Mika Eglinton: You performed Resurrection in Bradford earlier this year and you’ve just opened Visions at the Barbican in London, both pieces are part of a trilogy of works called They Only Come at Night, could you talk a bit about where the idea came from?

Alan Lane: It started a long time ago. We all live quite close to each other in Leeds and there’s a petrol station round the corner from us where a man was beaten to death one night. It was a horrible and disturbing incident, but by the end of the week the local papers and people had come up with different ideas as to why it had happened. No one knew the truth, but everyone was willing to speculate. Some people were saying the man was definitely from Eastern Europe, and others were saying he was into drugs, but what became increasingly clear was that people were happier with the idea that this was just a piece of mindless violence, a horrible accident. It was quite strange that a community presented with something so horrific should start to create myths – stories based on very little truth.

Then a few years ago we spent some time in the Balkans, in Bosnia. A woman was telling me one day that after some of the massacres, in which all the older men had been removed, they would tell their younger children that vampires had come for their fathers, because it was easier to believe that vampires had killed your dad than it was to believe that the man down the road had done it.

We started to think about vampire myths and how we tell stories to shield ourselves but also as a means of understanding the extremes of life without having to be horrified by our fellow man. The world is a mad place at the minute, so we thought the most comfortable way for us to talk about it was to make up a massive, new vampire myth with different rules so that we could have a look at the world, because it’s a bit too scary to look at head on.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Could you talk about why you’re interested in subjects that are often related to traumatic histories or memories?

Alan: It’s to do with how we turn our own personal histories into a set of stories, and then we turn our collective history into a set of stories too, so to an extent we’re defined by and made up of stories. We tend to look at what we call the ‘macro myth’ in traumatic events; so for example what is the place of Dresden or Srebrenica in a shared national history and how does that end up filtering down and affecting a single person? It’s to do with how ideas at the level of nation, culture or community affect the individual in that tiny moment when it’s just a man and woman having a cup of coffee. All that pressure of history that we feel all the time but we ignore, sometimes it just explodes into a personal story and that’s really fascinating to us.

Mika: Did this interest begin when you were still students at Sheffield?

Alan: Yes it did. The company is made up of 8 people and 5 of us were at the University of Sheffield together ten years ago. We developed an interest in how theatre could reflect the pace and style at which we live our lives, how we read information, how computer screens are used and so on. That’s grown over ten years into creating immersive environments.

Mika: What do you mean by an immersive environment?

Alan: It’s where we put the audience into the middle of a film, except that it’s real, it’s 3D, you can touch it, and if there’s water you’ll get wet, because water is wet. It’s where you can look behind you, in front of you, above you and below you and there will be the world we create, and the world might only be 6” x 6”, or it could be the whole building, but until you actually decide to leave the world it will completely surround you. It will smell like we want it to smell and it will feel like we want it to feel. So it is a lot like being in a film that we’ve made for you; you’re the hero in your own film, but you just don’t have to do anything.

Mika: How much ‘free will’ does the audience have or in what way, if at all, do you control the environment?

Alan: We try and make the audience feel like they’ve got total free will and then we try and make sure they go where we want them to go. So in Resurrection for example, the audience can walk anywhere they like in a huge studio space, but they can’t leave the room. In the Barbican car park, they have to follow a path and if they leave that path then the show will stop working, because they won’t be where we want them to be; but hopefully when we take you around, it feels like you’re in complete control of your own experience. In reality of course, it’s a piece of theatre, it’s rehearsed and it’s timed. So I think that’s always a big challenge for us to try and constantly make the audience feel like they’re in control, but also for the show to feel like it’s got a discipline to it.

Mika: Moving on to methodologies, as a creative ensemble I know you spend a lot of time conducting research as well as actually building the piece, could you explain the basic creation process for one of your shows?

Alan: It always makes us laugh, because at the minute we’re working with the University of Huddersfield and the University of Salford, and we often get emails from students asking us to describe our process to which we always answer: “we come up with an idea and we sit round a table until the idea is much better than it was”. And on the one hand that’s a very flippant answer, but actually it’s quite truthful. We’re not made up of performers. There are performers in our company, but a lot of us aren’t and so as a result we tend to have quite a passive process in the sense that we don’t improvise, we don’t rehearse in that way like other companies do.

