IN MEDIA RES - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

IN MEDIA RES
Why Multimedia Performance?

Eric Dyer, Brooke O’Harra, and Alex Timbers
in conversation with Steve Luber

Eric Dyer co-founded Radiohole in 1998, with Maggie Hoffman and Scott

Halvorsen Gillette. Since that time he has been a principle collaborator and
performer in Radiohole’s nine original performance works and two video
travaux, Fast Girls at the End and More or Less Hudson’s Bay, Encore (with Chris Kondek
and Victor Morales). The company is currently in the process of creating its tenth
work to premiere in New York City at The Kitchen in June 2008. Dyer has designed
sets and lighting for Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Elevator Repair Service, 3-
Legged Dog, and The Collapsable Giraffe, to name a few.

Brooke O’Harra is co-founder of The Theatre of a Two-headed Calf and a freelance
director with an interest in new and experimental texts. Recent Two-headed Calf
productions include Chikamatsu’s Drum of the Waves of Horikawa at HERE Arts
Centre, Rafael Spregelburg’s Panic at P.S. 122, Lisa D’Amour’s The Cataract at Perish-
able Theatre, G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara, Henry Fielding’s The Life and Death of Tom
Thumb the Great, and S.I. Witkiewicz’s The Mother and Tumor Brainiowicz, all at La
MaMa E.T.C.. Currently Two-headed Calf is developing a Macbeth for Soho Rep.
O’Harra directed for Ruth Margraff and is developing Maria/Stuart with playwright
Jason Grote at the Soho Rep writers and directors lab. She is the recipient of the
NEA/TCG Developing Directors Grant, a Harp Artist in Residence, and a Drama
League Directing fellow. She teaches acting at NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing.

Alex Timbers is Artistic Director of New York-based company Les Freres Corbusier.
Directing credits include Dixie’s Tupperware Party at Ars Nova, Gutenberg! The Musical!
at The Actor’s Playhouse, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant
at New York Theatre Workshop, Hell House at St. Ann’s Warehouse, underground
at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Williamstown
Theatre Festival, and Heddatron at HERE Arts Center. He also wrote and directed
Boozy, a comic fantasia on urban planning, which was named “Ten Best of 2005”
by the New York Daily News and Time Out New York. His awards and fellowships
include OBIE, two Garland Awards, Williamstown Directing Fellowship, Drama
League Directing Fellowship.

This conversation took place in New York City on March 19, 2007.

PAJ 87 (2007), pp. 15–29.  15

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

LUBER: Let’s start with the big question: why use media in your pieces?

DYER: Well it seems like a natural thing to do. I remembered this huge thing in
my life was when I was about 12 years old and I got a stereo. I had gotten this job
and saved up all of this money to buy a stereo. There was this fascination with music
and being able to play with it and in a way it kind of goes back to that.

O’HARRA: My interest in it comes basically because of the way we work collabora-
tivement. I never thought, “Oh I want to work with a live band or a composer,” until we
were approached. We were approached by this guy who developed spy technology.
Before approaching us he actually created a series of things that he thought might
be interesting and showed it to me and then I gave him a script. So it was really
just a way to work with an individual that seemed interesting to work with. Can’t
promise we’re ever going to use any of this but let’s give it a shot.

TIMBERS: It’s a great way to dispose of the exposition.

LUBER: That’s all fairly practical. So I’m sort of amazed that the term or the genre
of multimedia theatre exists anymore because it just seems so second nature at this
indiquer.

TIMBERS: Yeah when two-thirds of the new plays on Broadway have projection
designers. But theatre has always been a technical medium. Lighting is a technical
medium and it’s been used since time immemorial. So it’s a weird issue to me why
people sort of pay very peculiar and special attention to multimedia theatre, because
it’s all multimedia.

O’HARRA: Also as a director your biggest thing is focus and what you want the
people to focus on. So you have all of this other media as a different means to control
focus, and the more ways you have to control focus or manipulate focus or move
the audience attention around, why wouldn’t you take advantage of those?

LUBER: There seems to be an aversion to it because of this idea of theatre as a
“live” art form.

