MEV: Good morning to all of you and thank you for choosing to spend your Sunday talking about these fascinating topics in this wonderful venue. I’m very excited to be moderating this panel on Dramaturgy and Technology. And we’ve got a reasonable amount of time. So we’ve got about two hours or so, I think, so we can take it at a leisurely pace with about 25 minutes for each of the presenters. And I was also told that I could also introduce them in a bit more detail than is sometimes done, so I’ll speak for a short while and say something also about this panel, about how this fits within this conference, and about the people who you’ll hear more about later on.
So unlike the people sitting at the table here, I am not really an artist, I am more of a researcher, and one of the things that really fascinates me is technology and somebody who is interested in doing ethnographies of practice, in doing histories of theatre practice, and technology is one of the things that really fascinates me, but it also puzzles me sometimes. So I want to share an experience as a spectator that I often have and that it might be shared with other people in the room. I know that some of the organizers have also talked about this before, how sometimes technology is one of those things that are really hard to do well in a performance. I often get the feeling when I see technology that it’s not precisely done in the perfect way, that there is something missing. It is not necessarily the case of the amount of technology being used; sometimes less would be more, but sometimes actually it is not a matter of the amount but the modes in which it is being used. And I am often drawn to see things because they use technology, but once I am at the stage, I am disappointed by what happens. I know this is a common thing, there is also a common trend to use technology in ways that are perhaps not optimal.
One of the ideas I also remember from the previous conference, one idea that was thrown around often here, is how the art of the dramaturg is sometimes in a way, a thankless job. In the sense that if the dramaturg did their job correctly, sometimes you don’t notice it. But when you see a show that fails, there is often a feeling that a dramaturg was missing, that, oh, this thing was interesting but it kind of misses a dramaturg. There should have been a dramaturg here. And I would like to propose that perhaps one of the areas where dramaturgy is the most needed today is technology. So that is one of the slight provation where I would like this to begin, and this is one thing that I’ve been discussing also with the panelists today and I would like to ask them for their perspectives on: What does it mean to use technology too much? What does it mean to use it well? And what does it mean to be a dramaturg? What does it mean to correctly, or usefully, integrate technology? What are the dramaturgical principles where technology works well?
So, by way of introduction, I’ll say some things about the artists here and about the things they share in common. So, we have three globetrotting artists, you’ll look at the amount of countries that they’ve been to - that is interesting of course in it’s own right. They seem to all have converged in Taiwan at some point, so I think that is the one place that all of you have been presenting your work. Another thing that really struck my eye when I was going through their biographies, is that they have all been part of collectives. So they all work, and in many cases, set up these collectives of people from different disciplines, Su Wen-Chi who is going to be the first presenter, she set up this YiLab (一 當 代 舞 團) in Taiwan, and she is both a media artist and a dancer, and works with a variety of like-minded people in Taiwan and overseas. We have also got Martyn Coutts, who is originally from Australia but also has travelled extensively and worked in different kinds of media. He also co-founded the Field Theory, which is an artist collective working out of Australia primarily. And finally, Jompet Kuswidananto has also been heavily involved with Teater Garasi, who even though it has a name “Teater”, it is an artist collective from Indonesia, where people that are musicians… I think Mr. Jompet himself was a musician at first before transiting over to the visual arts and to theatre. So that is one of things that is interesting that they all share in common.
And I just want to highlight some very brief things of conversations we’ve had in the past few days. There were two workshops on Friday, many of you here were part of those workshops that were on the topic of technology and theatre, so I would also encourage you later on to bring in your own experiences and questions about those events. And just to finish this brief introduction I want to say something about each of the people here that I found worth sharing. So in the first workshop with Martyn, he said that he often talks himself out of a job. That when people invite him to be a media artist, he often tells people “Well do you actually need media?” and I (Martyn) often think “No”. I am quoting him, perhaps misquoting him, and he will address this later on. But I think that’s a really interesting thing and perhaps we should do this more often. Perhaps media artists should talk themselves out of a job more often or we should talk technology out of its job more often. That is one question I would like to leave here lingering for the rest of the session.
And in the workshop by Wen-Chi later that evening, she talked about her experience working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), and I won’t say too much because she will mention that later today as well. But she is a fascinating storyteller as you will see soon, and she taught us to this ethnography of artists at this massive collaborative institution in Switzerland. And one of the things that was so surprising for me about that, is how different, in many ways, it is the way that artists and scientists work. So just one quick thing that she mentioned was that to come up with an answer to a particular problem, they would divide people into two teams, and then each team would have to work through their answer, and then if both answers were correct at the end of a long time, that meant that the question was correct. Which strikes me as exactly the opposite of what we would do in a theatre situation. That you know if you would set up an assignment with people and they all came up with the same answer, that doesn’t mean the answer was correct, that probably means that the question was wrong. So that’s a very different kind of way to think about it.
And finally, the person that I’ve known for the longest time at this table is Jompet. I was based in Indonesia for several years before, and I am very interested in the work that Teater Garasi has done, and I have this very specific memory of an event to commemorate the anniversary of Teater Garasi, where people were doing all sorts of things in this house that was turned into a performance space. And for his own project, he did an installation that he’ll talk a bit more about later on called Noda/Stains, and it was, as you will see later on, a simple machine but incredibly effective, where paint was progressively spread through a room throughout a very long amount of time. One of the things that I also take from this is how technology sometimes is not necessarily you know big machines but small contraptions that change how we think about space and other people. So, I’ve spoken way too long but as you can see it is just an indication and I am really excited to be in the presence of the people here and looking forward to the conversations that will follow. So the first presenter will be SU Wen-Chi so, please. (8:35)
SW: Thank you Miguel. I feel very excited. I start with the term that How Ngean started, so thank you for How Ngean to invite me here. Like was such a pleasure and honour. I am very happy to have this chance to share with you my idea on technology, although these two terms that How Ngean gave me are not the two terms that I started with. Instead of like… Dramaturgy for me is somehow still very abstract. I am still discovering from yesterday’s panel and also I attended the first ADN here years ago and then I tried to understand how people now try to define this in Asia. I worked many years in Europe so I have a very vague idea of what dramaturgy is. And for me it was the person during the process who is more like for me like a library or a storyteller. There is always this person there. And as a dancer I think my job is just, you know, dance, and work with a choreographer. So while there’s a lot of... It is very physically demanding, I’m not going to open the book during the night. So I would rather go home and watch a film and eat well and sleep so that the next day I can work and I can have a good physical condition. So during the process I won’t have time to read, let’s say, or I don’t have this physical or mental space to read. And so there is always this person I can turn to when I have a problem with choreographer, like there’s some idea I don’t understand or there’s some contest that I didn’t really get into or I don't know who I am in the piece or during the process, so this person is responsible to guide me in a way when the choreographer has no time and then also to tell the story. For example there was a time when I worked in Indonesia and culturally I really didn’t understand. So I try to understand the contest so the dramaturg will tell me a lot of stories like myths and stories on how people look at the ritual and symbols and characters, and so somehow I learnt a lot from there.