What we do is we sit down and we build the show in concept. We don’t just come up with the idea, we think exactly how much it’s going to cost to make it, how long it will take and so on. In other words we work through what would normally be called the creative process and the production process, and we keep fine honing it and asking questions of each other and that can take weeks. So we can be sat round that table for a month, and then finally when we’re ready to make something that’s worth making, we start making it.

It’s a very discursive process and it’s one in which the composer could come up with an idea for the script, and the novelist could come up with the idea for the video, we are all equals round the table, it’s just that we have specialities, but it’s basically a meeting of people with ideas and we don’t leave the table until the idea meets everybody’s satisfaction.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: I’m sure you’re aware of other companies that are working with disused or non-purpose built performance spaces such as Shunt or Punchdrunk for example, where do you see Slung Low in the UK theatre landscape today?

Alan: I think we’re clearly part of a recent interest and enthusiasm for installations, of being put in immersive environments, but we’re also from a very traditional theatre background in the sense that we start and end with a story and everything we do, no matter how experimental it is, is to try and push the story into being clearer and more compelling. It’s vital to us that the story is clear to our audience and that we are taking them on a journey that is both a literal journey, we’re moving through a space, but also an emotional one like theatre has always been. I hope that we sit in both camps, or we take our inspiration from both camps.

Mika: Where do you think this renewed interest in ‘installations’, as you put it, comes from?

Alan: Firstly, companies have been working with installations for a long time and it’s just that we tend to forget about those people and hone in on a new person, and that’s fine, that’s the way the world works, but I think it’s also to do with the way our world is changing. You know, I have an iPhone and that phone is my bespoke phone, it makes me feel special, I go onto Amazon and there is a shopping list made just for me. You have a choice in everything now, you can go into the coffee shop and ask for your coffee to be made exactly the way you want it, and that’s something that in the last 10 – 15 years has become increasingly important; that the world is set up to deal with us en masse, but as a group of individuals.

So it’s constantly about something that makes us feel unique and bespoke and that’s what this type of work does. You go into an installation and you might be with 200 other people, but you feel like you’re the only person who had the experience you had that night, that it was special, and that in some way you chose that experience for yourself, even though obviously it’s a collective experience, shared by many others. If you can find a way to make a show so that it’s a shared experience in which everyone feels they’re unique, then I think that’s a very contemporary way of looking at the world and I think that’s why this sort of work is so popular at the minute.

Mika: So in that case is it possible to say that the trend is to a large extent influenced by technological developments?

Alan: Absolutely, if you walk into a train station now, you’re listening to your iPod, you’re reading the headlines on the BBC big screen, you’re checking which platform your train is, you’re checking your emails, your Facebook page, you’re taking in information so quickly, much faster than our parents generation did, much faster than even we did 20 years ago. Just look at the way television is edited, the scenes are shorter, the snaps between each scene more abrupt and on the bottom will be some scrolling information that you’re also taking in.

So in a similar sense the immersive installation allows us to transmit information to the audience through a number of different ways: it could be through a live performer, or you could have a soundtrack, it could be through smell, you could be watching a screen at the same time, you could be reading something while someone talks to you, all of this is possible, and I think that’s absolutely the influence of technology. Our brains are soaking up information much faster than they used to be because technology has trained us to do it.

Mika: What are the company’s artistic influences?

Alan: I think the thing that influences us is just people who tell stories incredibly well, and so the last show that we all saw as a company was Robert Lepage’s Lip Sync. We don’t aspire to make work in the same way that Mr. Lepage does, but just watching someone who is that good at telling stories is inspiring. When you attempt to push form and content and try to innovate as a company, you have to be careful about inspiration, because otherwise you just end up being a version of someone else. So we tend to be inspired by great storytellers across genres rather than necessarily having a theatre company that we follow and adore.

Mika: What is Slung Low’s relationship with text?

Alan: In They Only Come at Night, we came up with an idea for a show and then we turned that idea into a graphic novel, a comic book, and then we took that comic book and we adapted it for the stage. In that sense there’s no play script, but we all have a copy of this picture book that we follow, and we work out what we’re going to say, how we’re going to act and what we’re going to make accordingly. So our first focus and priority is the story, not necessarily a play script or even a text, because we might not have one, but we would all have some form of artefact. With Helium last year at the Barbican, it was based on a short story and this year it’s a graphic novel, but we did a show earlier in the year that was a script, it was a text in a traditional sense, but it could also be a video or even a song.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Is there any sort of preference among types of technology you use in production?