DYER: I think people are not really looking at how much things are already medi-
ated. They’re mistaking an actor standing there in the light as unmediated but they
don’t actually know that there’s this thing going on up there in the tech booth that
nobody knows about if you go to what is called a straight play, but it’s mediated.
At the very least an example of mediation would be by the medium of light. Ils
look a certain way because the light has been crafted to give them that certain look.
So I don’t think people are really looking at that fully, what it really means. Je pense
it’s a very reactionary stance and not a very well thought out position.

16  PAJ 87

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Les Freres Corbusier. Top: Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier, et,
More Importantly, Robert Moses (2005), The Ohio Theatre, New York City. Photo: David Evans Morris.
Courtesy Les Freres Corbusier; Bottom: Heddatron by Elizabeth Meriwether (2006), HERE Arts
Centre, New York City. Photo: Joan Marcus. Courtesy Les Freres Corbusier.

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LUBER / In Media Res  17

LUBER: This comes back to the idea of anything as multimedia: it’s a part of the
cultural literacy. People are just so used to their screens, like when you’re walking
around Times Square. To have multimedia just seems natural because this is how
people read any sort of aesthetic experience.

TIMBERS: It’s really interesting how your eye is really drawn towards any type of
video screen and you have a small video screen during a Radiohole show or playing
some type of loop that isn’t very active, and you can have an actor standing four feet
away from you but your attention is almost always on the TV. And it’s interesting
how you can manipulate scale in order to send focus. It’s always a tough balance and
a scary thing because I think your eye is always drawn to the moving image.

DYER: Your eye is drawn to light, particularly moving light. I think it’s a physi-
ological fact that you’re attracted to that light. Honestly, I’m not all that particularly
interested in video. That’s another thing: people a lot of times assume it’s about
video and about the image. For me, the thing that I’m really interested in media-
wise is sound and the potential use of sound. Not that I have no interest in video.
Lately the use of these little tiny screens is part of the fantasy about fragmentation,
but it’s also playing with that attention. To put something up that’s so small, it’s
really kind of hard to tell what your seeing on it—especially with these cheap LCD
screens where depending on where you’re sitting you can either see or not see—I
become interested in making that unclear, making it hard to focus on basically and
trying decentralize that and frustrate people’s expectation, to have that be the focus
of their attention. So often people use visual media to be that focus because it is
such a natural thing for your eyes to be drawn to. I’m interested in playing with
the antithesis of that.

O’HARRA: People are drawn toward movement or they start to watch the experi-
ence, like we put a camera at the end of a spring, so the actors wouldn’t move at
tous, but because they’re standing in front of the screen and the band is playing and
the actors look like they are bouncing around. And I think it took the audience a
long time to look at the actors and realize that they were totally still. That’s what’s
exciting: how people watch.

TIMBERS: It’s also interesting how people process video in terms of squares. Quand
you see full-field video projection you see someone open up a Coke and suddenly
a butterfly exits from it. You rarely see that sort of theatrical projection in America.
It’s almost always used in that kind of Québécois sort of theatre where it’s the cheesy
balloon and a girl who was seven and who died tragically dancing on the balloon. It’s
amazing how your mind is conditioned just to see video in squares and then when
you see something otherwise in the theatre you can’t tell what it is. Cheesy example:
I saw Tarzan. Tarzan has some amazing integration of projection and light design
where there are all these things with little fairy sprites that go up into the air and you
think there’s some sort of high tech go-go rotate thing, but the quality of the light
has to be video and it’s doing it in a completely non-patternable way. That to me
is really exciting when it’s the full on integration of the light and sound of video to
make theatre magic and you have no idea where one ends and the other begins.

18  PAJ 87

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O’HARRA: Which brings it back to the idea of what you do with illusion and
making theatre magic, because that’s been part of theatre forever.

DYER: But there’s also that element of if you can create the illusion you can also
take it apart by your illustration of the camera on the screen. At first, like you said,
it takes people a while to notice that the actors are just standing there but eventually
they’ll probably see what it is that’s doing that and that becomes part of it. As opposed
to when you seal the spectacle, like your example, you’re not ever going to show
anybody how that really works. No one is ever going to see how you do that.

TIMBERS: Even if you don’t understand the source, the conundrum of “How did
they do that?” becomes a part of the storytelling for them and what that moment
is about.

