The theatre director's responsibility in the face of emerging technologies

Talk at the First Conference on theatre and new technologies. RESAD. April 2006

Everyday life.

Over a coffee I glance at the newspaper online, pick out the articles that interest me and send some of them to the print server; others I file under “to do”, and the rest I simply discard. A specialised programme selects for me the many news items of interest happening in the world and sends them to my mobile in real time. At the same time I receive an email from a colleague travelling in Japan with the theatre plans attached in dxf format, so that we can make the necessary changes to the set and cut down the get-in time for the festival.

While I wolf down a croissant, a document arrives from a mailing list specialising in Spanish Golden Age theatre, in which a professor from the University of Arizona clears up a terrible doubt that assailed me last night as I reread Tirso de Molina’s Los balcones de Madrid and found notable differences between the manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional and the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma. I click on the links he recommends and there before my eyes is an electronic version of the text based on both manuscripts.

Hours later, I connect the mp3 player to the car’s multimedia system over bluetooth and listen to the final adjustments the composer has made to the last scene. Pleasantly surprised, I start a phone conversation on the hands-free to congratulate him on his work, and ask him to download the video of the last rehearsal over a virtual private network so that he can take in all the changes.

When I reach the rehearsal room the lighting designer hands me some rendered sketches so that I can get an idea of the final result, and shows me on a laptop the sequence of the various cues with their respective fade times. I ask the technical manager to email me the simulation of the flying system, the projectors and the motors.

Over lunch I make use of the dead time between courses to make a transfer on my mobile and, using the restaurant’s wifi, do the supermarket shop on an obsolete pda.

In the afternoon I receive the text with the writer’s changes, and through a discussion server I start a conversation on a forum set up for the purpose, in order to accept the proposed changes and suggest others.

End of the working day. Dinner at some friends’ house; during it, along comes Pedrito, the youngest son, clutching his games console and waging a fearsome battle with who knows what enemy. What are you playing? I ask him. Pokemon, he answers. Poke? Pokemon, he answers again. And what is that? After twelve interminable minutes in which I try, entirely without success, to understand twenty per cent of what is being put to me, I decide to fall back on an excuse that never fails. “I need a wee,” I tell him, turning round in an obvious retreat.

In the loo I get a text from the technical manager reminding me that I have an email with the flying and lighting file so that I can look at it tonight on the simulator on my home computer and approve it. When I arrive at the rehearsal tomorrow everything will be ready.

All through dinner I feel Pedrito’s gaze, his big bright eyes looking at me enquiringly; I dodge his eyes, afraid of hearing the fateful phrase: “Do you want to play?” Happily I come out of it victorious and, my feet already on the doormat, amid kisses and hugs, I breathe deeply. The danger has passed.

At night, tucked up in bed, I dream of Pokemons and little red riding hoods devoured by cyber wolves. When I wake, a terrible thought makes room for itself in my tormented head: “I have to catch up.”

Doubts, reflections, a few examples and more doubts.

We find ourselves in a permanent state of transit. From an industrial society we have moved to one clearly marked by the processing of information: the generation of wealth is no longer based on manufacturing “tangible” products but on something as fickle as information. The “real” gives way to the virtual, and the virtual takes on a reality of its own of such magnitude that it paradoxically outstrips our own reality, goes beyond it.

Borders will never be the same again: one click of the mouse takes us from a computer in Europe to another in Australia. We can reach, virtually and in the same span of time, different contents scattered across the whole globe. We can hold a conversation with several people thousands of kilometres away, we can put a document on a network and duplicate it over and over on hundreds of machines reached by millions of people… In some way, we have attained the gift of ubiquity.

And I ask myself: what can I do, as a theatre director, with these technologies that are changing our way of life and the way we perceive reality in unimaginable ways? And new questions arise. In what way have these technologies changed our perception and the audience’s reception? Do these changes help me or harm me? What are they? How do I understand them and act on them?

Television, and specifically its use and abuse, imposes on us, slowly and unstoppably, certain habits that sink deep into our being. A device that is in theory supposed to establish communication, and that paradoxically stays switched on whether or not we are in the room. We now take entirely for granted, and see as normal, watching a film broken into twelve little pieces by the advertising breaks we dread and long for at once. And curiously, it is beginning to look normal that those advertisements should interest us more than the film in question. And that must mean something…

Mobiles threaten our pockets with micro-films, video clips… The show is served.