And technology is something that... I put the two alternative subjects under there, which is rather the two terms I started with; is the body and movement. As a dancer and choreographer, as dancer-trained, I look at them, the world in motion. So I didn’t think of dance so much but I think of how much people are curious to see the moving thing or moving object. So the starting point is actually from early photography and film. And the reason why I changed, not to change, but to make a shift to the new media arts, is that after many years of being a dancer, I started to have a desire to create something. But I don’t have very clear questions about what I want to do, so I make a stop and make a graduate study. And at that time I chose, at that time called new media arts. And the reason why I call that is because I choose that is because during that time in Taiwan I found out that there is a group of professors or students or artists trying to figure out what is new media art is. So it's kind of like a job nobody knows how to define yet. And so I found okay great I think that is what I am trying to look for. Because I don't want to jump back to the dance training or choreography training and because there is a reason why I went to Europe to work, it’s because in Taiwan there is I think okay I only say in my personal point of view, in the education system it is encouraged to think only in dance. So to think only what the dance is and what the dance movement is. So you spend a lot of time in dance and I feel very let’s say I feel very trapped as a non leave in the tempo and trying to practice every day of what dance is. So the reason why I chose to work in Belgium for years is because I figured out that I observe the choreographers and dancers there, they are not just thinking about dance, but also thinking about what dance can do for the society. So there is a very strong relation between dance and what happened now in a society. (14:05)
In any case, then I jump into this new media arts. In the beginning they try to say it is a technology, but then they feel technology is too much tech-orientated so it is more than the technique itself. So new media arts means there is a new way of communication that we still don’t know what it is, but it is enhanced by the technology. So I start with... Wow 20 minutes actually very short. Already the introduction has taken me like 7 minutes. Okay and it’s uh just the first slide. Okay. So when I am in the new media art study, it turns out I have to sit down a lot. So there is no dance video, it’s only classroom. So we sit down and talks a lot, like talks every day, hours a day, and we try to talk what’s the in many genres like video art, computer art, kinetic art, and sound art, interactive art and also a lot of software and to see what is the aesthetic in this trying to define a certain aesthetic together. Or how we are going to do with it. And so in the beginning of course I am fascinated by the movement and then when it come out I studied this beginning of how photography starts, and as you might know of Muybridge Photography and early film from the brother Lumière (Lumière brothers - Auguste and Louis) and this on the right side is a camera obscura (gestures to slide on screen) so it’s the beginning of its kind of the technical devices that help the painter to draw the nature on the paper. And there is a lot of story from the brother Lumière when I studied it and he talks about when the first time brother Lumière put the film in Paris, and this is the film he plays it’s just simply a train arriving in the train station and then reaction of the audience is that because they never seen the moving images so when they see this, the audience all get panicked because they think it’s the train coming towards them. So they all get up and run out. And so for me it was like wow. Wow.
So that perception of reality from the video and comparing to I don’t know if you still remember the 911 event in 2001, and then I remember at that time I was coming back from dinner and going back to the dance company and then I passed by the guard and then I saw that he is watching the news of the twin towers collapse. And at that time I didn’t realize that something really happened, so we both are watching the news and repeating and all the time and then we say, “oh Hollywood made a new film”, and then they start to attack the twin towers and then it looked really visually like striking. And then of course afterwards I realized it’s a real thing, a real attack. So I start to think about, from the brother Lumiere, how people react till 2001, how we see the repeating images and we didn’t really doubt its truth, or if it is really happening. So we think of it’s kind of like drama or it’s a film, which is not real. (Changes slide) (17:53)
So this starts to get into my mind, and what is reality and what is virtuality. So there is a lot of reading or reference I am not going to avoid talking about that, because I discussed a bit with How Ngean and I wonder if I should cut into more practice parts, also some theory together. But then to be honest, to study new media art or theory actually gave me a lot of inspiration and where the, let’s say, the questions start. So I find myself, I try to observe during all this talk and reading which triggers me to say that like well you know after reading a phrase I will tell myself I’m not sure about it. And when I’m not sure about it, my questions start. So it breaks it into the four things I think I still try to, even study new media art, but I try to understand what is the connection to my body. (18:57)
So I figured out while talking to a lot of different arts who work in different mediums, we all have a common term called body. So it’s a body of the sound, the body of the installation, the body of technology, or the body of the computer. So this is always shared. This word, this term, is always shared. An aura. So Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) talks about in the beginning: He’s worried about this in the beginning of the mechanical age, that art can be reproduced. And when it’s the reproduction of the artwork, is it still called art? So where is this aura or I will say where is the spirit in my physical experience, I will say, where is my presence is? So to turn into this aura to presence in the theatre helps me a lot to think about what actually disappears while I work with technology. So that will be the third point. And the fourth point will be from Marshall McLuhan. So he has this book called The Extensions of Man. And at that time I tried to find out what is the connection to for example my laptop and me. Or this virtuality and me. And then this book helped me to think the technology is actually the extension of the human being. So while you are projecting your desire or what you want or how you create your another identity in the virtual space, actually you try to extend your senses into the space. And while this part is extended, somehow you become one body. So this helped me to visualize what technology is and can refer to.
And then for me of course the strongest reference (changes slide) will be the physical bodies itself. Then I start to work on… (Loop Me) Like the first thing I am questioning is how machines loop. For example when I look at the 911 image many times, and I try to record from each time I look at this image and each time I have a different understanding of it. Either it's something on top or I try to create another story, or I try to change the reality which it is. And so I was questioning, what if my body can be reproduced and can be looped in a system? And then does this looping system perfect? Because I think in the propaganda of new media or propaganda of technology, it always encourages us to think about a better future and to then think about better communication. But at that time I was very critical about how it can help us to communicate better. Because somehow I feel myself can communicate better through dance itself. So this is kind of I try to discover in this looping mechanism what is still there and what is missing. (22:29)
And the second work is the Wave. So it’s a... I think, Martyn, we just talked about this piece because it’s very heavy hardware that you see as you might like, imagine these high-tech things is to construct something. I have that idea also but in that year 2011 and 2014. I want to create a perfect machine that can be like a human being. So I set up this goal: I want this machine can move like my body. Like as organic as it can be. So I pay a lot, I learned a lot in 2011 and also pay a lot also, so it’s really until... But there’s a... It’s a very critical point that Michael also tried to give me a question, like how much because they link to the budget to the money that we invest in technology. So how much we can go in order not to lose ourselves. And then so this piece in 2011 I don’t have much budget but I create in a way it functions, but not really, it’s kind of halfway. So my ambition was cut halfway, and I also feel like, well, creating this mass machine I lost, I wait a lot, so my body feels most of the time waiting and then waiting for the money to be burnt out, waiting for my bank account to be empty, and waiting for all my team somehow all exhausted and collapse somehow. So after this piece... But then it was important that I do this, because I didn’t realize how much this machine can take. Then of course in 2014 we have another budget to do the upgrade. So at that time I was thinking of all these. I called Wave, because in technology it’s talking about this energy as a wave form. Either it’s electricity, either it’s wifi signal. So there is a lot of signal in this invisible space which you don’t visualize it. So I try to visualize it and together we are trying to see the city as an artificial nature. And that of course after that my bank account empty and my team collapsed and then I was thinking back, “okay I want to drop that high tech ideology”, and so thinking back how can I work without tech. So I went back to the environment of the theatre, and then thinking what I have there. So theatre lights and so I chose another team and then the team was more orientative to actually is to create the illusion of technology. Because it is all about hiding the machine, what is the mechanism working behind the machine or behind the system. So rather than putting up the real projection, we work more to find the material that is reflective in the pattern you will believe is from the really high tech graphic software design or with the really high definition projector from the back. And this is the question I try to give at that time. And then after this piece, I felt a bit lost because then what the technology can still mean and what it can still go for. (26:07)
