This Will Never Catch On: Zoom Theaters
The view from an upstairs window, Le Gras, Burgundy, France. The earliest known surviving photograph, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. Known as the first photograph.
In recent weeks my Theater Directing class at Columbia University has met with our teacher, Brian Kulick, to discuss Shakespeare. Each class begins with a brief preamble before we get down to the pentameters, in which Brian asks us simply, “How are you guys doing?
“What have you been up to since I last saw you?”
Usually, these introductions are an opportunity for gossip and goings on around town. So and so’s got a new show opening, or one of us has seen something that blew our minds (or bored us to tears). They always buzz with excitement. There’s something kinetic about being around that table. The energy is that of excited novitiates swapping secrets. There is something in the air that unites us, that bonds us together.
In the last weeks of term we, like the rest of the world, entered the Zoomiverse, our preamble changed dramatically. When Brian asks, “How is everyone doing? What have you been up to?” the answers come dull and plaintive:
“You know.”
“The same.”
“Nothing much.”
Looking at the pixelated silence, Brian says,
“You know... this Zoom thing is... It’s... I don’t know about you guys but it’s like...what Kindle is to books, Zoom is to people!”
Since theaters everywhere shuttered down, theater people have made valiant efforts to make do on the platform. There have been Zoom readings of new plays. Zoom workshops. In a Zoom visit with director Katie Mitchell, she described how she was rehearsing, by Zoom! The graduating acting class at The Lir, a conservatory in Ireland, did a Zoom showcase. Director Rachel Chavkin and playwright Jeremy O’Harris, gave Zoom masterclasses to huge audiences through New York Theater Workshop. Richard Nelson’s play WHAT DO WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT? has been, gone, and will soon return... to Zoom!
One of the surprising advantages of the Covid-19 crisis for the theater world is increased access to expertise, archival productions and - most excitingly - worldwide conversation on the nature and necessity of theater. That conversation, about the essence of theater, has rarely been so apposite. For that is the question which this sudden forced acceptance of the Zoomiverse, and more generally the internet and technology as a theatrical tool suggests: a crisis of liveness and a crisis of audience.
In many ways theater is the most conservative of artforms. Leaving aside for a moment the relative political progress (from the point of view of equity) in the theater of the 21st Century (the bar was not high), let me be clear: I speak from the longview. Historically, it seems to me that despite theater’s unique interpolation of the other arts forms, (and perhaps because of this very interpolation) it has been considerably slower to innovate on the fundamentals of its form than its cousins in dance, music, painting, sculpture, the literary arts and so on. The provenance of innovation in the theater tends to be sub-disciplinary. What I mean is that developments in the theater emerge parallel to and contingent upon innovation in the other arts. This is particularly true of the literary avant-gardes and their crossover from prose and poetry to playwriting. Notable exceptions to the rule include dadaist performance art, futurist synthesi and queer performance practice.
We are poised at a critical juncture. The ability with which we adopt, adapt to and master the new technologies now at our disposal is not only necessary to the survival of the form but furthermore, as unique a moment in the history of theater as the Photographic Moment in the history of painting.
The earliest known photograph, taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826-ish from an upstairs window of his home, looks out on a stark horizon. The contrast is high and the forms are aggressive. A white triangle (the roof of an outhouse?) protrudes towards us, like the threat of an uncertain future. Looking at this photograph, it’s hard to believe that the invention of photography would change the world. It seems absurd that this muddy, monochromatic abstraction would change the art of painting forever, and ironically, precipitate the rise of abstract art.
When photography was introduced, representational painting was defunct. It was suddenly irrelevant whether a Master could paint the Tuilerie Gardens realistically. You could do that with a camera. It’s what Manet can do with paint: the forced-short foreground and the faceless figures in his cacophony Music in the Tuilerie Gardens that makes it a masterpiece. With the rise of photography, the purpose of painting had changed forever.
The Photographic Moment forced painters to go back-to-basics in order to survive: What was painting? What was perception? What was paint? What did it feel like? What kind of paint? What colour? What medium? What was color? Light? Shadow? How much paint? What is the weight of a painting? What is worth the weight? What do we put on the canvas? Landscapes? Figures? What is landscape? What does ‘figurative’ mean?” How do you paint a person? Why would you? What do you paint them on? What is the world? Who are we?
Without photography, neither modernism nor postmodernism (nor whatever’s happening now) in painting would exist as we know them today. It is my hope then, that in this dimming of the theater world, we go back-to-basics. That we reexamine the fundamentals of our form. We have similar questions to answer. What does this word “live” mean? What does this word “audience” mean? It behooves us to ask how we have looked at these fundamentals in the past, and how we are looking at them now.