LUBER: Is there also a difference between doing what you are talking about, et
sort of revealing the mechanism or making the audience aware of it, and something
like Tarzan or the example I was thinking of, The Woman in White by Andrew Lloyd
Weber? There was no set. The backdrops were projections. They were computer-ani-
mated projections but if someone had to enter through a door they would open a
door in the background. It was just that intricate. So there’s that mechanism at least
trying to cover that up. There’s that escape, that Disney magic that makes seeing a
Disney show on Broadway different from a more experimental group.

TIMBERS: So you’re saying that the layers of metatheatricality . . . it’s not acknowl-
edging the apparatus, but clearly within the theatre it’s not representational?

LUBER: Exactly. It’s the difference between trying to hide Tarzan’s wires holding
him up and seeing your running the lights and the sound from onstage or, visibly,
offstage.

O’HARRA: It’s different if you’re just creating an environment and you’re using it as
just design as opposed to making it part of the language. Like the way in The Mother
we were using video we had on the head and in the eyes of the character so that it
was about perspective. When someone was being spoken to you were looking at their
faces on screen and getting a close up of what it’s like to be spoken to really closely
by someone. But there’s always the problem of people just watching the video and
do they think about perspective or do they just need to feel close up?

LUBER: Do you have any particular process that you use to integrate different
media into your performances, even if those media are different show to show or
piece to piece?

DYER: Well we always have the same toys every show and we start with that, et
those things are part of the process. It’s not brought in from outside or thought of as
a design concept. We don’t think of certain strategies of how we’re going to use media,
we start with that and it evolves with the process of making the entire show.

LUBER / In Media Res  19

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Radiohole. Top: Cintreuse (2002), The Performing Garage, New York City. Photo:
Courtesy Chris Kondek; Bottom: Fluke (2006), P.S. 122, New York City. Photo:
Courtesy Lisa Whiteman.

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20  PAJ 87

LUBER: So does the text sort of form along with how you use these toys?

DYER: Oui, well, it’s simultaneous. We’re using these and the text is happening,
everything is simultaneous. We don’t start with a text; we almost don’t start with
an idea or a very small idea.

O’HARRA: I think our process is more problem conscious. It’s a rehearsal process. je
think the problem of media is that we have these things and I have this person who
wants to use these things in rehearsal and then it’s, “How do you solve the problem
and make it exciting?” It’s like the problem of text and the problem of actors.

TIMBERS: A lot of young playwrights are into the idea of writing for media but
they have never experienced media or worked with it so they don’t actually know
how to do that. Donc, helping writers who don’t understand how to use it to help in
the storytelling, that’s how it works at my company. It’s interesting to sort of lead
people on that course and use the media purely for storytelling as opposed to, “We
have these cool gadgets and we want to figure out how to integrate them into a
piece or make a piece around them.” To me it’s very interesting as an idea and I
hope someday someone will be interested in that.

O’HARRA: It’s always about the vocabulary of whatever we bring in. So if we’re
bringing in video then I feel like one of our jobs is to teach the audience through
the process how to read the vocabulary. And what the story of that vocabulary is
and how it ties into the other vocabularies.

DYER: I think the process for us is not to teach the audience but to teach ourselves.
Then if we start to sort of have a sense of it we start we just kind of assume that the
audience will go with us. If we come to that understanding. It’s interesting because
I feel like personally we’re probably creating the same show over and over again, mais
it feels like every time we start anew that I don’t understand these things. I don’t
understand what it is to use these samples and this kind of thing, so it’s odd being
reduced each time back to that zero state. I’m sure I’m learning something along
the way but I don’t know that I can put my finger on it.

LUBER: So we talk about writers who are trying to write for performance and your
trying to write for performance, how about the reception? Either from audience
or critics, do you think they have this vocabulary or do you think they’re at least
willing to go along for the ride in terms of understanding it? I think that’s one of
the shortcomings of critics, and this sort of exacerbates that anxiety about media
because they don’t know what they’re writing about.

O’ HARRA: I feel like that actually gives me a lot of freedom. It’s interesting because
there are some video artists I know that have seen our work and who are much more
fussy about what we’re doing and what we’re trying to do. My concern is that it’s
hardly ever how I’m using media, but it’s how I’m making sure that media doesn’t
take over. It’s not about having it be misunderstood; it’s about having it become the
end all be all of the experience.

LUBER / In Media Res  21

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TIMBERS: I also think from a critic’s standpoint reading difficult language is just
as difficult as reading difficult media use. If it’s clear to a certain extent I think they
don’t get it as much as I don’t get the way some writers write.

