Oldal 147 [147]
OCR
NICHOLAS E. JOHNSON, NEILL O’DWYER, AND ENDA BATES digital culture. It is the first in-depth exploration of process and product of Experiment One (14 April 2017), also known as Intermedial Play, a version of Play that emerged from conversations relating to creative possibilities for a PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) robotic teleconferencing camera and control unit. Conceptually exploring the similarity between such a camera (designed for surveillance applications) and the “interrogator” light of Beckett’s script, this experiment was staged with live actors performing in one room but streamed via a web link to an audience sitting in a different building, raising questions of simultaneity and “live risk” that are generally absent from digital and film adaptations of Play. The second experiment, relating to a user-centered FVV (Free-Viewpoint-Video, a variety of VR or Virtual Reality) version called Virtual Play, raises other questions about the new cultural subjectivities imposed on humans by new technologies of presence.’ Authored by the three collaborators who developed the Intermedial Play/Virtual Play project at a conceptual level — working as director (Nicholas Johnson), videographer/scenographer (Néill O’Dwyer), and sound artist (Enda Bates) — this essay will discuss the strands of influence in each of our areas of responsibility in the project, with special attention to the dynamic tension between “tradition” and “innovation” in Beckettian performance. In addition to outside influences that were brought into the rehearsal room, this project drew from our research into prior production histories as well as film adaptations (both Marin Karmitz’s 1966 Comédie and Anthony Minghella’s 2001 Beckett on Film adaptation). Placing these past versions of Play in dialogue with our 2017 experiments will help elicit the specificities of new, real-time, digital telepresence technologies, which we feel offer a fresh digital augmentation of a pivotal script within Beckett’s oeuvre, as well as a Beckettian response to the technologies themselves. DIRECTORIAL INFLUENCES A central ontological challenge of the live theatre is that while the “blueprint” of a source text might remain mostly the same over time, the conditions of its production and reception continuously change. This shift could be considered as a problem of influence, occurring on multiple levels. First, the circumstances that apply to a given context — social, technological, material — affect what types of production are conceivable, permissible, or otherwise possible at a given time and place for the artists involved. Second, these 2 As detailed analyses ofthe Virtual Play project have been published elsewhere, this publication will not engage substantially with it; see Néill O’ Dwyer — Nicholas Johnson: Exploring Volumetric Video and Narrative through Samuel Beckett’s Play, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2019). DOI: 14794713.2019.1567243. + 146 +