Video games have settled into everyday life, taking up most of the leisure time of children, adolescents and an ever-growing number of adults. These games have bigger production budgets than a film and show off, in a full display of technology, the very latest in sound, image and interface, plunging the player into a unique world where they can interact at the same time with imaginary characters and real users.

Children have stopped swapping picture cards; now they take part in role-playing games imported from the console and gamble their new mythological heroes at cards.

How are we to read this? The audience’s reception is changing, settling slowly and imperceptibly and finally imposing its habitual criteria — because habit, custom, settles quickly and for ever into the sleep of the sleeping. And that does not help us at all.

Out of these reflections came Proyecto Alpha, a production I directed some years ago. I wanted to warn children about the dangers of video games and television, but only and exclusively when they are used indiscriminately. I needed to tell them about the need to sharpen their critical sense, bombarded as it continually is by hundreds of messages. To that end I wrote a text in which some girls were abducted by a ufo and turned into mega-warrior super-girls; what began as an innocent game ends in tragedy. If I wanted to tell them something that really interested them, something that would catch their attention and rouse them, I had to change the way I told it, because the formulas used in my own childhood appealed only to me. Hence the aesthetic sits somewhere between science fiction, the video clip and manga. Of course that aesthetic called for a great many technological elements; more than that, the use of fluorescence, projections of virtual images, high-brightness diodes and laser diodes became indispensable in telling this story the way I wanted to tell it. They were a dramaturgical choice. The projections interacted with the actresses, supporting their work at every moment. The video, the laser diodes and the fluorescence were not mere gimmicks: they were part of the staging and were central to the actresses’ working process. Because they, above all, were the protagonists. To bring out the many changes of place, we chose a set based on fluorescent light, so that by switching on some tubes or others it could become a spaceship, an orbital laboratory, an abduction chamber, a battle cruiser… We also needed an energy ball that had to interact with the actresses, becoming another character. The solution, a partial one as we shall see, came through high-brightness diodes controlled by a microcontroller, and in this way we obtained an element that changed colour following a preset sequence, fixed during rehearsals and giving absolute priority to the actresses’ work. In those days we could not make Alpha really react. Today we would have found it easier.

What happened to the production? It was performed three times, because in the programmers’ view a production using such an aesthetic could not be considered theatre; it belonged more to cinema or to cartoons, but theatre, no, under no circumstances. What is more, they maintained that in using this aesthetic we were doing children a disservice, since both television and video games are regarded most of the time by these professionals as, let us call it, a cultural cancer. Happily, what I keep is the memory of a boy who, on his way out of the theatre, looked up at the technicians’ box and shouted at us, thumb in the air: Cool!

Giving in to this whirlwind of consumer capitalism, some cultural policies would reduce us to leisure rather than reflection, to entertainment in its most worldly sense rather than transgression. Are we being asked for a theatre condemned to mere contemplation?

Another question I put to myself is: why this rejection of technology by so much of the profession? Why do we stay shut inside our marvellous bubble of velvet?

I think we are afraid, that this same fear paralyses us and makes us justify our panic in a thousand and one ways, and I also think there can be nothing worse for a maker than fear, because it is one of the few things that can paralyse us without our noticing.

Theatre has been characterised over and over by taking into its buildings and its productions whatever emerging devices delighted the audience. Today that situation has changed, and technological advances reach the stage after doing the rounds of the amusement parks, the rock concerts and our own living rooms.

Except in isolated cases, theatre makers suffer the limitations of the tyranny of the proscenium arch. A kind of theatre that a particular society used to reflect itself, but which with the passing years and the advance of society is now an iron chain that immobilises the place of performance and holds it at a distance from the audience: a sort of impassable wall that makes direct communication between sender and receiver difficult, to say the least.

Theatres, as public spaces, are a representation of the society that builds them and in which that society sees itself reflected. They answer a set of needs inherent to that society. Why do we go on building great auditoriums that allow not the slightest possibility of change?

Today, given the function that we are economically and politically expected to give theatre — relegating it to leisure and entertainment and placing the spectator as a passive observer — theatres are built as mere buildings in which to house a series of highly assorted productions with common characteristics, and therefore exportable to every other building. Of course, nothing serves those requirements better than a proscenium theatre. And nothing could be further from theatre and from the needs our society, today’s society, has of theatre — our theatre. Today’s.