And so jumping to the second section. Big turning page. Because I only have 7 minutes left. So the next stop I think between this question and to the next thing, I jump into the residency in CERN in 2016. And at that time, honestly I have very no idea of quantum physics. It’s… Mathematics, biology, physics are my very weak points... Subjects in school. And because dancers are somehow all trained in the literature part or the sociology part, we are not trained in this part. So from high school I was divided immediately into this part of subjects. And then up till that point because I am still trying to find what the technology means and then why like where it can still be helpful for my practice. And then this CERN comes up. And at that time I didn’t know about quantum physics actually. I asked a lot of friends who can come up together because it needed to find a partner to go to the residence together. And it turns out not so many local colleagues I work with a lot of artists I work with, they didn’t find any connections after studying the website of CERN. And then so but I want to go there because there is one thing I want to see, which is the you know the worldwide web server. So this is the place, the birthplace of the world wide web. And then there’s the first server here. So I wanted to see that. So I said like I have to go there. And then without knowing what quantum physics is. So I tried to study again my high school physics books, and tried to find the connection there with dance. And then there’s still some structure I can find out is I think in the performance-making we might be, we are so familiar with, we didn’t realize it is physics too. Because physics actually studies the matters. So it’s how matter works, how the energy, how the space, how you define time and space. So I try to you know put my theatre practice into certain break down into certain principles, which I think is what I believe and what I can is how I do, how I see space and time. And so the scientists in CERN felt very happy because I somehow, I kind of relate to the time-space they try to study. (29:00)
So just to give you some basic information about CERN. So CERN is the world’s largest quantum physics laboratory in the world and it’s in Geneva. So it’s famous for its LHC, the Large Hadron Colliders and it’s 27km, between France and Switzerland, and under earth. So the work of quantum physics is to collide the particles and see what are the components inside. So this is some landscape. It’s like I want to say I was expecting a very sci-fi place. You know like when I imagine a very high tech laboratory. And then it turns out very factory-like. So and then scientists say, “you know, Wen-Chi it’s not about visually it is beautiful, it’s about it’s practical”. And then I was like oh okay different aesthetic you know. So the street was a huge compound, and the street was named by the deceased scientist, so this is the biggest boulevard named by Einstein. And the scientists, more than three thousand scientists work in this big compound and are divided into 2 groups, experimental physicists and theoretical physicists. And this the is something I will really want to see, it’s the first world wide web’s server. And it’s interesting the beginning of how, because now we are so familiar with and we see it as a tool of communication. And then but actually the beginning purpose is actually just to exchange the data between the scientists. So there is not such a big concern about the communication for the people around the world. Car chamber. And strange little things. I also try to observe how scientists behave. They drink a lot of cappuccino, no espresso, strong coffee all the time and coffee machines everywhere for free. And they hate and because they say when your brain starts to solve a problem you cannot let it stop. You just have to keep it running. And then they don’t like people to clean their research room. And then this is the very tiny office and corridor and this is not sci-fi, so what I think it’s cloud, you know well we say talk about the cloud is very realistically look like that. It’s really a lot of let’s say, hard disks. Big hard disks. There is a big whole basement of hard disks. (31:43)
And okay what I learnt from this residency is the fundamental research on matter, thinking in scales. So imagine the particles are the smallest on a scale on this side, and the universe is the largest on this side, and the human being in between. So thinking in scales. And big questions. So they don’t talk about technology so much, because they say it needs to start with the question. What is our question? Our question is how, where, how our universe starts. And then also fact is what it is, it is beyond intuition. So they don't talk about truths, they don't talk about beliefs, they say, it doesn't matter if you believe or not, it's about facts. So fact is what it is and science is most of the time beyond intuition. And beauty in equations. Because there's this moment I sat in the restaurant and this mathematician on my side and then he suddenly says, “Wen-Chi did you realize the equation of general relativity is so beautiful?” And then I was like yes. But you know… So, another aesthetic. (33:14)
Okay then I start to create some workshops and to try to see how I apply these experiences in dance. So dance is the matter used and the self-made camera obscura. I think the people who did the workshop would know this. Also working in the principles of quantum physics, because it is about cutting the space and time half and half, until it’s turned into the smallest scale of particles. So I try to rework in the theatre space or in the studio, how I divide actual space into half-half and to see how the participants react to that. Also cut into the mental space half and half, where we did the practice the other day with the mobile phone. Because while people are on the phone, their half awareness is shared with another space and time. So I try to create those. That’s the link, exercise I say, a prototype together. And so for me working with technology is never, you know, it’s never about technology, it’s about which question you want to address, and what kind of tool you can use. So I never define, because How Ngean asked me do you define what kind of technology in the beginning you want to do? Then I said no actually I try to define my question first and then to see what kind of tool that I can take from. So yeah I think it’s time, thank you so much. (34:57)
MEV: Well, thank you very much for that presentation. So now we move onto our second presenter of this panel. So to Mr. Jompet.
JK: I am going to present a lot of images so in the projectors so if I think you guys if you want to have a better perspective I think it’s up to you.
MEV: Yeah can we dim the lights, is that possible?
JK: And also the speakers. Okay I have some images to present for you.
This is the first picture I want to show. I was about 5 years old in this picture. You see I am in my kindergarten uniform, with my father, in police station. I remember we took this picture after my father signed a letter. Later I know that it was a statement letter to stop selling liquor. In the 80s, our house was a countrified bar for local youth. When it turned to be lively, the neighbours were objected and made report to the police.
This image I took it from a newspaper. I keep it because I am very sure I am in this picture. Among this crowd that spill over the street. The picture was possibly taken from an upper level of a building or a mosque minaret or maybe a tree top I don’t really remember. This is the funeral procession of the sultan in 1988. I supposed to be in the front row, sitting on the asphalt. But I still didn’t find it. From my place I can see clearly the sultan’s coffins passing through slowly in a car that was pulled by maybe like six horses. I remember the smell of the flower fragrance. I remember the silence. Vaguely... You can see a BMX bike laid down under the tree behind the crowd. Yeah that’s mine.
The next image is me with my Catholic friends waving two small flags of Indonesia and Vaticans. In 1989, Pope John Paul II visited our city. I and Catholic families in the village walk more than an hour to the army base where the Pope give mass. I was happy to enter the army base. I was fascinated to see the heavily armed soldiers. I was able to see an M-16 from 1m away. We took this picture actually because we want to in a picture with a row of F-16 behind us, but they are too small in the picture.
In the next image, the date is imprinted in the photograph - 30 September 1987. I was with my elementary school mates. The one in the right hand. My face was blocked by my friend’s three finger signs. The picture was taken by my teacher when we stood in a row in front of our school gate. We were ready to walk about 30 minutes to the nearer cinema to see the anti-communist operation movie. And it was not the first time. (39:24)
(Computer ping sounds? Noda/Stains, Installation 2016 (starts 39:47) Singing (starts 40:48))
Next image. The image is not clear anymore. It is me with a girl whose name I don’t remember. And a person whose head was cut off from the picture. The girl was the daughter of a grocery shop owner who was a good friend of my parents. This was taken in a store room of the shop. You see the cardboard boxes behind us? They were full of pirated Western music cassettes. They were just taken down from display because the government suddenly banned pirated Western music records. I think before 86 or 87, all Western musics records in the shops were pirated ones. Not long before that, the government also banned sad songs. I went to this shop to buy my first music album: Van Halen. (42:14)
The next image. These are serial images of tattoos. Erased tattoos actually. This belongs to my neighbour’s buddies. In the 80s, they decided to erase their tattoos because there was a big military operations to eradicate gangsters. And having tattoos or having long hair was risky at that time since the military used this mark to specify their target. And these guys were actually loyal customers of my father’s bar. (42:56)
(Video: ritual on mountaintop. Sounds of nature and then music/singing of Merdeka as shift to people on streets. A speech. People climbing onto a truck. Dancing music to people moving things/daily life. Song changes. Another more upbeat song with people waving to the music. Motorbikes starting up. (46:08) Back to mountaintop ritual. A bell being rung a few times. (46:34) Garden of The Blind, Sound performances, 2000-2002. Horn and other pipe sounds. Turbine or machine gun sounds. Rock band tuning with loud machinery sounds. Chanting/singing. Exercise thuds/beat. Music to accompany the riding of a bicycle. (48:45) Back to the folks ringing the bell on the mountain. Grand Parade (Exhibition View), Installations, 2014. Drum sounds. Model for Mass and Explosion, Installation, 2014. After Voices, Installation, 2016. On Asphalt, Multi-channel video, 2012.) (54:10)
The next image is… This is not the picture I want to show. (Showing Poem of Voices #3, Installation, 2015.) Anyway, this is the picture of my hand built radio transmitter. I made this when I was in secondary school. I did a lot of illegal broadcasts. I named this radio station as Radio Aica-Aibon. The next image is me with my first band in a rental music studio named vivace. Owned by a policeman who is also my guitar teacher. The studio was located in a low-rank police housing. There were no aircon in the studio, so that’s why we were all shirtless. There was only one big window facing an open-air volleyball court, where the police usually hang out. This picture was taken by another police man who tested his new pocket camera. He took a picture of us from that window, laughing and saying “You’re going to be famous!” Our eyes were red by the flash.