Alan: We’ve just don’t a show that was all based online, an alternative reality game called TOCAN Live and it had no sound or moving pictures. In other shows we use a lot of video and orchestrated sound. So in a sense the media we tend to use is not film but the components that are used in film. In Visions we’re using a very cinematic soundtrack and video in an atmospheric way, so we also try to make sure that we go across media.

Mika: Does part of your work have a documentary element to it?

Alan: I think although our work is always based on some thought about the real world, like the Bosnia story I told you about or the incident at the petrol station, actually what we’re creating are massive immersive metaphors in a sense.

Mika: What is the company’s artistic policy?

Alan: The artistic policy is firstly that it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from, it just matters that it’s a good idea. So even as the ‘boss’, if I come with an idea and everyone else thinks it’s rubbish, it’s rubbish. That’s very important, because otherwise it can be very ego driven for us. And the other one is that we will learn whatever we have to learn in order to accomplish what it is we want to do. So we edit all our own video, we make all our own music, but when we started we didn’t know how to do any of that. So if we need to know how to do animation, which is something that we’ve had to do for one of our projects, then one of us goes away and sits in a room until he/she knows how to do it.

Mika: Some of the company members teach at universities. How does teaching and creating theatre fit together?

Alan: Well one of the most important, pragmatic things for us is that we have to make a living, and this year we’re creating 4 large-scale shows which is incredibly tiring, so teaching is a different type of challenge. The other thing is that we make much bigger shows than our resources perhaps allow us to, and working with students means that we can let them into our genuine process. So we don’t go in and teach conceptual work, we go in and say “right in 6 months we have to make this show and we’re going to spend the next month making it with you”. We then break it up into little bits and get to work. So in that way, the student are learning new skills as they work on the show with us.

It also means that in terms of research and development and in throwing ideas around, all of a sudden we now have many more minds throwing the idea around, and that’s a really exciting artistic feat for us. So I think we’ve found a way to both teach and make work and the two aren’t in any way exclusive of each other, they are integral to how we make work. In a really practical sense we often need an awful lot of bodies and the students have been brilliant over the last 5 years in helping with that process.

Mika: The last question is what’s on the horizon in terms of projects over the next 5 years for Slung Low?

Alan: Well, hopefully within the next 6 to 12 months, we’ll find a residence, a premises. We want to take over a warehouse and turn it into our studio. The other thing is that we’re looking to collaborate abroad. We’ve spent the last 10 years working in this country, and hopefully through our recent British Council showcase in Edinburgh and with this show at the Barbican, along with all the things we’re doing this year, we’ll have the chance to work with artists from abroad.

And yet physical and multimedia company Precarious continue to tempt fate and get away with it. Like their 2008 triumph The Factory, anomie is pure techie eye candy. Six giant flatscreen TVs are the set and often parts of the performers, too, synchronising prerecorded and rotoscoped footage with live movement so the cast can appear to fall or step or crawl partially or fully inside the false-coloured world behind the screens. As if that wasn’t enough, precise projection onto gauze or plastic film creates eerily floating apparitions: flowers or shimmering green curtains of binary code. And it all works.

Unlike The Factory, however, anomie’s multimedia aspect limits, rather than enhances, its physical theatre aspect. There are too many long scenes of performers thrashing and squirming on mattresses with their heads inside television sets, and too few of the Gestic tableaux that made The Factory a statement, rather than a technical exercise. Anomie only comes close to equalling The Factory’s images of people packaged and stored like meat when it casts aside the screens in favour of tangible props, like the reams of shiny black videotape that entangle a camcorder voyeur, or the mattress through which two potential lovers blindly explore one another.

New physical theatre company Idle Motion embrace tangible props to create onstage imagery from the very beginning in their gentler, necessarily smaller-scale production Borges and I. Stacks of second-hand books litter the stage, and their torn, clipped, punched, removed and rebound pages tumble out to form silhouetted skylines, or combine to represent an aeroplane, or stack to form a treacherous spiral staircase for Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to stumble around as he gradually loses his sight.

