In Psycho-Opera the media, namely TV, was “personified.” It loomed over us like an android Golem. It entered our brains like a worm in the ear, inhabited our bodies, spoke through our tongues, flicking in and out of the collective mouth, locked in a kiss. And when it fucked us, was it rape, seduction or masturbation? We were in love with our captor, the parent/child who was none other than the projection of our own psyches, a kind of electronic manifestation of our unconscious.
Where does the body and the brain of one individual end and another begin? The collective body and its schizoid brain stood before us having a psychotic seizure, a freak-out, a breakdown. It was America embodied in the man/woman Leyland (John Fleck) who was hallucinating. The boundary line between fact and fiction, the real and imagined, had dissolved. History was reduced to a parade of celebrity personae, moments remembered from movies. The newscaster’s headlines collapsed and blended into each other in fractured sentences without meaning or syntax, as if a disinterested God was sitting up in the cosmos with his remote randomly switching channels in a frenetic search for reruns of I Love Lucy.
The central event that triggered our societal breakdown was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a live TV spectacle that marked the coming of age of the age of TV. It was the end of innocence, a psychic “rape” in which Fleck cast Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald as the unlikely lovers, victims and perpetrators, sacrificial icons.
Fleck played Leyland to the histrionic hilt, flailing about Sam Hale’s pristine, ominously antiseptic set with its circuit-printed floor and TV-headed robots manipulated by technicians in hospital attire. He switched effortlessly from male to female personae, singing in an operatic falsetto, feverishly wrenching clothes and gyrating lasciviously while engaging in a dialogue with the multiple personalities who inhabited his psyche via the TV monitors. They included his mother, father, psychiatrist, an evangelical preacher, a news anchorman, a movie star, politician, criminal, etc. In each he sought salvation, liberation, love. None was to be found.
The solution to his schizophrenic, paranoid, manic-depressive rantings should be obvious to all of us since it has already been implemented in this decade. They gave him a lobotomy. He returned, “normalized,” a Reagan-era brainwashed Mr. Feel Good, a certified amnesiac, a Yuppie in a suit, a jargon-spouting hustler with a smile and a wave, a well-packaged media product. Everything is just fine! Right, folks!
Psycho-Opera was a farcical tragedy, a personal history that was a parable, an “opera” for our time.
Commentary Intermedia: Performance and Video (1983)
This is the first article in a new column on interdisciplinary/intermedia arts. Being a subject often set adrift in a semantic labyrinth, it seems appropriate to begin by examining the terminology. The words “interdisciplinary” and “intermedia” have become the new code words to describe a large and varied body of works that are fortunately still operating in a relatively undefined and essentially borderless territory. For lack of any other sufficiently broad descriptive classification these works have often been loosely labeled “Performance,” which is as good a term as any. Sometimes for the convenience of critics, curators, and/or audiences, these performance works are also called Postmodern Dance, New Theater and mostly recently Opera, thus placing them in an approachable and identifiable context.
The prefix inter means among, between, together, and also reciprocally — a mutual exchange. However discipline and media are not the same thing. A discipline is a “teaching” or training, or more generally an area of knowledge to be conveyed, a system of ideas, a mode of thought, a methodology. Media are the means and materials through which ideas are conveyed. Thus in contemporary terms one could define disciplines as information systems, and media as the transmitters. In the arts the distinction between the two often becomes unclear and breaks down.
Performance is pan-disciplinary. Video functions as both discipline and medium, making the issues surrounding it particularly complex. In this column I will discuss video, film, and audio as media within the context of performance. I will examine the ways new media and technologies have affected and changed the performance arts, and the prospects for the future — who is doing what and how, the resulting controversies, and creative possibilities.
Given that video as an art medium to be utilized in performance has been available for approximately twenty years, it has been successfully integrated theatrically and conceptually in relatively few performance works. One reason may be economic — a matter of resources and access. Or perhaps the radical innovations of the 1960s, in performance forms, structures, ideology, and methodology, in dance, theater, music, and visual arts, were necessary pre-requisites for interaction with the new medium of video as an art form and a technology that has altered the social, political, and cultural landscape at an ever-increasing rate. But how far have we come since video first showed its face on stage in the 1966 performance works of Robert Rauschenberg and Alex Hay in Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering, as part the now historic Experiments in Art and Technology events? The number of artists to use video innovatively in performance, with proficiency, intelligence, imagination, and the resources to do so, is far less than one might expect or hope.
A few recent performance works whose use of video meets that criteria merit examination — Bad Smells by choreographer Twyla Tharp, Obedience School by Laura Farabough, artistic director of Nightfire, and Hajj by writer/director Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines. Each artist uses it differently for different purposes and with dramatically different results. In both Tharp’s and Farabough’s pieces the media is part of the subject matter; thus, the visual presence of the technology on stage is an inherent part of the work’s form and content. Breuer, on the other hand, treats the technology as merely another image-making tool; thus, the mechanisms are invisible and the images created with them are an integral part of the metaphoric structure of the work. While Breuer’s approach is the most innovative as well as the most complex and sophisticated, all three artists succeed in their intentions.
The visual aesthetics of Tharp’s Bad Smells, as expressed by the costumes and make-up, are within a current vogue one might aptly dub “post-atomic, post-techno mutant barbarian” via The Road Warrior film, and perhaps Doris Lessing’s uncomfortably prophetic novel Memoirs of a Survivor. As the title suggests, Bad Smells metaphorically has a nasty odor. It evokes the stench of sweat and piss, disease and decay. The raggedly clad dancers menacingly bare their teeth, snarl and grin. They are threatening and threatened.
Dance, like film and video, deals first with time and motion. In Bad Smells, a video camera is attached to one of the dancers, binding them together in complicity, partners in a perfectly synchronized duet. The camera becomes a performer, an instrument of the choreography, a transmitter of images from the perspective of the performer’s body. The performer becomes a camera in motion, persistent and aggressive, moving amongst the other performers on a mirrored floor — sparring, taunting, hounding, pursuing, engaging, provoking, enticing, seducing.
What the camera sees is transmitted directly in real time — the split second of the electronic signal — on to a large projection screen. This is the most basic and direct use of video as on-the-spot reportage — a live camera projecting magnified images of the actual performance simultaneously with its occurrence. The intentions and implications are another matter, and Tharp’s messages are multiple.
Tharp sets up two parallel modes of information of equal weight and power. While mirroring each other, they are also pitted against each other in competition and contradiction. In spite of their simultaneity the live and the projected event are not the same. Something happens in the transference from one to the other. The performers and their video images battle each other for our attention, interfering with each other, and ultimately cancelling each other out. All information is neutralized. The images on the screen are gaudy, garish replicas, more like the inside of a rock disco club than the stinking, smoldering urban wasteland of starving survivors on stage. There is a gap in credibility between our two levels of perception. The Media lies and distorts, Tharp tells us. The ugly