The next image. I was possibly about 5 years old. I was carried in the back of my father for being too tired hiking up the sun downs on a hill. (Chanting begins) On top of the hill is the Portuguese-made statue of Mother Mary and a spring. We were here for annual pilgrimage. In this picture, our group was praying in front of Jesus bearing the cross diorama.
(War of Java, Do You Remember? Single channel video, 2008. Cut to mountaintop scene.)
The next image is me receiving a trophy from the head of my village for winning the badminton competition during the Independence Day commemoration in 1986. I was still in my army costume, (After Voices, Installation, 2016.) with wooden rifle and fake mustache, because we did a strip parade previously. The head of the village was also in his army costume with pistol in his hip. He played the role of young Suharto in the parade. (58:00)
(After Voices continues. Firecrackers. Keroncong Concordia, Installation, 2019. Text on screen: “The glorious land I spilled my blood for. The land I adore until the end of time. My peaceful and palmy homeland. A fruitful coconut island. The jasmine island all nation adore. Since a long time ago.” Video with singing. Mountaintop with song in the background.) (1:00:00)
MEV: Thank you very much for that and now we will move on to the last presentation of this panel with Martyn.
MC: Okay. Hi. I am Martyn and I’m from Melbourne and I’m an interdisciplinary artist. I work as a performance maker and a dramaturg and a video artist as well. So I make work that’s usually non text-based. It’s usually technology driven and it uses non-traditional spaces like the public or online. So through the presentation I’m going to present some provocations. Some of those provocations I agree with, and some of them I don’t agree with. But I’m just going to throw them up as a conversation starter. But before I do, you know, it’s funny coming to a dramaturgy conference because of course, everyone, as everyone knows, just goes what is dramaturgy? What does a dramaturg do? Those questions just come all the time and when I was at VCA my lecturer Richard Murphet said to me that the dramaturg is the midwife to the process and I thought that was a really great thing. It kind of makes me think who’s the mother and what is the baby? Is the mother the creative team or is the mother the director or the playwright? And is the baby the work? I don’t know. Anyway, I always kind of abide by that because I think midwife is a really great kind of term for a dramaturg.
So, to start with, it’s been my experience as a maker and Miguel kind of alluded to this before and as a dramaturg and also as a video artist that we very rarely cut technology from the show. It looks great, it’s shiny, our attention is directed to it and why would we let it go? So when I work as a video artist I am quite often arguing myself out of a job, saying things like “Why is that video there? What is the point of it?” And I guess you can never really let go of being a dramaturg even when you are actually the video artist. So often media comes in late in a production and if it hasn't truly integrated into the work it feels like a late addition. It feels like it's been tacked on. And I would argue that technology needs to be rehearsed with the actors as much as say a prop is or the set pieces or the costumes. So you should be working with the technology as early as possible. Hopefully before the actors even get into the room if you're working in the theatre.
So I made a work into 2007 called Wayfarer, which was a live game work, where audience members got to play the performers as if they were avatars in a game. So they would look into a screen and they would talk to them live and then they would direct them through a space that they couldn't see. And we worked for two years to perfect the software and the hardware for this project, and the performers came in with three days before the show went up. And I argued at the time that performers are the most reliable pieces of technology that we had on that show. They're certainly the most flexible, they're the most adaptable and they didn't break as much. So as soon as media content enters the stage space it's already creating a series of complicated relationships. We're incredibly visually literate as humans. We're able to pass a lot of visual information in an adept manner. But I think we're only just beginning to be able to understand how technology works along the older media on stage. A friend of mine who is also a very talented sound artist and technologist once said to me, “Why are we still calling it new media? It’s not new.” And I guess it’s true for those of you that are dubbed millennials or even the generation after that; it may feel like this stuff’s been around forever but it’s worth keeping in mind that the internet is only 30 years old and YouTube started in 2005 and Instagram started in 2010. So these things are new and my answer to him, to that question, is that new media’s still new, well, it depends on your overall view of time. My response to my friend was in relation to a piece of charcoal or a paintbrush, yes, new media is new. So we still have a long way to go. I think we’re able to process language, we’re able to process how the body moves in a choreography, we’re even able to understand mise en scène on stage because we’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, and in terms of like what reading bodies, we've been doing it for millenia. So our ability to read surround sound, our ability to read projection or interactive devices is not at the same level yet. It’s just not there.
So what does a projection mean in a space? What does a big rectangle of light mean? If someone's making a headphone work, why are we being asked to use those devices? What connotations does a TV have in the space? And that's the job of the dramaturg and I feel like, as I’ve said, we've got a long way to go.
So I'm staying in a hotel, thanks very much to ADN for that, and during this week I was in the gym in the morning, and I met a guy who told me, after being on the treadmill for about 20 minutes, that he had a heart attack in January and it was in Shanghai, and as he was being wheeled into the theater he said to the doctor, “What are my chances? Am I going to die?” And the doctor said, “You have 10% chance of living.” And he said, “I need my phone, I need to call my son in England and tell him goodbye.” And so luckily he survived but I just started to wonder what is his relationship now to this? What does it mean for him? What does the phone mean to him? Is it just a device or is it something more? And in 911, which was referenced by Wen-Chi, there all these stories of people that were in the twin towers but they were above where the planes hit, and they were phoning their loved ones, and some of them got hold of their loved ones but some of them didn't, and some of those messages went to message bank, and then those loved ones of those families were trying to contact the Telco companies to retain those last messages, but it was super hard to do that. So what does a phone mean? What is the semiotics of the digital devices that we have. It's not just a functional thing. We talk to our loved ones on them, we watch our favourite shows, we find our way through the world using maps, we soundtrack our world through streaming music, it's loaded full of meanings. And in the theatre we really hone in and we go, “What does that chair mean? What does that piece of set mean? What does that costume mean?” And we need to be doing that for technology as well. You know, why is there a projector in the ceiling? Why is it hidden? Why is it not in the space? These are questions that need to be asked. (1:08:51)
So I want to look at a project (Shell Game) first where I actually asked the question, “Do I need technology in this show?” And the answer was no. So I became really fascinated with the Spratly Islands chain in the South China Sea, which, as a lot of you would know, there's a lot of build up of tension there, 6 or 7 different countries claim islands in that island chain. It's highly contested and these islands are completely uninhabitable. And they were being occupied primarily for strategic gain. And in terms of Australia’s relationship to the region, we have a lot of trade flowing through there into China, into Japan, we also have a lot of our coal goes out, and alcohol going into China props up our economy. Like it's the reason that we've managed to weather the storm as such. So it has impact on us. But I think and I was interested in the idea that no one was really talking about this in Australia and it was a really big thing and it continues to be.
So I thought about how to stage this work. I thought about how to do it with technology but in the end I went with a game structure that actually used tarot cards as the way to deliver the work. So I made a set of tarot cards, 22 of them and each card is an island in that island chain. So I just lost my place. So I offered one participant… So it was for one person at a time and I offered the participant 5 cards, and they chose islands at random, so the stories they got were random and the narrative that was generated was random as well. So someone might get 5 Chinese cards, someone might get 2 Taiwanese and 3 Filipino cards, so the way that the story played out was always going to be different. And because it was such a large sprawling geopolitical work I wanted the opportunity to bring it back to a one-on-one conversation. I wanted to steal this huge thing that was going on and just actually have a discursive conversation with someone about these issues. And when I thought about how technology could be involved in this I actually felt like it would just get in the way. So the technology I used in the show was literally just these cards.