Well, what are they? Here’s my best shot at two very general definitions, to help us out. I look forward to your disagreements:
Liveness: Action in real time before an audience.
Audience: The group participating in the art.
Theater-making manuals in the latter half of the 20th Century have emphasised time and space as the principal materials of the theater maker. Without too much trouble, one can see how these favorite paints of the theater have to be rethought in light of Covid-19, and how they are embedded in my definitions.
I spoke to a playwright friend yesterday about a reading of her new play. We joked about how the interminable New Play Pause was doubly as interminable over Zoom. Last week in the virtual space of his masterclass, a dance teacher said, “Jon, I can’t see you, but I can hear you. Can you mute so we can’t hear your kids.”
“Oh gosh I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. Cute that they joined.”
Sometimes, in digital time, there’s a Zoom glitch and everything momentarily speeds up. Somehow, I have had time for a five-second glitch, followed by rapid acceleration and then - impossibly - I have rejoined just in time to pick up the conversation, apparently without missing a beat.
Intellectually, these glitches in space-time are exciting for all of about one second. One desperate theater maker’s second. There’s hope! But, isn’t there something “shallow feeling” about all of this? There’s a bad mouth taste to the whole thing. Just thinking about it my eyes feel tired. My teacher Brian might call it that Kindle-feeling. The people on the other end aren’t all there. Fiona Shaw recently attributed this feeling to the way we read people:
“You know, when you speak to people, you read their whole body.”
The people in the squares look like our friends and colleagues and famous people and family, but they’re not all there. Disembodied. Distracted. Occasionally decapitated by a pixel wind.
It would be remiss of us to forget, in our eagerness to adopt, adapt and master these technologies, the third (to me, and in no particular order) most important material of the theater, the body. Our unique selling point in a world of streaming content, pixel winds and warp speeds remains the presence of a physical body. Right now, it is exactly the absence of such a body that is the most theatrical element of the digital theater experience.
So, when we return to the theaters the audience will be faced by a liveness that has a very high value. The idea of storytelling happening in real time before our eyes will be radical again, not only because it will be risky to gather together. The audience will be changed. They may have to sit further apart physically. Emotionally they will just have weathered not only the virus, but the financial depressions and mental health pandemics to follow. They will be infected with a very powerful story about the danger of time spent in a space with other bodies. They may, as Dr. Fauci recommends, no longer shake hands. They may no longer embrace. They will be the post-Covid-19 audience. They will be the post Covid-19 theater. Clapping will have a new meaning. The theater cough will have a new meaning. They will want to remember what intimacy is. They will want to know that sitting together is worth the risk. When we return to our “de-densified” theaters, sitting alone together might even be a bit dangerous, a bit sexy.
There is a chance, for about five minutes, that theater will be transgressive again.
We are at a pivotal moment for the theater formally. I advocate for a back-to-basics approach, and (in theater lingo) an “yes, AND” response to what I consider the Photographic Moment before us. Let us recognize and seize the opportunity to re-invent the fundamentals of theater-making, while simultaneously remembering that the art of theater is an art of people, and that people need to touch and be touched. A revolution of the basics will allow us to transcend this relatively tethered idea of the theater as contingent on the forms which make it up.
Technology in the theater is nothing new. There have of course been a great many movements for integration of technology in the theater. I think of my first internship, with the Wooster Group. Elizabeth LeCompt and her people were way ahead of the theater-on-screen game. How prescient their work feels now. I think of Katie Mitchell, with her “live cinema.” I think of my colleague Nicholas Johnson, working on Beckett’s Play in Trinity College’s virtual reality laboratory. I think of my peers MALAPROP in Dublin, whose recent short film, GULP (a YouTube video), felt inherently theatrical with no theater in sight. My brother recommended I watch a favorite rapper’s gig on the videogame Fortnite. I said, “This will never catch on.”
We can learn borderland-lessons from these pioneers in theater and technology, about mediation, synchronicity, hypertextuality, gamification, etc., etc. At the end of the day though, I have a nagging doubt. I suspect you have it too. That the digital is simply inimical to the theatrical. No offence to kindle-users, I just prefer the real thing! I cannot pretend I was always for the incorporation of theater and technology. On the contrary, theater for me was about pure physical presence. I sit down front, in the middle. What I value above all is the immanence of the actor. The arrest of action. The common breath of audience attention.
Increasingly, I fear that my stubbornness to embrace the necessity of change in the theater will be a mistake, not only quickly limiting my job opportunities, but also blinding me to the future of our art form.
To 19th Century painters, photography must have seemed crude, maudlin, maybe a little distasteful. It must have felt like the end of painting. I imagine being there, and telling myself, “This will never catch on.”