DYER: So often it just stops at the generalization. I don’t know of anybody writ-
ing really well about technology in theatre from a point of view of understanding
these things, and really critiquing that specifically. Most of what you see stops at a
generalization.

TIMBERS: The only sort of in depth stuff you get is Light and Sound America
and that’s not critical, it’s just, “These are the tools they use.” It seems to me that
after the Bob Brustein days of criticism and of understanding a piece of work by
a company in terms of its back history and repertory and all that stuff, if that was
aujourd'hui, if a critic exists like this, that would also include your design aesthetic and
the evolution of that, and you would discuss the tools you use for that. But since
no one does that there is no discussion other than in academia and it seems to me
that academics aren’t very interested in the actual technology.

LUBER: Well that brings up a problem for both sides of the equation in terms of
academics and practitioners in the cycle of funding, especially in America. As an
academic it’s nearly impossible to do a book-length study of one particular group
or person these days, and there’s the same problem with media. In other countries
there’s a lot more funding for it, explicitly I should say, and here it’s a lot harder for
a smaller company because of money.

O’HARRA: That’s something I never think about with media.

DYER: Well we approached it from a very different point of view. When we started
it was about what we had. It was basically our stereo system, and to a certain degree
we still approach things that way. We’ve accumulated more stuff as we’ve gone along,
but we wrote our first grant about technology just a couple of years ago. But it
was never about funding for really expensive projectors and super high-end sound
packages and all this stuff. So we’ve never really looked at it from that money point
de vue.

TIMBERS: Money is always connected to trying to make a living and we specifically
try to channel most of our funding basically into our pockets so we can stay alive.

DYER: Not that we don’t spend money. I think that if we had it we probably could
be like kids in a candy store.

LUBER: That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you specifically. You have
a spirit about it that I really enjoy as an audience member. I mean, the Wooster
Group—as fun and amazing as they are—they don’t use robots like Heddatron and
they don’t use these spy cams like Major Barbara and they don’t have these little,
mechanical fishies or the Audio Spotlight thing like Fluke.

22  PAJ 87

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DYER: People take their technology seriously in a lot of cases. The Wooster Group
sort of set this thing up or people set it up around them where technology kind of
became the deity. The way that their work has evolved outside of them in the world
people look at it as, “Oooh.” But I don’t think they look at it that way. There’s no
playfulness, the playfulness seems to be gone.

TIMBERS: Theatrical projection design in general is so cheesy that we thought it
would be funny to see how much high concept-y for theatre surroundings we could
do and then try to pull off a sort of slick dense kind of thing. It’s amazing because
then you have these actors that are getting paid nothing, and they are horrified because
they see all of this technology and they think, “We’re not getting paid because they’re
buying all of these projectors!” It’s amazing what you can pull off for so little money
that people just go crazy over. People don’t know how much video costs.

DYER: This kind of slickness thing drives me crazy. So we had that rear projection
in Fluke, which I was kind of ambivalent about. That was, as a collaborative thing,
some things come from some people and that wasn’t so much coming from me but I
ended up really liking it. At first I hated it but then one of the things I loved about it
was that Maggie [Hoffman’s] grandfather had been in the Navy and when he crossed
the International Date Line you go through this ceremony and the sailors get a little
certificate that says they’ve crossed it. So her grandfather had this certificate that
had this really cheesy border around it with stars, fish, and crabs and stuff. Maggie
blew it up and photocopied it and made this ridiculous wooden frame that went
around it and we put these flashing lights around it, just as a way to take away this
kind of austerity, this kind of purity of image. You have this feeling that everything
is framed and this frame is kind of irregular and the lights kind of mess with the
color. It’s a way to intentionally make it less perfect. There’s something about video
in particular that has this sort of obsession with perfection. You get into people who
really know what they’re talking about and they’re talking about resolution and this
many pixels and I’m like, “I don’t know.” I guess we enjoy bringing things down
to our own terms the way we relate to them. We don’t worry about that kind of
specialized thing where you’re just really trying to perfect.

O’HARRA: I like that “the way we relate to them.” That makes sense.