So myself and the participant would walk through the city and we would enter corporate foyers. And I don’t know if you have corporate foyers in Singapore, but in Melbourne these are places that are at the bottom of corporate buildings. They have lounge chairs in them and if you’re a business person then you can go and have a sit, and you can read your paper or you can wait for someone or you can have a coffee and they’re free. Like they’re free. But, and if you’re wearing what I’m wearing in there, then I could sit there all day, but if you’re wearing what Jason was wearing then you get moved on. So that space is a contested space. So these spaces became the islands for me. They became a contested space which is also kind of mirroring what was happening in the actual content of the work. So here’s me in some foyers. So these are the cards. So each of the islands actually had a story to tell as well, and I gave each of them a kind of symbology as well. So this one on the right, this island used to belong to one nation, but then another nation managed to steal it one day when a whole garrison from that island when off to another island for a general’s birthday party, and the other country just swept in and took the island and the soldiers were too hungover to come back and take it over again, and so it’s still is occupied by that other country. The one in the center was the capital of a micronation, so it’s called Flat Island or Patag (Tagalog) and the micronation was called the Free Territory of Freedomland, and it lasted for a little while, but then the Filipino government cracked down on it and yeah that went away. And the last one is a salami, so Chinese government has been sort of slowly picking off islands one by one and then also just building their own islands by dragging kind of sand from nearby reefs and dumping it down. And the salami kind of references a legal term which is called salami slicing, which means that you just cut very very thin slices, which basically means they just take a little bit at a time and then no one can kind of pin anything on them because they’re just taking bits. So I just found that quite amusing.
So in this Shell Game you already have a lot of dramaturgical complexity. The work is mobile, the conversation is open, the order of content is random and the relationship is intimate. So why would I introduce technology into that? Why would I introduce technology into that? And it’s really interesting, Professor Tadashi (Tadashi Uchino) was talking about, you know, a small gesture and about expressing ourselves subtly, but also this idea that the participation is a placebo pill, so I was, you know, I’m sitting within a context of Australia about participation where there is a lot of participatory work at the moment. And so the challenge is to really try and make it mean something and I guess as a participant you don’t want to go along and feel like you’re making all of the work. Like that’s the artist’s job, like why are you making all the work? Anyway, so yeah moving on. (1:14:42)
So a lot of my work plays out in public space. For me I want to awaken the audience by placing them in a new site and generating a new relationship. So I’m interested in this quote where the core of it is “Venues are designed to ossify the relationship between artists and audience most appropriate to the 19th Century”. Just love that’s so much. Like that the relationship in the theatre is being ossified. I just... I really, really love that. So I’m always outside of the theatre, I don't want that ossification to happen to me. And I think that sometimes technology can reset that relationship when you’ve got an interactive work. So sometimes when you move people into a new setting, you recontextualize their behaviour. And so you remove the barrier that people might have to go to the theatre, and I think it was talked about yesterday a little bit that there are barriers to going to the theatre. It tends to be a particular demographic of people that go to the theatre, and especially in Australia as well. So I think technology has the capacity to reset this relationship, it doesn’t always work, but, for example, there are a lot of headphone works in Australia, and a headphone work enables you to be mobile, it enables you to transmit sound over long distances, a very intimate quality of sound as well, so there are technologies that can kind of shift the way that you view theatre and performance.
So I’ll talk about a work called Alter. I’m just going to check the time. What’s the time Yanling? Ten minutes, awesome. I’ll talk about a work called Alter where I was actually the dramaturg. So I’m part of the core team of 4 but I was actually the dramaturg for this work. And Alter is a work for 16 iPads and 16 people. So in Alter we worked against the way that we regularly interact with a portable device. So we’re trying to break the known way in which we hold them. So as we’re using handheld devices there are already relationships and players as I’ve kind of described before. The digital device is ubiquitous in our world. How do we move beyond these associations? How do we get around the associations and the tactility that we already associate with a digital device? So in this case an iPad or a phone. As Wen-Chi referenced before, Marshall McLuhan said the medium is in the message in 1964. So how and why we use technology needs to be constantly questioned because it is very loaded.
In Alter, all 16 audience members… Every member of the audience is responsible for one iPad, for moving it from one configuration to the next, and the experience has some of the hallmarks of a theatre experience. It’s in the dark, it’s temporal, it’s intimate. But we primarily used the objects as sound and light devices. We discovered through testing that any content that had a face on it or a human body on it, or anything that oriented in a particular way, just changed the way that we viewed the device. Whereas if it was in a big field, so like a field like this, and we had an abstract piece of imagery, or it was one piece of imagery that was spread across 16, so this is like some imagery of a tree moving, but it’s kind of cut up into 16 constituent parts. This is actually when it really started to work. Because people forgot that they were iPads, and then they started to go “Oh here is a composite image that’s happening here”, and so their relationship with the device shifted. So the other thing that we tried to do as well is, as you can see from the invigilator here. She’s handing over the iPad in a way that is different. We didn’t just go like that, because then immediately someone would pick it up like that. We tried to give it to them kind of like that, so it becomes, well a tablet, it becomes something different. It becomes a more reverent object, I would say. So the work became a meditation on our connection to nature, our ability to slow down, and to listen, and our collective nature as a species. So this is people lying down, kind of listening, and the spatialized sound that happened with 16 iPads is just incredible. Like they’re very, very good sound devices and our ability to hear things spatially is amazing.