The play is a tearjerker without being maudlin, and the inventive use of books and their pages as props, characters and scenery pieces is consistently surprising and delightful, whereas anomie’s invention, while undeniably technically masterful, soon becomes repetitive. Which just goes to show: even if you can defy precedent and rely on your technology to work, you still can’t rely on it to carry your show for you.

Conceived and created by Whit MacLaughlin and his award winning Philadelphia-based company, New Paradise Laboratories, Fatebook is a meditation on fate or destiny as seen through the lens of digital communication. The online strand of the project was launched in July this year and follows the lives of 13 characters as they interact with audience members across multiple social media networks. Their stories evolve – with directorial input from MacLaughlin – through a new media narrative of Twitter and Facebook updates, YouTube videos and photos on Flickr; documenting scenes from their everyday lives in Philadelphia.

Each of these 13 online odysseys is heading for offline collision at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in September later this summer. The real space performance is set to bring even more digitalia to bear. A myriad of screens, projectors and live video feeds will transform the space into an epic mediatised environment in which the borders between digital and analogue, live and recorded, fact and fiction merge in a “momentous night—the Fatebook party—where time stops, computers crash…and nobody can say what’s real.”

After an in-depth Skype exchange with MacLaughlin it became clear that here was an experiment at the bleeding edge of digital performance, evolving in sync with developments in social media. I wanted to find out more about the artistic and logistical challenges involved in creating performance online, to extend my ongoing exploration of performance work crossing the digital-analogue divide and to take stock (in a performative context) of terms in frequent but awkward circulation on the Web. Terms such as real (real time, real space, real life), physical (physical space, physical world), space (cyberspace, real space), and the fact/fiction binary.

Andrew Eglinton: Where did the idea for Fatebook originate from?

Whit MacLaughlin: Around two years ago I was observing the effect of social media on young people. There seemed to be an encroaching difference in the way the imagination worked in this space. I was also hoping to participate in the front line of experiential investigations into the way ‘cyberspace’ and ‘real space’ interact in the imagination. What is the nature of the interactions we experience in both spaces? Where does this experience reside in the individual? I became interested in devising a piece that made use of the style or nature of the experience in both media.

I also watched people having sex in a public online space and was interested in how sexual function was stimulated by almost pure, prefrontal, ‘real time’ stimulation, as opposed to the long-standing tradition of literary pornography.

Around about the same time, I saw a performance of a ‘movie’ at the Ars Electronica conference in Linz, Austria. The piece wasn’t terribly interesting, but one great moment happened that set off an alarm in me; the piece was broadcast through a variety of media, but one of the actors suddenly walked through the space we were inhabiting, and I was struck by the way that I responded so differently to the actor in cyber expressions as opposed to real expressions. I liked the smash up and that was the genesis of Fatebook.

I felt that many of the online films and ’shows’ had not really translated the medium away from film and TV into the new zone. They still seemed cinematic. So I was interested in investigating the possibility of narrative that was interactive; both inside the medium, and then across platforms, so to speak.

Andrew: You mention a perceived difference in the way the imagination works in online spaces, what sort of difference(s)? Have you been able to pinpoint anything in particular?

Whit: Well, it’s conjecture and unscientific at this point, but I was struck by how powerful and immediate text scrolling across a computer screen could be. I began to think about teenagers and how ‘personal’ their conversations are in texting and IMing. I felt that the overall tenor of online ‘conversation’ was really close to the atmosphere of pillow talk. Whispering into someone else’s ear. Short phrases. Immediate and almost telepathic. Not couched in metaphor. Not carefully articulated. Even with young adults, it was bedroom to bedroom.

Andrew: I want to pick up on your experience of watching people having sex in a public online space and interacting with viewers via text chat. What aspect(s) or characteristic(s) of that real time environment did you find stimulating?

Whit: It was the sense of something unfolding in the ‘present’ that was an exhibitionistic expression of intimacy. There were also no physical inhibitions, and this is linked to the phenomenon of physical safety and emotional vulnerability in cyberspace. It’s a paradigm that I find very interesting. Young people are especially vulnerable to emotional cruelty online. Not being wary of it and not understanding the intense ‘publicness’ of action in cyberspace.

Andrew: So these fragments, these influences and ideas formed the basis for a devised performance project. What was the first practical step towards realising Fatebook and when did it take place?