And this is where technology becomes an ally, and I embrace it and kiss it, because it allows me, at ever lower cost and without giving up the advantages of a theatre building, to conceive a production in its entirety while doing without that building and staging it wherever I like, placing the audience in the ideal position for the reception of that particular production: in the round, on three sides… above, below… conceiving it for 80 spectators or for 20,000. Technology gives me all the freedom I need, in exchange for money, naturally — but the costs of technology fall steadily and its advance grows steadily faster.

On this point I want to give as an example a production I directed last year. We wanted to make a production that would bring theatre with some dignity to a set of villages in Castilla-La Mancha where, given their small populations, a company had rarely if ever been. We wanted to do it with technical conditions they could never have provided, since some of them did not even have a hall. Well, if they have no stage, let us bring one, and no sooner said than done: the producers Armar Teatro & Falsaria de Indias bought a lorry and we built a corrala de comedias. The lorry arrives in the village and in less than twenty minutes a hydraulic system turns it into a corrala de comedias with two accessible levels, dressing rooms, integrated microphone and lighting systems, and a usable playing area 6 metres high, 8 metres wide at the opening and 5 metres deep. The production was a selection of three interludes by Cervantes.

The idea is not new — in fact the Junta de Extremadura has had stage lorries for years — but what matters is that a mid-scale company with limited financial means has been able to carry out a stage project of this order. Years ago that would have been unthinkable.

Let us come back to reception. Theatre, unlike video games or television, is something we cannot interrupt, cannot turn down so that it does not disturb us, cannot carry in our pocket and pause when it suits us.

Theatre has something it has not let anyone take from it: its ephemeral, unrepeatable character. We cannot duplicate over and over the immediate present that each performance is, because in each and every case we would end up with different performances. The present belongs to theatre, the here and now. Nor can we fix it on any support to be viewed later, because all we will have fixed is a dead copy, without soul, of something that was but in no case is.

And where does all this take me? Because they are very fine words, but underneath they turn into a great problem. As society moves on, what do we have to do to make it pay? Can we compete with all the other narrative structures? We will rarely manage to pay for a television advertisement; that advertisement will simply cost far more than we would take by filling the theatre. Do we have to accept in the end that we are destined for minorities? How and in what way can we reach the wider public? Because deep down, we would all like to.

We also have closeness to the actor and the actress. In this age so full of technology, which contradictorily keeps us so far apart — in these times when to communicate we do it through a telephone handset or an armoured window inside a taxi, or when we change our appearance and our name in a chat room — that is where an urgent need arises to “touch” what is real, to feel an actor’s whisper stroking your ears, to meet a pair of eyes looking at you. To be present at an unrepeatable moment. And that does belong to theatre, and for the moment nobody can take that from us either. This is our strength, our reason to be. Of this, at least, I am sure. This search for closeness tempts me again and again to experiment with a sensory theatre: a world of smells, images, sounds — among them the word — lights and shadows that wrap around the spectator, that stroke each and every one of their senses; a communion with the spectator three centimetres from their body. I do not know whether that will be considered theatre or a fairground booth; in any case it answers a personal search and arises from a need, which is to meet the spectator.

The use of technology, in its technical facet as much as its narrative one, is still a tool at our service whose purpose is to make our work easier. We are surrounded by technology; any object we turn our attention to bears a technological trace, from a simple box of matches to the trousers we are wearing. If technology is present in our lives, how can we expect to keep it away from theatre? It is a contradiction in terms; even if we wanted to, we could not. We are the heirs of our culture. It falls precisely to us, as makers, to use it, and not only in its functional part: we have means we would never have imagined, so let us give them life, let us search, let us investigate, let us get it wrong — it is the only way to make theatre what it has always been, an artistic medium of communication engaged with society, a place unafraid to fly, where we can believe the impossible, laugh, dream, reflect; a space in which to venture into the unknown, to tell the same old stories differently, or who knows what and in what way, to wake our senses; a place that demands of technology the best of itself. Let it be us who look for the frontiers technology lets us glimpse. Us who ask the questions it suggests.

We can imagine, with technology’s help, a theatre close to the spectator, open to experiment as it always has been; a theatre in which we see our longings, our chimeras and our meanness reflected; a theatre with an R&D department at the service of stage narrative; a theatre, in short, that allows a one-to-one with the spectator. It is our responsibility — if not, we will quite possibly end up eating popcorn and wondering why people stopped going to the theatre

© 2006 Andrés Beladiez. All rights reserved