So the real dramaturgical question in this work was how to move people through the configurations we’ve set up. And although the interaction was very minimal, there is a sense that they are responsible for moving the show forward. And I think that in some way means that the audience feels like they’re co-authoring the work with us. Again you know Professor Tadashi, I mean it’s amazing he was talking about this, but you know he talked about delegating responsibility as well, so it’s just like, it’s a very interesting thing. And in a way, the dramaturgy of participation, there’s a new panel for you, “Dramaturgy of Participation”, unless you’ve done it before, that is a really interesting area right now. Like how do you build dramaturgy for participation when you don’t know what the outcome is going to be at all? You have no concept at all. Yeah we were very simple with that interaction, but it did work. So this again kind of goes to the capitalist engagement that Professor Tadashi was talking about earlier. And I’m not entirely on board with this kind of utopia of co-authorship with an audience member, even though participation, I do do participation in my work, because I do want to shift perspective, but I yeah it’s really still up in the air for me, and I work quite hard to make sure that participation also has meaning. It’s not just tacked on because it’s a trend. But if we are going to shift people out of the theatre, if we are going to change their perspective then we need to be thinking about how co-authorship can happen in an interesting way. (1:21:50)
The final work I want to talk about is Body Politic. So I showed a tiny little excerpt of this in the workshop on Friday and this is actually a work that’s for the theatre, and it’s the first work that I’ve made for the theatre in I don’t know how long, a really long time. And I developed the work in a studio at a Taipei artist village, and I wanted to keep the elements really basic and really intimate. The work uses a projector, a camera, a projection and a body, like that’s it, just kind of three elements. And it’s hard, it’s an investigation of the body and technology that feeds back on itself. And it also subtly kind of looks at media culture and our relationship with the camera. Which has changed a lot in the past sort of 10 years. Like how we relate to it, to this camera now, is very, very different to how we did 10 years ago. It’s interesting we have some similarities in the work. So you know like I think that it’s interesting because you look at that and you go oh there’s lots of technology in that show but actually there’s not. There’s that camera that I’m looking at and then there’s a projector and that’s it, that’s the show, like it’s not like your work where there’s a lot of things going on it’s very complicated. Also because I wanted to make the work just by myself, so I wanted to keep it super, super simple, and so that’s kind of how it happened. And the sort of integration of those two things has been very, very married from the very start. It’s embedded in the content, it’s embedded in the practice. So yeah, theatre should be poor and dumb. Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know. I mean this is a great quote that I kind of sometimes give to some students that I teach at VCA: “It seems odd that theatre is seeking to emulate cinema, let celluloid do what it does best.” So film is best as film, and I would also say that some theatre, some mainstage theatre, could be TV as well. So do you know what I mean? If it’s just some people talking on stage, where is the transformation? Where is the thing that you can only do in the theatre? Where is that? And that’s why I very rarely go to the theatre, unfortunately, but you know when I do, like I see a lot of dance, but dance is transformative, like it’s shifting all the time. So in Body Politic, you know, my image is kind of looped, but there’s also this thing about... I’m running this loop but I’m also getting crushed by this loop. So I do some actions in this loop that really, really put pressure on my body. One of them you would have seen in the workshop, those of you who were there, where I jump for four minutes. There’s this one where I hold a speaker above my head for as long as I can, and eventually I get crushed by it. And so it’s like technology is kind of swallowing me in this work, really. And this is me eating a hot dog, which is disgusting. So yeah I just kind of slowly kind of get swallowed by the media. (1:25:17)
And lastly, I guess I just want to say there can be this kind of real-false dichotomy about human is good and technology is bad, that human is organic and it’s fleshy and it’s alive, and technology is just cold and metal and it’s dead, and I just don’t buy that dichotomy at all. So I want to kind of almost conclude with this beautiful quote from Tommy Orange who’s a native American writer, and he kind of unpicks this dichotomy by basically saying the materiality that exists inside technology has actually come from the earth anyway. So it’s all the spirituality, and I think you talked about spirituality and aura, like there can be. And I think Björk said that as well, like there’s spirit in the technology. So in summation, with thinking in a rigorous way about how and why we include technological elements in our performance will have a great impact on the quality of these works. We will also get better at reading how technology can work alongside these other elements and hopefully that means things will feel more integrated. And finally, is it possible that through the interrogation of media and technology and performance, that we can also extend that investigation into our daily lives, and therefore have a more integrated sense how digital devices and media intersects with us as humans? Thank you. (1:27:05)
MEV: Well, thank you very much for those three presentations. We’re going to have some Q&A now. I just want to take an opportunity to respond a little bit to these three presentations before we open this up for questions. And you know before you... This has been such a wonderful session, so rich, so many things that you have mentioned. I remember there was a quote with which the keynote ended, from Professor Uchino about the multiple threads, and I’m not going to try to bring all those threads together, but I’m going to try to address one of the things that I saw throughout your work, and I want to throw that at you and see if you agree with my interpretation of these things that I picked up. Or before I do that though, there was something that Martyn you mentioned, like this metaphor of the midwife and I think it’s such a strange and inadequate metaphor in many ways. I mean you mentioned that you know sometimes… But I was still thinking about that. So there were two things that I was thinking about, that one, besides all the complexities of the gender issues of the metaphor and of the many things that people might want to unpack.
But one way in which I think this is very different, is that yesterday people were talking about how the dramaturg is also somebody who unsettles, and this is of course, something like a thread that has been coming through all these many events. There’s also this Indonesian word of the pengganggu, somebody who disturbs, who creates a disturbance, and I think that’s exactly not what you want a midwife to do. Like you know, actually the midwife is there to reassure you of a complex process and to assure you that it is going to be okay. It’s actually I wanted to suggest, is the dramaturg the anti-midwife? Is somebody who says whoa actually this is maybe not going to be okay? Maybe this is not… It’s somebody who’s there to seed doubt. And the other thing, the way in which the midwife is the dramaturg I think, is in the sense that it’s a human technology. That it’s actually, I’m overextending this a bit too much, but there’s this over medicalized business of medicine, which in my mind I could see over-technologized theatre, and the midwife is the human, who has subjectivity and can fail, but who brings all these different things.
To kind of connect the thoughts a little bit to the other talks. There were things that were mentioned or addressed throughout which were: The body, I think that came very strongly, but also absence, and I wanted to offer that as a point and see if you would agree with that reading. And Wen-Chi you also mentioned how you know you wanted to build this perfect machine, and the difficulty in doing that actually helped you rethink your connection to the technology, and you offered this wonderful term of like the body of the technology. That everything has a body, everything is like a human and that sometimes also this less is more, or moving down the thing you need to remove, the things that are actually better there through absence. That point was illustrated in very strong ways I think by Jompet’s intervention, that I think you also made us look differently at something we thought we expected, and that to what extent… I’m mixing metaphors, with apologies, but there’s a thing about a train as well that you mentioned, and I don’t think you could possibly show anything that would make us have that reaction to the train. You know, like no matter what anybody would show on a stage or on a screen, we’re never going to have that reaction. So maybe the only way that we could have that reaction is through absence. The only thing that would make us rethink is absence. Or how do we change how we handle the devices, as Martyn said, like how do we offer the phone, how do we do things, as should be. Here are this point I am going in many different directions, but to bring it to a slightly more concrete thread, I got the impression that you all were talking about the body and absence. And if I would want to extract a lesson perhaps or a piece of advice from here is that the role of the dramaturg in relation to technology is really about removing things, about absence, and about getting people to rethink what they think they know about how they see things. So is this an overly simplistic reading of what you were saying? I mean do you agree with this interpretation of what you said? I just want to leave it there and then invite you all to respond. (Nervous audience laughter) (1:32:39)
MC: I guess, just cause I know Wen-Chi’s work a bit, and it’s interesting at the end of Loop Me and the end of Wave, you’ve set up the body’s driving this work, but then the body actually leaves in both of those works, and the technology continues. So this loops visual version of her just keeps going for maybe 10, 15 minutes? And in Wave, the kind of sculptural lighting system just continues, and there’s this really interesting question of like, you know, how is that connected to your body? Your body is absent now, but it’s continuing to go, and somehow you’re still here, even though you’re absent you’re still here with us as well through this technology. And I love that when technology can take on a kind of… It’s same in your (Jompet’s) work actually as well, can take on a kind of almost human kind of form or something.
SW: I think in the… Because I also have a lot of thoughts on this absence or what this disappear in working with technology, and then I think as a dancer or physical worker, I try to protect the holiness of my physical presence. But in a way like while working with technology, I try to believe or I try to incorporate the presence of the medium I work with as well. And so for example in Loop Me, I think the idea is that the… It was for me to observe when the image of the body was taken by the video and suddenly then project into another surface, and then through the video manipulation you can change the timing, you can figure 8 it, and you can recompose it and for me it was a slightly shock to see that, to see your own body treated, or being shifted in that way. And so I questioned at that time while your movement is transformed into information itself, it becomes 0 1 then. And then through that 0 1, you can actually transform this information into another format. It can be a sound, it can be an image, it can be any graphic. So for that piece, second piece like you mentioned, I wasn’t there, like I wasn’t there. So it created a lot of critiques of questioning if we go to the theatre and the dancer is not there and it’s only the video left, is it still a theatre piece? So there’s a big discussion on that. And I also think the absence although my idea is to create a perfect machine, because I think the desire for technology, in a way, I question. Because we always talk about time in the future, what we can do in the future. But through a study of digital architecture, I realized the form and or the architecture, the space, the design, is actually going into a very organic way. So it was imagined that I kind of reference it back to the time when we lived in a cave. So while I work with technology, actually I always refer to the past. I constantly want to refer to the past. Where the condition of human being, where we want to be, and what we want to, how we want to communicate with nature, or with our body. So we also look at what we call aesthetical mistake from the machine, because we thought machine can repeat perfectly, but at the time I worked a lot with copy machine, because copy machine it should be 100% that give a perfect copy, so I try to copy and try to see how this machine will make mistakes. And so by observing the images it prints out, hundreds of prints, it turns out after thousands of prints, the quality goes down a little bit. So I realized the machine does make mistakes, like that doesn’t cope up to our expectations. On building that perfect machine, because it’s like the idea when we try to build the robot, we want this human being same like me, and try to have the same emotions and same reactions like human beings. But at that time, my team we were questioning because actually the event mentioned the Fukushima power plant and it was a huge event for us, because we start to question the arrogance of technology and how much we believe in the perfection of how technology can offer us. But turns out there’s a mistake. And the mistake might not come, of course we build machine, actually then you see the mistake also from human being as well, like you know to cope with our expectation but then compared to what we can actually do. (1:39:00)
JK: I think I started making artwork just right after the dictator fell in Indonesia in 1998 and I think I just, was one of Indonesians who exploded to express their euphoria, who was not allowed before to read what was hidden before, and from time to time we found that a lot of things were hidden or shapeless during the reformation, so I think… Yeah now I’m looking back and I think I’m one of the Indonesians who wanted to get the shape of what was shapeless before, through the technology and so, I think I worked a lot with images of course, I created a course or like I think the Noda installation, the leaking room is quite representative to express this, that is creating, how to say, to bring this the trauma, trauma is quite abstract and shapeless, it’s like being in a leaking room, you want it to be white but it’s never white.