TIMBERS: We did [Heddatron] with robots and the robots never really worked. Le
first performance they didn’t even make it onto the floor. We had this woman, Joan
Templeton, and she wrote this book, Ibsen’s Women, and we built the whole story
line around that. We had these robots and we tried to make them work correctly
but they would slam into walls and hit each other and sometimes they would hurt
actors. And I remember afterwards—we had no idea who Templeton was and she
had no idea that we had based this on her book—she was like, “It’s just puerile—and
the robots don’t even work!” And it’s beyond our critique of the well-made play. It’s
interesting that people want everything to be so tidy and perfect.

DYER: Those people don’t enjoy our work at all.

LUBER / In Media Res  23

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TIMBERS: Yeah it’s alive, it’s messy, it’s awkward, and it has to be. I think that’s
moving in any theatre piece. That’s one of the wonderful things about the attempts
to use really fancy technology with no ability to consistently control it.

DYER: We have a specific term for failure, the serious failure of a show, which is:
“Let’s go to the videotape.” I forget where that came from but if somebody says
that in the show it means we’re really in hot water, like basically the show is broken.
I remember once when we were doing Bender, all the lights went out and Scott
[Halvorsen Gillette] goes “Goddamnit, you unplugged the show!” which I did in
fact unplug the whole show.

LUBER: Acknowledging this love-hate relationship with failure and imperfection,
what would you like to do with media in the future?

O’HARRA: I’ve had a really hard time balancing live performers and videos or hav-
ing video be a consistent thing throughout a show and not feeling like it’s there and
then it’s gone or that the vocabulary of it is constantly changing. So I’ve sort of put
it aside until I can figure out how the vocabulary of it is more consistent.

DYER: Yeah, again for us it’s a new process I think with the video aspect of it because
now we have a couple of these things and if on some surplus site there are a couple
of cheap LCD monitors I might pick them up; that idea of fracturing a piece more
and attempting to kind of confuse the audience. I’m interested in working in two
opposite directions: on one level, I’m interested in using it as a device specifically to
confuse people; alors, on the other hand, working to unify a show and bring people
through that experience so that when they come out the other side they feel like
they’ve been through this one unified experience. We’re not looking at the narra-
tive structure of the plots so we’re kind of looking for a different way to unify that
spectacle and at the same time fragment it. So I think with image and video that’s
where I’m interested in going. There are tools out there that we started using and
things that we’ve gotten access to. So going back to the budget issue, if we couldn’t
afford them then we just wouldn’t use them. But with sound we have these Audio
Spotlights that are another interesting thing.

TIMBERS: And what are the Audio Spotlights?

DYER: They’re basically devices where you can aim sound directionally and locate
it. Again this kind of parallels this notion of some people being able to see this little
TV and others can’t, so people in our audience have these very different experiences.
With those Audio Spotlights comes the idea of kind of telling secrets or giving dif-
ferent performances to different people. I had this whole expectation with those
things that people would be like, “Wow, those were great,” but then I realized that
we used them on one level ambiantly and everyone knew that was happening but
on another level we were telling people certain things—speaking something to you
but not them over there—and nobody knew that they were hearing it through that
so they thought everybody else heard it, aussi. So you’re giving all of these little secret
performances and secret shows to people. With sound there’s something really fun-

24  PAJ 87

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damental and I think—I’m going to go out on a limb—but I think it’s connected
to our sense of being. That’s why I still think there’s something in there that’s really
fundamental and that moves us. I don’t know what the word is for it. So with sound,
that is basically what I’m interested in continuing to pursue.

TIMBERS: I’ve used video a lot for comedy purposes in terms of trying to figure
out how to meld the high brow and the low brow or the high arts and the low arts
and I’m not really interested in using video for that anymore, or representational
imagery at all. I’m still so fascinated by the problem of breaking outside of these
squares and these boxes and using video in more integrated ways. Just thinking of
the next couple of shows I’m doing, that’s the goal, exploring the full field of video
and using weird kinds of angles.

O’HARRA: You know what I think was really kind of difficult for me in a good
chemin? I saw a bunch of early John Jesurun stuff from when he was using video. Il
was using video so well 20 years ago I don’t know how to explain it but it made me
just sort of want to stop for a minute and then sort of rethink it before I go back
into it because it really blew my mind.

LUBER: Well no one seems to be rethinking video like Nam June Paik used to do,
actually challenging the form itself, something that elementary.

