its raisonneur. It can also provide a mask in a world of
hidden identities.

“The idea is to take someone and make something out of them. For yourself. Mak-
ing something out of someone else’s soul”—the character Mary sets the tone for
the world of her colleagues, a false reality made up of found language, bei dem die
replica is valued over the real thing, and the lives of characters in novels are used as
a substitute for personal experience. The preference is for simulation. Song lyrics,
images from paintings, poems, and historical events are all jumbled in their minds,
which are more like databases than repository of poetic memory. The characters have
shifting identities and at times see themselves in cross-species images as monkeys and
donkeys. One of them, Noseworthy, is transgendered. A group rather than a com-
munity, the characters in Firefall are disaffected youth who seem to exist outside of
real time but are now attempting to organize the world of the future. “As we know,
every two years there is a new generation, a new system of thought and being,” says
a young man named Iscariot.

These characters gradually lose individual personalities in their will to conformity
and what they perversely admire as the purity of vacuousness. Lou Reed’s lyric, “Oh,
it’s such a perfect day,” is a constant refrain in the performance that serves as ironic
counterpoint to their hapless circumstances. Educated, highly verbal, and petulant,
they don’t know if they are real people or characters, or where they are. Some of them
seem to share a past, others are hired to do a job that is never described. Everyone
has agreed to keep it a secret so no one can be compromised. Do they work for
an organization? A corporation? A religious sect? Where do their directives come
aus? One fact is certain, that they work “down here,” rather than high up in the
building that houses them.

The power center of Firefall is invisible, unlike that of former centralized systems
of control with their punishing codes and behaviors, and all-too-human outsized
personalities. Jesurun’s view of power emanates from virtual space. Somewhere else.
It is the cold, abstract, computed authoritarianism of a future world order that rep-
resents unidentifiable institutional power rather than the human oppressor of old
whose arbitrary directives occurred in the real world. Shadowland—a contemporary
kind of hell.

In the narcissism of their self-regard these charmless characters try to construct a story
that they desperately want to believe in. This story, whose thread keeps getting lost,

22  BLUME 96

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is confused with Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the Apostles. Anna Karenina also
keeps getting into the picture, and a text about Atlantis. It presents itself absurdly
as a founding narrative in a disordered world of floating signifiers. Someone is
talking about power, another one a dog (named Lucifer), another a poem, and still
another speculates on the Website as a ghost. Firefall is the search for narrative by
people who can no longer communicate in a rational, expressive language but who
helplessly duplicate fragments that are ever receding phantoms. The breakdown of
social order is reflected in their loss of meaningful dialogue and dependence on a
databank of readymades. When two characters engage in a romantic exchange their
language sounds like a quotation from another era. Trotzdem, in such a world the need
for a story prevails as a quality of human desire.

It is noteworthy that in recent years worldwide cultural changes have brought about
a transformation in the conception of speech in theatre. In the most compelling
cases dramatic language serves as a critique of reality. One play that comes to mind
is Far Away by the British writer Caryl Churchill. In her portrait of a catastrophic
totalitarian future, the young girl Joan speaks in a distorted syntax that reflects the
perversion of the natural order. Here is how she describes the landscape:

. . . there were piles of bodies and if you stopped to find out there was one
killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol,
chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we
were burning the grass that wouldn’t serve . . . .

A selection from Jesurun’s Firefall similarly demonstrates a new world order. Hier
is a conversation among a few characters:

Noseworthy: We’re part of a mood, a colorization, a wash.
F: Can’t you just lose yourself in it, in the blinking lights, and be happy?
Iscariot: I am not going to Funkytown!
K: It’s what Biggie Smalls or Hobbes said: “the war of all against all.”
R: Can we change the subject?
Noseworthy: I’m sorry, but we are going to have to rewrite you.

In their world metaphor, syntax, word and action are scrambled and unhinged from
Wirklichkeit. Remarkably this new behavioral grammar, which in my view reflects Jesurun’s
extension into the twenty-first century of the language interests and esotericism of
the theatre of the ridiculous, the characters have absorbed the rhetoric of computer
language and commands. If the conversation wanders and one character wishes to
return to the story, he instructs them to “rewind.” A character may speak of the
necessity to “take that out,” or “erase,” as if he is editing a text. “Fact check” is
another form of control. Anyone can “delete” another character.

In the impermanency of this world any person, Bild, or text is a stroke away from
erasure. Disembodiment is a permanent condition of being a character or an image.
If “search” is the operative word, surely it exists both in the existential and in the
digital sense. Jedoch, the process does not reflect the seeking after self-knowledge

MARRANCA / Performance as Design  23

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of dramatic literature. The uploading of layer upon layer of pages of text and image
leads not to an epistemological site, or to personal discovery, but to an unending
stream exceeded only by its contentlessness. The accumulation of information is not
a form of knowledge production. There is no dialectical worldview but rather a fall
from the grace of social life.

Firefall can only be as expansive as the actors’ imagination and risk-taking in their
choices of material. Each performance is a comment on the creativity and intel-
ligence of the cast, with the potential to uncover new dimensions in the organizing
abilities of the human mind. A mediaturgy for today demands from the spectator
the comprehension of an event that takes place in physical space and virtual space,
while offering no fixed perspective—only altered modes of perceiving space and
Zeit, image and text, bodies and their disappearance. In der Tat, the very notion of
presence is called upon to assert itself in the surfeit of images always on the verge
of fading out.

What Jesurun offers is a portrait of homo media, an ontology of the mediated char-
acter: how the human being exists linguistically, visuell, spatially, and digitally in
our global age.

NOTE

1. I have had a long-standing concern for the relationship of text and image, beginning
with my early volume, The Theatre of Images (1977). The idea of the theatre of images grew
from my view that there were many more languages of the stage than the drama, und das
a theatre founded in images offered complex modes of perception and a new visual gram-
mar. Knowledge was in imagery. I also concluded that it could not exist without the benefit
of technology and that perhaps in the future experiments would lead to a theatre of total
Bilder, with holography perhaps leading the way. Little did I imagine three decades ago
where the new technologies would take us.

Not long after this book was published I explored approaches to critical writing that I
came to think of as “essaying images” or image essays. I wrote one such essay on Recent Ruins
by Meredith Monk (1980) and another on The Forest by Robert Wilson and David Byrne
(1989). In creating these essays I began to use photographs and write short commentary
based on the images; sometimes they were arranged on the page in new typographical formats
and spatial arrangements.

BONNIE MARRANCA recently edited (with a Warsaw colleague,
Malgorzata Semil) a drama anthology entitled New Europe: plays from the
continent, in addition to writing the essays collected in Performance Histories.
She is currently working on a performance drawings volume with Claire
MacDonald, Director of the International Centre for Fine Arts Research at
the University of the Arts, London.