MEV: We can open this up to questions, I guess there are plenty of things that people might want to share on these topics and then ask our participants. So do we have any questions? I was asking another very quick question. Inspired by what you said just now about the politics of media, and that was something that you were not… None of you mentioned that explicitly, but I’m just curious to what extent are the politics, I mean you have a work of course called Body Politic, Martyn, but I wondered to what extent when you are doing things in your work, is that actually a concept that you use? Or is it also too wide to be meaningful?
MC: (Inaudible short answer, “Do what feels right?”)
JK: I don’t know how to answer this…
MEV: Can I go first? Sure, yeah and I don’t know if anybody else wants to jump on that.
SW: On the concept?
MEV: Yeah is there a useful concept? I mean one thing that you also mentioned in your presentation is that you found both dramaturgy and technology are not that useful, so I wonder if, in the context of technology, is the political a useful concept or is it also too broad and too abstract or complex to be of use? (1:43:03)
SW: When I talked about, I didn’t really apply the two words, dramaturgy and technology, because I think at that time we tried to, we think the technology is too technical. Because technology doesn’t mean hardware, doesn’t mean machine. So we thought that this term is a bit too narrow for what we want to do at that time. So we thought of… There’s a lot of terms, for example, new media arts, or tech arts, or multidisciplinary art, or interdisciplinary art, or transdisciplinary art. But for example interdisciplinary art, I didn’t really understand at that time and because I think it’s when I back in Taiwan, I felt like it’s for granted theatre is a very multiple disciplinary. So I didn’t think in this part that I’m coming to combine different disciplines. So I just think of like what is my question and what I want to perceive, this is my beginning point and then never look back. So we see technology as a tool. So it doesn’t mean that… It depends on what’s the concept for our project that year, and so then we try to decide either we want to use video or we need to build some kinetic installation. And dramaturgy for me is because we work as a collective, in a way it’s a collective but I’m the one who decides the starting question and then along the way because... I think because in the beginning, although I studied many subjects, I know that I would not go into, for example, Isadora, and study for the software, for a year. So at that time I discussed with my team, saying is there any way we can work together, because technology is moving really fast, and each of us in the team, we have a different medium, so one is in sound, one is in video, and one can do the mechanical design, and so we decided to share the job and along the way I tried to put the team together because each person is a strong individual in a way, so we don’t have this hierarchy of dancer or choreographer or this kind of thing so it’s really trying to be as equal as possible, and then to see what can start from there. And along the way, dramaturgy is to direct… Not direct though… Is to observe what the material comes out from the artist, and then try to put it in order I think.
MC: Just briefly, I think there is some politics of new media in that only certain people can afford to use it, and then also as Zihan (Loo Zihan) actually said in the workshop on Friday, in Body Politic the person that is in front of the camera and who I am has a particular meaning as well, if it was someone else of a different culture then that would have a different meaning as well, just you know. So I think there is inherent politics in technology. Yeah. (1:47:09)
Aud 1: Thank you, sorry, we are not pick up on too much of what you said in the summary, but just as a mother who’s had three children, I did not want an anti-midwife, but as a director, I’d love a dramaturg. So I think the midwife probably does have a place, but I know you’re being slightly provocative in that, but don’t give any pregnant mother an anti-midwife, but do give a dramaturg to a director I would suggest. But it was just interesting as well I’m picking up in your relationship to the mention of the first moving image being a train and loved the story that everyone ran from the theatre. And it got me thinking interestingly as to… I think there are many reasons why moving images don’t make people flee from the theatre now and that’s probably a lot to do with the understanding of theatre etiquette as well as the understanding of a moving image, but it made me think about actually as an audience member, my biggest joy is when I feel like I’ve been hit by a moving train. Whenever I have sat in an audience and felt that, then I know I’ve had a response to the piece I’ve just seen, which in turn… I was thinking when did that last happen because it doesn’t happen all the time when I go to the theatre. But certainly a piece that was in SIFA last year, being 1984 co-produced by State Theatre of South Australia and Headlong. And I was also reminded of another production where I really did feel like I was hit by a train which was The Maids, done by Sydney Theatre Company with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert. And both those pieces as well it was interesting in relation to what you’re talking about that they were fantastic uses of technology and producing those pieces of work. And how the creative team had incorporated them, made it so fantastically seamless, it was so meant to be there, which was just so fabulous as an audience member, but also as a theatre practitioner, to see. And Martyn it was your comment where you said that the biggest question relating to dramaturgy, to this concept is, and into that awful feeling of shit have I just been to Universal Studios or have I been to see a great piece of art? And that conflict is why we’re doing this. You said in the theatre, but in relation to your work as a piece of theatre, would maybe make it even that broader, and the fact that in a theatre makes us often think of a stage and rather than the lights of work that you talked about as well. But in light of all those sort of thinking and what you’ve all brought to this panel, is in terms of us, we move the work we do as directors forward, and as dramaturgs involvement in it, the ways of educating and creating a greater understanding of how we can incorporate technology into our work without it feeling like an add on, so that we do come out with those feelings of being hit by a train each time, when we’ve had the joy of using it. How can we make that happen more and more, to make it a really constructive piece?
MC: I think it’s interesting cause the three of us are makers who also are interested in technology and so both of the ideas of the performance and the technology come together at the very start. I think when you get into trouble is when it’s the theatre show, and you’ve written the script back here, I talked about this in the workshop. The script’s written back here, and then the production starts here, and this is also when the video comes in. And so it’s like, there’s all this time when the script is being worked on and reworked and being edited and there’s the dramaturg involved and all this stuff, and then the video comes in here. And so the video actually needs to come here, it needs to come at the same time. And then they’re built together, because you started with the ideas of the technology the same time that you started with the ideas of the choreography. And you’re building your machines with the idea of where they’re going to go. And same with me. I’m a video artist as well, so I’m constantly thinking in tandem about those things. It’s actually about changing the… In terms of the theatre company or a major theatre company, it’s about changing the modes of production… Shifting the time. Cause media production takes time, and theatre directors don’t understand that, you know? You go out of the room as a video artist, you’ll make something, you’ll bring it back into the room and they’ll go “Oh we’ve cut that scene”. And you’ve just wasted 3 hours. So the people… That understanding needs to be better. It needs to be better. Yeah. (1:52:47)
Aud 2: Yeah. This is still being formed up here. So I’ll try to pose it as eloquently as possible, but just to clarify something that Martyn brought up regarding my comment during the workshop, is how technology inherently has a gendered perspective or classist perceptive or racialized perspective. The example I used is cameras where it’s designed intentionally to film under, to capture certain skin tones, under certain types of conditions. So there is also the angle that I like to bring into the conversation, somewhat linked to the question on politics. What really struck me about watching Jompet’s video is this sublime awe and terror in confronting an assembly. And it’s somewhat linked to what Cui (?) was bringing in, in the morning, when we talked about very romanticized notion of theatre as a form of assembly, versus the very visceral and potentially violent assembly that has been utilized and instrumentalized in a way through technology and as a means to assemble and to gather and to change their perspective and to enact violence under illiberal regimes around this region. And technology as a device of power and control, especially within the trend of theatre or I’m thinking about like that and I’m also thinking about Wen-Chi’s you know it’s using technology as a ambiguous veil to dissipate responsibility beyond a single figure. So it’s nobody, it’s an absence of a body, and it’s also not a single body. And what happens when technology is dramaturgically used for that effect and means? And what does it mean for us to be producing theatre under these social conditions.