Whit: I approached a large theatre company in the US that I have worked with before as a commissioning organization. They are into creating experimental work for young audiences, which I initially thought was a prime audience for the piece, and we agreed to proceed. So we embarked on a year and a half series of workshops with a cast of teenagers.

I started to envision a piece that involved real time online interactions that would bring physical life directly up against cyberspace life; a narrative form that would simply highlight the properties of each. People are so passionate about their online hangouts, and I just wanted to see what would happen.

So I interviewed a number of young adults, put together a cast and started to work on the shape of the experience. The project was going to have a technological component. We dreamed big at the time — we were into developing a kind of real time networked approach to the unfolding of the piece.

It soon became clear that there would need to be two shows: an online show that would proceed for a certain amount of time before a real space show took place; and the real space show would interact with the cyberspace one – hopefully in a seamless manner.

Then, just as we were going into production mode, the economic crisis hit, and the project was axed. So I had to come up with alternative ways to structure and execute the piece that I could manage within my own resources.

Andrew: You say you “just wanted to see what would happen”. Did you pitch that as a project outcome in your brief to the commissioning organization? In other words, was it made explicit from the outset that this work would be wholly experimental? That there were perhaps few precedents at the time?

Whit: Yes. Everyone was marginally comfortable with that. We had also hired a consulting firm to help us figure out the web experience, because not much existed by way of templates. There were going to be aspects of the piece that were very challenging to any organization of any size. Paradigm shifts that I saw happening before our very eyes that most theatre organizations aren’t nimble enough to put into action.

Andrew: Such as?

Whit: Well, marketing for example. Who is it in a theatre organization that tells the story? I began to see that in cyberspace, the employees of an arts organization – the production team, the administration, the artistic leadership, the artists etc. – are the prime communication agents.

Theatre is still used to creating a product, a thing, a production, and then hiring marketers, who shape the ’story’ of the thing and try to sell it to the public. In cyberspace, the artistic director, for instance, has direct access to the people who form the ‘audience’ for the piece. But artistic personnel are notoriously fastidious about talking directly to the public. It’s a status drop or something. They think of their work as the primary focus of their relationship to an audience. But in cyberspace, that relationship is begging to be up-ended.

I saw an opportunity to build a community, where the marketing of the piece was indistinguishable from its content. So I began to say things like “its marketing is its content” which some people found disturbing; as if that couldn’t be the content of a theatre piece. Our partner organization found this aspect particularly challenging.

Andrew: So by virtue of its existence in cyberspace, the company was marketing the production at the same time that it was creating the story and characters for the piece?

Whit: I tend to describe the creative process of this piece as writing a novel on the fly that you are shooting at the same time as a film, that you are broadcasting as soon as you have the dailies, and rehearsing after you take the curtain up!

Andrew: Nice. As you mentioned earlier, there’s also a ‘physical world’ component to Fatebook, the show that will take place in September as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Have you resorted back to ‘traditional’ marketing roles and structures for that?

Whit: We do have plans to undertake traditional marketing techniques at the same time as we carry out the online component. There have been ramifications to that. I am now writing grant applications with slightly grandiose claims about reducing the normal ratios of production to marketing costs. People are very hopeful about the efficacy of communication in cyberspace, but they are also increasingly wary of slight changes in the atmosphere of online communication and it’s almost a totally commercial zone.

Andrew: Is there an absence of morality in virtual space? A relinquishing of responsibility?

Whit: I think that personal responsibility as a concept is in flux because of the interaction of fact and fiction in cyberspace. For instance, people have been entrapped for interacting sexually with under aged youth by policemen posing as youth. It’s difficult to tell where the crime really is. It seems to be an Orwellian sort of thought crime. And people have told me about relationships they’ve had with someone they’ve never met or seen online. They wonder if they are having an affair. I say, “do you have ’sex’?” They say, “well, yes, I guess”. And I say “you’re having an affair”. There’s just so much room for manoeuvring.

Andrew: I’m interested in this notion of blurring fact and fiction online, particularly in relation to building characters that inhabit social media space (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr etc.). Could you describe the character development process and your online relationship with the actors as the director?

