Theory and Practice
The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre

The Iron Age-The Industrial Age-The Digital Age
There's a growing inevitability to it (a ridiculous statement.)That is, there's a dawning sense of how inevitable it always has been, since ENIAC and Babbage and before, back to the abacus, back to counting jackals on ten fingers. Eventually the entire physical world will be describable by numbers.

The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre has been experimenting with digital technology for the last three years. We began with using computer-based figure animation software and 3D design software to do choreography, set design, lighting design, etc. The object was to previsualize a production as much as possible before the rehearsal period.

In the digital world you cannot distinguish different disciplines by the physical nature of the media or the process by which work is created.

The goal, formulated by artistic director Cheryl Faver, was to make possible long-term development of complex theatrical works. We wanted to be Robert Wilson with his German government funding, we wanted to work on a piece for a year, two years. We wanted to avoid (or at least ameliorate) that dual nightmare of American theater, the 4 Week Rehearsal and the 3 Day Tech.

In the digital world ... we can (if we want) strip theater of its physical components. The props. The lights. The seats. The room. From previsualization we are lured into distance collaboration. A funding source (One World Arts Foundation) hooks us up with IBM. We are introduced to IBM's Person to Person software, which combines videoconferencing with a suite of real-time collaborative tools. While talking with and seeing your collaborator, you can share graphics, send files back and forth, run the same application (say a 3D set modeling program) and so on.

In the digital world ... how can we (or why should we) distinguish between painting and set design and film and theater and architecture when the digital tools are all the same, and the delivery platform is the same?

Scenario: a stage director for an upcoming production is on the Riviera (rehearsing another production of course); in New York the production team includes set and lighting designers, actors, stage managers, etc.; in Chicago the costume designer has dialled up. Over digital data lines, we are able to solve problems, make changes in staging, lighting, set, costumes, budget, etc.

After about 50 years of the Industrial Revolution (the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th) the philosophical implications hit the arts. The arts imploded, fragmented, and were radically reborn. We are approaching the next Turn. Already the Digital Revolution is undermining the categories of artist and audience.

Of course, the next step for The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre is to see that the tools of production begin to influence our aesthetic. The process becomes part of the product. Our original objective was to support traditional physical production. This still seems a valid goal to us. But, of course, other possibilities are very seductive:

Cheryl Faver adapts a segment of Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights The Lights for a digital stage. There are four actors on the physical stage (three Fausts and a Mephisto.) Another two actors appear live from another location, in a videoconferencing window on a rear projection screen. They are Annabelle and Marguerite, attending the Paris Opera. The Boy and the Dog are computer-generated figures. The stairway to Mephisto's mansion in Hell is animated, so that the actor (behind the screen, seen in shadow) can climb the stairs. Another character (perhaps Stein herself?) types in her dialogue in a text chat window.

Our experiments begin to change our ideas about theater. It becomes ridiculous to think of theater as what can happen in one room, with one audience.

TGSRT embarks on a series of experiments in distance art. We do a fax art event with downtown Helsinki, creating graphic dialogues over ordinary fax machines. Working with Douglas Davis, we enable a text dialogue performance called Discours amoureuses with a performer in Geneva, Switzerland and another in Manhattan. We do a simultaneous gallery opening with Vienna and HERE. We do a bi-coastal music performance, with musicians in L.A. and New York, and audiences in both places. We do another one with Paris. We imagine the ultimate multi-site performance, a 24-hour play played continuously at 12 sites around the world, 2 hours each, to which anyone can dial in anytime and see something happening.

We can take a timid, parochial view of what theater is, or an aggressive, imperialistic one. Theater has always been an integrative, collaborative art which potentially (and sometimes actually) includes all art: music, dance, painting, sculpture, etc. Why not be aggressive in the tumultuous context of the Digital Revolution? Why not claim all interactive art in the name of theater?

We start an education program where kids in different cities and countries can work together on performance projects using videoconferencing and collaborative tools. We do a workshop of The Crucible with kids from Portsmouth, England and from the New York public schools. They meet each other, they talk about rap and clothes, they flirt, they rehearse scenes together. It's like the collision of two worlds. But they love it. We ask Arthur Miller to come and talk to them, and he does. We hook him up via videoconferencing to kids in Australia, England, Italy. He's fascinated by the technology, warmly attentive to the kid's work, and incredibly articulate about theater, society, politics, history.

Brenda Laurel writes a book called Computers as Theatre. In the book, she analyzes the computer interface in Aristotelian terms. The screen is the stage and the user the audience. This relates to some of our thinking about multimedia, to wit: multimedia as art is much closer to theater, and the performing arts in general, than it is to film, video, or the visual arts.

We experiment with multimedia animation, story-telling on the computer screen. CD-ROM is exciting and boring at the same time. Who wants to put that much effort into a canned art form? We encounter the World Wide Web, and are blown away. Not so much by the current reality, but by the enormous potential. Even though the Web right now is like some enormous global magazine edited by a madman, we start to conceive of the Web as an eventspace, a place where things can happen. For two reasons. First, theater has always been live (intelligent, aware) and potentially interactive. We can argue about type and levels of interactivity, but no other form has that claim. Second, among the forms which are sequential or time-based, the theater has always combined modes of representation in one work.

Our technological goals start to become more focused. We want to merge the capabilities of videoconferencing (point-to-point, real-time video and collaborative tools) with the Internet (multi-point, cross-platform, no international connect charges) and especially the World Wide Web (graphic hypermedia, global access.) Artistically, that means we can combine synchronous (live, performance) art forms with asynchronous (galleries, installations, libraries) art forms.

Photography and film tend towards one mode, usually naturalism, throughout a work. Theater is always (at the same time) symbolic (what is that proscenium?) stylized or abstract (is that painted flat a forest?) and naturalistic (that's a real person up there). And computers have that quality also. They naturally juxtapose information in various forms (text, images, animation) in space, on the same screen.

We imagine merging our fascination with process with the audience's appreciation for product. We imagine a narrative which appears on the Web not sequentially, like a serial novel or soap opera, but developmentally, like a writer writing the last scene first, or a builder building the foundation. We imagine a narrative Web in which theaters all over the world share a set of character/actors, a set of set designs and places, a library of props and situations.

Arthur Miller once pointed out a similar distinction between theater and film. In theater, you can juxtapose two realities (a hotel room with a suburban kitchen many years later) on one stage, in one simultaneous image. In order to make sense of the scene, the user (audience) must be an active collaborator, putting the pieces together in real time. Whereas film and video tend to juxtapose elements in time, sequentially, creating a dreamlike experience which is more passive for the viewer.

We see ourselves and others doing this work as building a world stage, like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland taking a bucket of paint and a red barn and making a theater.

In the multimedia feeding frenzy, artists are presented with an incredible opportunity. The Digital Revolution is about new means of representing reality, new means of communication and expression. That's the territory of the artist. The artist is important today. A rare feeling, particularly in America.

We have the sinking feeling that, as fast we progress, we are falling behind. We think what we are doing is cutting edge, but we are tinkering with Model Ts. It's difficult to compete with Jurassic Park or Doom II. And good art in this medium is probably many years in the future. But we comfort ourselves with the joy in the process itself. Experimentation yields its own rewards: every new feature or facility we play with fragments our conventional thinking, sheds new light on the essential nature of drama or theater or narrative. Some artists accept the tools they are given and do brilliant, historical work. Others feel compelled to reinvent the tools themselves. These are both good strategies. They are both integral to art.