Aud 3: I’m sorry can I add on something to what he just said so you also have more time to think? (Audience laughter) It’s a tough question to really process. So I was thinking like I can see a lot of this in the work that you have shown, all three of you, but in the sense of the way in which it was presented there seems to be some kind of dichotomy set between the human and technology, which you have broken in a lot of ways in the kind of work which you have done. But I would like to think about power, the question of power, and not in the Foucauldian sense where we know that for a long time now the state has used technology, especially medical legal control of the citizen’s body for regulatory purposes right? And for governance? But in terms of the other end, where it is not the state, it is the artist, who is using technology and in that sense I would think that’s photography, is a technology of the production of the human, right? So what are the ways in which technology is used to produce the self creatively? And where do you really think technology ends and the human begins because I’m very influenced by this particular essay written by Paul Preciado, it’s called Testo Junkie. It’s on the trans male experience of taking testosterone. And this person has written at length in a bio-political frame that they’ve borrowed from Foucault, but also taking it much beyond that. So don’t you think that photography, theatre, cinema, is also a technology of producing the human in a creative sense?
SW: Okay. I think I would… From where to start? Okay I think maybe like as I see the technology as an extension of the man. For example, when I worked with kinetic installation or sound or lights, I didn’t think them as a something apart or something alien. So I try to incorporate it in a way that we are one body. And there’s this, I think, you mentioned about this the medium is the message? And because the medium is something that you use to, as a body, as a material itself, you can say this is the materially body and then there is something that you want to say. And for me, I try not to have this binary separation but indeed this helps me to start to think like man-machine or your aura or these materials, your body as materials. And technology for me, there’s this kind of feeling of… That the video itself is not simply something else, it’s from your physical presence. When you share this presence, it becomes part of your presence. I think that this kind of, in this book, the medium is the message, trying to say that while you repeatedly read the same news every day, the content of the news becomes actually not important. The importance is the repetition of the broadcast. The way how they broadcast. And it’s repeating like a wave, sending to you. And what’s the content is might not be that important. Because it’s about this repetition itself. So I try not to think of that because I think as a human being reacting to technology, there’s much more than that. And not to say that we don’t want… I think that this part of our, you know… How we evolve, our time, and you somehow, instead of thinking to avoid it, something apart, I would try to incorporate as if… Yeah. (Laughs) Something.
MC: I don’t really have anything amazing to add. But just jumping off from the, yeah. I think I’m trying to yeah, the technology and the body in the work that I make is completely… I try to co-opt it, I try to integrate it completely, so I’m kind of… I work with the same system quite often, so it becomes part of my body. It’s cyborgian in a way. Yeah. And all of the things you’re saying about how they all exist and who creates this technology and why do they do it and what’s it for and all of those things but I’m hoping that inside what I’m doing it is interrogating those things at the same time. So it’s not just I’m playing into a kind of power structure, I’m playing into a kind of capitalist structure. But that hopefully I’m actually interrogating what that thing is, and that thing is my body. So. Yeah.
JK: I don’t know if I’m answering the question, but I really… Some learn or inspired or interested in the well like the people who with motorcycle, with the boom boom, during the dictatorship, this idea to have this motorcycles without mufflers and doing this is a way to, because you are a muted, you are muted, you are not allowed to speak up any critical thinking to the government, and it is replaced by these sounds. And then they become axis, I mean these people become visible, become hurt, but in a different way, not in a way people want to see them actually. Not the way he want to be actually. It’s a… I don’t know if it’s great answers. (2:02:35)
MEV: We have 5 more minutes, so perhaps a couple of questions, maybe one complicated question or two easy ones.
Aud 4: Hi, Michael Earley from LASALLE College of the Arts. I was just wondering if any of you saw ST/LL in the festival and just what your reaction was? I mean, it seems to me it was absolutely stunning production, extraordinary use of technology, in which the human is subservient to the technology, the humans were just kind of a prop, and it’s billed as a kind of theatre piece installation. So I was just wondering what you… How you saw that? Cause in all of your talks I kept thinking about that because I could see relations, complicated and simple relations to that particular production.
SW: I saw that piece in Taipei and Dumb Type is some group I really like a lot, like early Dumb Type works. And then I think because in the beginning a few pieces, they really tried to… It’s the urgency of the existence crisis. So and then facing the age of technology. So I see the speed. And then afterwards in ST/LL, I feel it is aesthetically established, like in terms of visual aspect of technology, and it’s as clean and sharp in a way, I appreciate its quality. But as the content itself, as body as a prop, I wouldn’t… In a way I try to have a more, me myself watching shows with technology, I would rather to think it more layers. Like because there’s one thing I also work with, is the close relationship of technology and human being. And it’s based on the mythology of narcissist, and seeing that, you see your projection as if you see your projection in a virtual space, and then you fall in love with it. And while these projections are extended a way from your body in a way you’re still the one, but that it’s a kind of extended part is already something else. I guess it’s a bit like mother and child relationship. So it’s a different entity as well, although it’s come from your own self. And when it is something else, I guess in this also a layer of, the you know, the human being or I would say the dance shouldn’t be the only centre of the show. This is what I insist also, when I’m doing a piece. Is that because most of the time I think I have a discussion with new media artists. They say like most of the time when we work with choreographers we feel like technicians. So it’s to serve the choreographer, and the dance is the centre of expression, of narration, and it shouldn’t… For me it shouldn’t be, because if you talks about that each medium and we all compose as a whole body, then for me there’s a time for dance itself, there’s time for the props, there’s time for the music and then there’s time for the another kinetic installation, so each one for me there’s a purpose and I think that when I see ST/LL I try to visualize how the director wanted to compose his visual flow. And then I feel visual flow, visually, even it look as a still image, that I try to compose the still image into movement, and that’s also in my practice. So it’s not about dance, it’s a series of photography, like photos, and through series of photos you have a flow of what you want to say. So I watched the performance in this perspective. (2:07:29)
MEV: We have time for one more… Or perhaps… Oh we have one more question.
Aud 5: It’s actually not a question, just the reaction. Thank you so much, cause I also work a lot with technology or I think about it a lot also because I’m a Gen Z I guess. And when I think about, not just technology, but maybe new technologies or current technologies, and when I think about it in like when I work, it’s all about affordances, like what are these new technologies affording us to do, not just in the work but in the world as humanity, what is it allowing us to do, and then what is the meaning behind that affordance. I think if there’s… To me if there’s a summary of how I relate to new technologies, it’s how affordances and the meaning behind it. So yeah. Just wanted to…
MEV: Thank you and I think that’s a very good point on which to end this conversation. There are many lingering thoughts and lingering questions that I hope, you know, to paraphrase, there’s a time for dance, there's a time for lunch, and there’s a time for questions, so hopefully those things will continue to inform each other. And if you can just join me in thanking all the artists for this panel. (Applause) And thank you again to ADN for inviting us and for organizing this. As you know, this is the first time that there’s a technology and dramaturgy panel as part of this event, but hopefully not the last. And thank you all very much. (2:09:21)