Whit: I should point out that the 13 actors working on Fatebook have never all been together in the same room at the same time – until this coming Monday when we start work on the real space show. The actors have devised characters whole cloth out of their own lives. So much of the content for this show is autobiographical. I have been steering the development of character – as co-author – remotely. Facebook and Twitter have been our rehearsal space so far. We created parameters, and identities – in collaboration – and then started interacting in these spaces in a variety of ways.

Andrew: Could you give an example of a parameter?

Whit: I watched and commented individually as I was devising ways of guiding the actors into the situations I envisioned. I wanted certain characters to be ’supernatural’ for example, but I didn’t tell them, I didn’t want them to ‘hit the nail on the head’ so to speak. So I guided them towards certain things by inference. Soon, one character, for instance, was devising a ‘revirginization’ procedure. Eventually, I took almost five months of online interactions and then started compiling, editing, and rewriting.

Ame Montoya - responding to the theme 'Passing Out'. Photo © Matt Saunders

Andrew: I want to pick up on the term ‘real time’. We’ve used it several times now. It’s a term I associate with ‘real time Web’, often used to suggest a demarcation between a static text-based era of the Internet and the current (instantaneous) global communication platform that it has become. What does ‘real time’ mean in the context of Fatebook?

Whit: To me, it means I can communicate with you without making an appointment. We don’t need to get our bodies anywhere and we just pick up where we left off, whenever we want. It’s realer than real time. I’m not sure whether that describes the actuality of real time online, or perhaps more the experience of it.

Andrew: On the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival website Fatebook is described thus: “The action plays out within a labyrinth of screens displaying the shifting cityscapes and intimate spaces in which the characters live. Twelve projectors and live video feeds blur the line between the digital environment and the physical one.” What are the tensions in shifting between digital and physical interfaces in this performance? What does the physical dimension bring to the performance?

Whit: Well, that’s the point, I think. There will be such an immersion in illusion that I’m not sure the participant will necessarily know what is live and what is canned. The environments well be established then mutated. Characters will be communicating across the room, in ways that it will not be clear how much is live. There will also be live green-screened broadcasting. The whole milieu of the performance is illusion. Then there will be a complete meltdown of the piece that will plunk us all into real space and we’ll suddenly see and feel the unmediated room and hear unmediated sound.

Andrew: What do you hope will emerge at that moment of real space recognition?

Whit: I don’t know. I actually think that presence in real space is the holy grail of experience, and proximity against the odds is the miracle. So, I’m not sure what cyber proximity is going to do with the traditional structures of meaning and what cyber availability is going to do to our physical metaphors. I feel like I just want, at this point, to highlight the differences and make them really salient.

Andrew: Thank you very much for your time and insight into the workings of Fatebook.

Whether or not a West end production would utilise the technique’s full dramatic potential, chances are it would have the budget to overcome some of the technical issues that blight the Almeida’s production, Slung Low’s Last Seen.

The company use chunky ear-defender type radio ‘phones and miked-up actors to ensure that even those in the audience who can’t see the action can at least hear every nuance of the dialogue. A sound tech accompanies the procession around the streets of Islington, armed with a bulky backpack that broadcasts incidental music and sound effects to accentuate the actors’ voices or underscore silent sequences. The technology vastly improves the outdoor promenade format, helping maintain an atmosphere that could otherwise easily be shattered by background noise.

There are three routes, and each audience member only gets to see one, but occasionally you can catch glimpses of set pieces not intended for you: a fully laid dinner table through a park gate is a reminder that the stories you see are never the entirety of what the city has to tell. Every passer-by wearing headphones or a hands-free set feels like they could potentially be a player. Though all you ever do is follow and listen, there’s an exciting sense of exploration and discovery without the attendant dangers of the unknown.

But – and though it most probably isn’t the company’s fault, it’s still a big but – the headphones pick up interference far too easily. Some of the dialogue sinks under waves of static, which can be physically painful on the ear, and the music under one potentially very poignant moment has to share the airwaves with a local pirate radio station broadcasting from a nearby window.

The technology is simultaneously the best and worst aspect of Last Seen. Without it, the production would be at best pedestrian and at worst inaudible. Because of it, the production will be discussed more for its technical flaws than for its dramatic merit (as I’ve demonstrated). What the production definitely is, though, is a glimpse of how the technology could positively impact theatre, whether as a dramatic technique in itself or as a facilitatory tool, once its shortcomings are ironed out. The theatre world might just have to wait until the technology catches up to its vision.

