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Alice Croft, or: Transforming

Performance in Internet Culture

Peter M Boenisch

(I)

When, some years ago, a new computer game hit the streets, numerous hi-tech-augurs declared the death of cinema. Similarly, several decades ago, with the advent of film, the end of theatre and live performance had also been proclaimed. Today, Lara Croft, heroine of ‘the game that killed the cinema’, has found her way to the movie screen – and live theatre is likewise still alive in the mediatized internet society of the twenty-first century. All of these negative, pessimistic predictions were based on a conventional, linear view of the world which can only understand one thing coming discretely after the other, cause strictly followed by effect. This traditional perspective looks for sharp, clear-cut breaks, but ignores ongoing smooth and far less obvious transformations. In his groundbreaking study on the impact of media technology on culture, Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan gives a prognosis which is diametrically opposed to such a view: according to him, in order to adapt and reprogramme the cognitive capacity of a society on the verge of a new cultural formation – e.g. from traditional print culture, which he famously termed the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, to our present culture of electronic media – traditional strategies of both aesthetic and common signification will always be gradually transformed rather than abandoned and replaced from one moment to another (comp. McLuhan, 1962). Following his argument, it is no surprise that earlier art forms like theatre and cinema are still around in today’s media-technological environment of ‘electrONic culture’ (1). Far from being outdated relics of a past culture, these art forms, too, have undergone significant changes: the internet will never kill either the theatre or the movie star – but electrONic culture has been updating these traditional media for some time now, and put them into its own service.

This essay examines how computer technology has reshaped and redefined traditional aesthetic strategies of signification in theatrical performance, introducing ‘virtual’ spaces and realities to the stage. A recent production by the LIDA Project (www.lida.org), an experimental theatre collective based in Denver, Colorado, will be used as an illuminating example – even if (or rather: because) their piece uses none of the so-called ‘new media’ on stage. Building on that case study, I will then draw some tentative conclusions on the potential force and impact of live performance in our electrONic society: Following conceptual suggestions mainly from Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva, I will describe contemporary electrONic performance as operating in a liminal space, as an interface between us and both a fictional semiotic cyberspace and a symbolic reality.

(II)

During the ‘hot’ period of the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s, both superpowers conducted experiments with mind-control devices. While the CIA became notorious for its ‘MK-ultra’-programme, the Soviets constructed a similarly infamous device they called LIDA (pronounced ‘Lee-Da’) which stimulated and influenced the electromagnetic currents of the human brain through low frequency radio waves – a terrifying device for ‘remote control’. The Denver-based multi-media art collective which has borrowed that name – The LIDA Project – has dedicated its recent work to the challenge of conventional strategies of theatrical presentation and the investigation of a more positive, artistic kind of creative ‘mind control’ through performance. In late 2000, LIDA launched their (2):: Good-Evil (3)::: Experiments (www.good-evil.org) to scrutinize the potential of intersections between live art and digital technology. At the heart of this series of productions lies the confrontation, as it is put on the experiments’ homepage, ‘between man and machine, digital and organic, good and evil’. The first completed module of the Good-Evil-project was Alice, a production shown in LIDA’s own warehouse theatre-space in uptown Denver during May and June of 2001. The performance – conceived mainly by the group’s artistic director Brian Freeland and playwright Tami Canaday – blends the internet and the theatre on both its thematic, and on its production level.