DYER: Another thing I should say is we were more interested in the kind of opera-
tional aspect of it. I mean, I see all sorts of technology in this room and you’re
pressing buttons and you’re orchestrating your life with all of these buttons and to
me exploring that aspect—which isn’t very overt—but that’s something that we’re
interested in, that it’s part of your everyday life. So we approach it like that. I’m
kind of glad that I haven’t had that experience of seeing someone who did something
so well that . . .

TIMBERS: That it was stifling.

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O’HARRA: It’s not that, I just wanted to rethink it and know it better. It’s inter-
esting now because we actually build all of our dance movements; like our kabuki
movement in our play right now Drum of the Waves of Horikawa is actually taken
off YouTube. Everything is directly gleaned from YouTube. So it’s all of this old
footage of The Slits and then we pull out what looks formal and what looks like
kabuki and it looks like everyone’s doing kabuki, but our source material is all from
YouTube. So we’re not making up any of our moves and we’re not inventing kabuki
and if anyone asks where it came from we can be like, “Oh, this is from this thing
on YouTube done by The Slits.” There is a use of technology in that way, which is
that people made these really cheap, crappy recordings of these concerts with these
women performers or these bands when most of the time the performers didn’t even
know they were being recorded. And what they’re doing is completely arbitrary and
natural and we’re turning it into this codified thing that people are going to imagine
is this historically codified thing.

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LUBER / In Media Res  25

DYER: So much of our material has a similar history, poking around the basement
listening to old records, and that lineage isn’t apparent when you get out to the
surface. The surface of the piece is the performance you come to, that’s the surface
but it’s incredibly layered. I think for us as artists this is what makes it so exciting,
because if you could go right to the surface it would be kind of boring.

TIMBERS: That’s actually another way that my company always uses media. Not
that you’re saying you’re going to provide the context for the audience to understand
but our shows deal a lot with academia and esoteric historical subject matter and I
never liked the idea of director’s notes. But it became interesting to me that if you’re
really going to understand the show it’s going to have different levels of accessibility
for different people’s analyses. Then there’s some basic knowledge you have to have to
be able to appreciate the basics and concepts of the show. So we started this idea of
pre-show videos that sort of took the piss out of it but that helped you understand
the context, and maybe you watched it and maybe you didn’t but you at least had
the opportunity to get up to speed. I found myself often going to shows that are
particularly mash-up shows and needing to prime myself beforehand a little bit and
I find I enjoy it more. If you’re not somehow in the marketing saying, “We need to
know these things,” that’s something where media can help expose that knowledge
in a really fun and easy way and in a more visceral way than something in your
program that you’ll never read.

DYER: Yeah, we’re never really interested in explaining that sort of thing to people.
We’re interested in giving multiple access points. So for example in Fluke you don’t
have to know anything about Moby-Dick, and it’s probably better if you don’t know
too much about it. But we do give people multiple access points so that they can
relate to what ‘s happening on multiple levels so they won’t have to be completely
informed.

O’HARRA: It’s a complicated thing. A sort of argument we’ve been having is whether
to tell people that the movement isn’t kabuki and that we’re bringing in punk rock
footage. Do we advertise the show as kabuki when it was only a kabuki text and then
we changed a lot? We advertised Major Barbara as kabuki even though it’s definitely
not on most levels; it just validated it in terms of marketing. Anything you give—I
mean that’s sort of different from explaining it—but it’s really complicated the way
you talk about your work and the way you use all of these layers. When one layer
happens to stand out how does it affect the way the masses read it and the way it’s
talked about?

TIMBERS: We’re very interested—I mean it’s very opposite—but we’re very inter-
ested in didacticism and we’re interested in treating it mostly as education first and
entertainment second. So I think if you don’t have any context it’s a real . . . hope-
fully it’s enjoyable to six-year-olds but it’s a total failure for us.

LUBER: Do you have anyone, Par exemple, see Hell House seriously?

26  PAJ 87

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Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. Top: The Mother by S. je. Witkiewicz (2003), La MaMa,
New York City; Bottom: The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great adapted from
Henry Fielding (2004), La MaMa, New York City. Photos: Courtesy Theatre of a
Two-Headed Calf.

