Technology in the theater is not always lifeless

The word “technology” finds its way to theater reviews more often every year and is in a danger of becoming a term as meaningless as post-modernism for example. Everybody uses it but all have different notions in mind they care not to explain. It seems that we have to distinguish between theatre technology, technology used in the theater, technological theater and something I suggest to call experience theater.

Theater technology is all the new engineering solutions to help set/light/sound designers to fulfil the (director´s) artistic intentions from the first deus ex machina to the rows of computers and buttons any sound/light technician has to be able to use nowadays. The difference between that and the technology used in the theater is that the latter has not been made specially for the theater but is borrowed from other areas. In the last decades theater has mostly flirted with cinema and some years ago it was quite hard to see a performance in an international festival where they had no screens on stage. That is also what Andy Field discusses in his entry to The Guardian´s theater blog.

Technological theater, however, is a much harder term to grasp because there´s always a temptation to take the easy road and call everything that has machinery on stage technological theater. And that would be as far from truth as calling performances without a linear story anti-narrative theater. I have seen only one truly technological performance and that was “Stifter´s Thing” by German director Heiner Goebbels. In that performance there were no actors on stage, just podiums, screens, little pools filled with water and other substances and these were the entities acting, having conversations with sound and light, performing. And although there were no humans on stage – apart from some technicians – it was a rather traditional theater in a sense that the audience sat passively behind the fourth wall. Andy Field would probably hesitate to call this theater since the excitement of theater is “seeing these people right in front of your eyes, seeing them breathing and sweating, knowing that something could go wrong, knowing that you could stand up and shout and they would hear you”. But I do not see the difference because behind every machinery there´s still a human being pushing those buttons – and they would certainly hear Mr Field if he should decide to shout at them – and furthermore: machines tend to be much more capricious than any prima donna ever could and so the risk of totally different outcome from what was intended is greater.

But the latest experiments with technology have decisively broke down that fourth wall separating the stage and the audience and left the spectator alone with the machine. Belgian director Eric Joris is a good example here. With his company CREW they create performances for just one person at a time: the spectators eyes are covered with video spectacles and ears with headphones and the performance itself happens in virtual reality so that the spectator may feel like s/he has moved a lot but actually has just walked around in circles. It is an immensely personal experience, having all the intimacy and immediacy Mr Field demands from theater, and that is why I suggest to call it experience theater. Of course the boundaries of such theater are yet to be discovered not only in how far technology will allow us to go but also if it is possible to share that experience with other people. In their “O_Rex” CREW tried to do just that by creating a show on stage for the audience to see while one lucky volunteer had the first hand experience but somehow watching him was not that interesting – at least not yet.

So I do not think that technology will necessarily take the liveness away from theater, on the contrary, It can make the experience even more intimate and some unsuccessful performances should not make us worry too much. After all, I have seen many unfortunate performances with lot of breathing and sweating by actors that I would rather not call theater as well.