The ten-person, 75-minute-long piece is centred around Alice – a figure at the crossroads between the real and the virtual: she brings together both the real Alice Liddell, with her infamous relationship as a sort of child muse to the Anglican reverend Charles Dodgson (better known as the writer Lewis Carroll), and the fictional, virtual Alice as she appears in Carroll’s popular novels Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass. The piece’s narrative is loosely structured around the lives of and the relationship between Dodgson and Liddell. At the same time, it superimposes today’s internet society onto the ‘real’ Victorian background of the two protagonist’s story. At one point in the performance, for example, Alice is operating a computer mouse as she enters Wonderland through the looking glass. Later, she will supply the Dodgson character with a technical device on which he starts to compose. Once he uses this ‘notebook’, however, his poetry begins to lose its potency and he is drawn into a creative crisis. Next to these two main characters, other famous figures from the Wonderland stories enter the stage: the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and – in the role of a narrator of sorts – the Caterpillar. The piece, however, is anything but a dramatization of the novels’ plots, spiced up by references to contemporary virtual worlds. There is no conventional, plot-based dramatic dialogue; the intertextual script text combines paragraphs from the novels with lines drawn from numerous other sources (from contemporary philosophy to internet banner ads) in a highly associative way (2). With that textual polylogue alone, the performance creates the atmosphere of an internet chat room: Alice and Dodgson try to establish communication between themselves, but at the same time, other voices and characters intervene. Some of them comment and extend the dialogue of the central characters, others appear merely as ‘white noise’ in the background, even as unwanted, disrupting interference. Corresponding to these ‘vocal tableaux’, as a newspaper review has described them (Yakhlef, 2001: n.pag), there are equally associative visual tableaux, created, above all, by a distinctive lighting design. On the aural level, electronic techno music is played. All this suggests an atmosphere of a ‘cerebral space of the stage’ (Yakhlef, 2001: n.pag; comp. also Lillie, 2001). However, the production was formally staged in an almost traditional manner; it did not bring any computers on stage, and made no use of the internet in the performance either.

Alice is thus thematically based on an exploration of similarities between Alice’s Wonderland and today’s ‘Wonderland’ of cyberspace. The escapism manifest in her journeys functions, on that level, as the ground for comparison between Carroll’s Victorian society and today’s digital culture. The Victorian world, where nearly everything took place behind closed doors, would echo current mechanisms of repression particularly well, especially in the US – an aspect of the production which was reinforced only months after the performance of the piece, in the wake of 11 September (3). Carroll’s Wonderland stages a virtual counterworld, the remedy for these every-day repressions, a utopian and free place, where identities become fluid, where numerous fantastic characters come alive – and a place where controversial, suppressed sexual fantasies might be realized, or at least meditated upon in symbolic form. At the same time, however, this surreal Wonderland is based – exactly like the Web’s virtual realities – on a number of strict rules, which Alice has first to decode in the course of her journeys. But not only Carroll’s fictional world functions this way; his novels are likewise thoroughly rule-based structures. The writer used numerous anagrams and codes, which – once de-coded – gave way to almost unlimited dimensions beneath the surface of what at first glance seems to be tales for children. For both Alice – the character – and for Dodgson – the writer –, these journeys are ‘about creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to reality – worlds in which we can extend, amplify, and enrich our own capacities to think, feel, and act’. With these words, Brenda Laurel describes human/computer interaction in her book Computers as Theatre (Laurel, 1991:33). That not only serves as concise description of Alice’s Wonderland and cyberspace, but also as a useful definition of theatre.

So far, I have described the thematic treatment of electrONic culture in the performance text of LIDA’s Alice-production. At the same time, though, the collective sought to intersect theatre and digital technology on a second level as well. The entire performance – which, as mentioned above, made no use of computer or internet technology on stage – was conceived on-line, using the net as a forum for communication and collective creation. Even before the first rehearsal period in November 2000, LIDA had posted a number of questions on their website (www.good-evil.org). Some of these focal questions from this internet communication were: What is the definition of theatre? Can that traditional aesthetic medium remain valid and still be a powerful tool to reflect issues of our electronic society? Is theatre still meaningful to an audience which is permanently confronted with concepts of interactivity and numerous other manifestations of a entirely digitalized environment in their daily lives? Then, are computers able to enhance the theatrical experience? The most riveting Internet events are still live performances: live chats, live concerts, the live broadcast of births, executions and sex. Thus, can the Internet also advance artistic live performance, or is it only a powerful medium for broadcasting theatrical events? Is that particular liveness of computer transmitted events which has become known as ‘tele-presence’ of performance and audience identical and equally forceful than the traditional theatrical co-presence of actors and spectators in the same room, at the same time?