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LUBER / In Media Res  27

TIMBERS: Yeah, like the final performance we had, for example, a group went
through and a third of them were Latino men in their fifties who thought it was
réel, loved it and were weeping at the end, and then a third of them were this drunk
bachelorette party who were screaming with laughter, and a third were girls from
Williamsburg in big boots just making snide comments and their experiences of it
were completely—they all enjoyed it—but their experiences of the production were
just completely different. So for that we actually did provide dramaturgy outside that
explained what the production is: this is the frame around it, don’t burn down the
theatre. But we were still protested by gay rights groups, we were still protested by
evangelicals—evangelicals that still went through the whole thing and were weep-
ing and loved it. There is an argument that it doesn’t matter if they actually believe
that it was, if they knew it was a put on, but I think these people read all of this
stuff and they still did believe that we were evangelicals . . . in DUMBO, which is
really strange.

DYER: For us it becomes another layer, that dramaturgical aspect. If you were to
come in and be confronted with an instructional video on how to deal with this
Radiohole show it would already be messing with your mind. It would be misinfor-
mation mixed in, because some of it’s true and some of it’s not true. Like in Fluke
I think there was a lot of, “What’s about Moby Dick, where does Moby Dick fit
dans?” and there’s a lot of little places but there’s a lot that has nothing to do with it
aussi. That’s part of the game; part of what I think makes it enjoyable too.

O’HARRA: But it’s interesting the way media is being used. It can be so
manipulative.

DYER: To my mind that’s the same thing as the Tarzan example: we try to create
this seamless illusion of spectacle, to unify this spectacle. We’re surrounded by the
illusion of a unified world, which is fed to us all the time. And on some level I think
we do this for ourselves. We have to unify and make sense of the world around us.
We tell ourselves our own story about what the world is and we find our ways of
making sense of it and joining it together. But there’s something so sinister about
it, especially in a city like New York, a city that produces a spectacle. I think that’s
part of my compulsion towards this idea of fragmenting, to not be part of that.

O’HARRA: So it’s like everything that we see on video is manipulated and you
choose what you want, put it together and you edit it. So by fragmenting it you’re
just taking away the deceits.

TIMBERS: But even if you know, “Okay, well this has just all been edited together,»
there’s a wearing down by attrition. So much of it is fed to you that eventually you
start to just take it as the way things are even if you are aware of it and self-conscious
about it. It’s almost impossible to parse that out of you.

LUBER: That’s why I like the use of media in performance, that it really takes it
out of this typified economy of supply and demand in terms of media and in terms
of the regularity of it. It takes it out of context, ironically enough.

28  PAJ 87

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DYER: Bien, it puts it back into a form of free play where it hasn’t all been prede-
termined. All of these things have this use value. One of the most fun things we
were doing was we had a TV in Bend Your Mind Off. We had a two-thousand-dollar
video camera and I’d fall on the floor with it and we’d purposely make it look like
it hit the floor and we had a television that would make it look violent. That was
kind of a little too obvious but it’s just using these things in the wrong way.

TIMBERS: It’s funny in a show like yours or any show where you have those cords
out and people are spending the whole time obviously tracking the cords and then
you trip the camera and break it up. People don’t worry about that in plays as much
but when you have all of this media, people are putting price tags on all the elements
of your production: “I hope they don’t break the TV!»

LUBER: Well I just remember one of my biggest reactions was during Radiohole is
Still My Name, the scene where you’re just gorging yourselves with Budweiser and
canned green beans . . .

DYER: Green bean juice and chicken grease.

LUBER: Chicken grease all over the floor and I thought, “They’re going to electrocute
themselves and break everything and it’s all going to come crashing down!” There’s
this beautiful moment about excess and binging and I’m worried that everything
is just going to die.

DYER: It might. I remember in Norway we were doing that show and it was kind
of boring, we just didn’t have the energy and they weren’t responding to it. Et
it came to that moment and we get down there and the footlight that we used
exploded. It just exploded and glass went everywhere. All of a sudden the show was
completely energized and people started to freak out about it and now we’ve got
chicken and beans and juice and broken glass in our food. But it was this moment
of things going haywire and it woke everybody up.

LUBER: So we have our answer. The future of multimedia performance: Blow stuff
en haut.

STEVE LUBER is the production manager for PAJ and a doctoral candidate
in theatre at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is also
co-author of ObsceneJester.net: The Performance Art Blog.

LUBER / In Media Res  29

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