The search for answers to these and similar questions provided the idea and starting point of the entire Good : Evil – Experiments project. Brian Freeland, the artistic director, was not at all pleased with the way performance and theatre has reacted to the new, highly technological environment (4): on the one hand, he stated, intimate chamber pieces, what he calls ‘campfire-type theatre’ seemed to satisfy the human longing for direct, personal contact in our mediatized society. On the other hand, there are hybrid forms of techno-theatre which for him ‘don’t have to take place in the theatre itself.’ Thus, when it comes to telling a story – which for Freeland is the rhyme and reason of the theatre – the influence of computers on theatre spectators is hardly ever reflected today. With his Good : Evil - Experiments, he strives to bridge this gap. Alice, as the first result of these experiments, was to become a conventional contemporary theatre piece, performed live before an audience in a theatre space. But even before its first night, the internet and computers had already been integrated into the process of producing the piece. The group’s homepage was the place where the performance that would become Alice was created – on-line, and in real time. Their discussion forums mentioned above were opened for the on-line public, in the so-called ‘Connection’-section of the website. Meanwhile, the on-site collaborators (Freeland himself, the playwright Tami Canaday, the dramaturge Kryssi Wyckoff Martin, and the local performance artists Jeannene Bybee, Steven Divide, and Nils Swanson) started their research on the lives of Carroll/Dodgson and Alice Liddell, on their relationship, and, more generally, on their context in the Victorian era. Alice’s counter-Victorian Wonderland thus became the ‘Looking Glass’ for the simultaneous discussions of the questions summarized above. All the research, together with a ‘rehearsal notebook’, were also made available on-line, where visitors were then able to contribute their own suggestions, thoughts, and comments. Another important part of the website was the ‘Location’-page, where links could be added: these soon encompassed sites about contemporary techno music as well as specialist sites dedicated to Alice and the Victorian age.

The LIDA collective rehearsing Alice.

Click here to view their ‘Rehearsal Notebook’.

When it came to devising the production and preparing the script, the entire process was again continuously documented on-line. After the roles had been cast, the performers started to read and discuss chapters from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Their reactions, images and incidental thoughts on the texts were published in the rehearsal notebook. Early on in these discussions, the similarities of the novels’ Wonderland and digital cyberspace (which later functioned as the thematic basis of the piece, as described above) quickly became one of the key issues. Intimate correlations between these worlds were discovered, regarding issues such as personality, language, and phenomenological experience. At the same time, the debates focused on an astounding sense of continuity between the virtual worlds and the real-life presence. Likewise, the rule-based structures of both the digital and the Dodgson/Carrol-Wonderlands were identified and explored. Reading the play, the collaborators compared Alice’s entry into Wonderland with our everyday log-ins into cyberspace. It turned out that Carroll’s two novels confronted the reader with two entirely different attitudes on the part of Alice as she entered the fictitious space: in Alice in Wonderland, she is portrayed as ignorant, out of control, and directly affected by what is happening to her. In contrast, Through The Looking Glass shows Alice in an ‘updated mode’, as one contributor to the on-line discussion remarked: there, she has become highly developed, is in total control, and now is the one who affects what is happening.

With no text or finished play to put on stage, the practical rehearsals explored the issues from the on-line and on-site discussions on a physical level. At one point, the collaborative actors and directors discovered a close relationship between these issues and the game of chess: with its white and black figures, it seemed to reflect the underlying bipartite Good/Evil structure of the entire project. There were other similarities as well: chess is also based on thoroughly logical, mathematical operations and definite rules, similar to computer commands like ‘Go To’ or ‘Stop’. In the end, chess became the basis for physical exercises, and its rule-based structure was also employed when it came to arranging text paragraphs from the novel for the performance. Furthermore, the game of chess provided the basis for the setting of Alice: on stage, there was a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, and the actors moved about like chess figures for the whole first part of the performance.