The Forest Fringe – a studio space in an abandoned church, supported by Battersea Arts Centre – was a popular venue at the Fringe 2008. The Forest Fringe at the BAC weekend (27-28 March) showcased some of the best work from last year and previewed some exciting work in progress planned for 2009.

2008 highlights included Tip of Your Tongue, director Abigail Conway’s PostSecret -style anonymous truth-telling ritual, in which participants read and then eat unspoken truths written by others on rice-paper; and Lucy Ellinson’s Eulogy, In State. Ellinson’s piece, staged in a dusty corridor under the BAC’s main staircase, required the audience to help construct a eulogy for Ellinson before holding a vigil over her ‘dead’ body.

Looking ahead to this coming August, Bootworks had taken over a corner of the foyer with their Black Box, a short performance installation intended for a single audience member. In fact – probably intentionally – Black Box proved as entertaining for those outside the box as for the lone observer seated inside. While the silent-movie narrative could only be decoded from inside, only from outside was it possible to appreciate the company’s feats of timing and physical illusion.

In the Committee Room, Tinned Fingers created a cosy, playful world of animal stories, adapted drama games and arbitrary popularity-contest morality, in Our Father’s Ears. An ample supply of wine and the friendly atmosphere ensured the audience were happy to take part.

For just 15 lucky participants per night, Rotozaza were testing out their new ‘autoteatro’ experience, GuruGuru. Autoteatro blurs, erases and redraws the line between audience and performer by feeding prerecorded lines and instructions to participants via headphones, creating a prepackaged performance that changes with every iteration while requiring no regular actors. It’s a form of theatre that would be impossible to conceive without modern technology.

The Festival Fringe is a space for experimentation. Fringe audiences not only accept, but expect deviation from convention. From the looks of its 2009 line-up so far, the Forest Fringe is set to challenge every convention in sight, from the role of the audience right up to what we can comfortably classify as theatre.

“We’re guilty of homemade bombs and homemade wine. We’re guilty of coldness and spite. We never laughed and we never found the time….”

In Speak Bitterness a small group of performers take on the task of confessing to everything. Dressed in their best suits, the performers compete to confess the most horrific, amusing or convincing things. Lined-up as if for a show trial or a press conference, they meet the gaze of the audience, speaking softly, drawing them in and admitting it all.

For the six hour duration of the work the audience are free to come and go as they please while the performers are trapped – by turns cowed, breezy, anguished, reluctant, jovial and of course determined. The text they work from is a constantly updated catalogue of human wrong-doing great and small, from murder, genocide, rape and arson to bad moods, jealous rages, never washing-up properly and not taking the dogs out for a walk.

The performance will be webcast live, and will be performed by the six core-members of Forced Entertainment including Artistic Director, Tim Etchells. The whole company performing together is a rare event and a fitting marker of Forced Entertainment’s 25th anniversary this year.
Tune in here from 5pm-11pm (UK time), 6pm – 12midnight (Mainland Europe).

Theatre practice remains strongly rooted in the physical world, but the impact of the real-time Web on the infrastructure of theatre is undeniable. It is changing the way we encounter theatre, the way we learn and talk about it, and it has given rise to new exploratory practice. Performance in virtual online envrionments goes back to the beginning of the Internet (and beyond), but only in the past few years with the Web 2.0 paradigm has it become viable to produce live online performances for live online audiences.

Curious to find out more about the possibilities of performance in this context, I spoke to two artists from The Netherlands about their work with theatre in Second Life (hereafter SL). SL is one of the Web’s largest 3D virtual worlds, built to a great extent by its users who interact and socialize via personal avatars. Joyce Timmerman is a member of the Amsterdam based theatre company Slapelozen. She has a personal interest in SL and sometimes uses it in her creative work. Ze Moo is an “information-artist” and (live)media-expert/consultant based in The Netherlands and in Cyberspace.

Second Life Logo

Andrew Eglinton (AE): Thank you both for taking the time to participate in this online discussion. The aim is to try and paint a picture of what ‘theatre’ in a virtual online environment such as SL might consist of and to find out what some of the implications are for ‘real world’ theatre.

I understand that you’ve both been involved in a particular project that brought live performances in SL to an audience in a venue in Amsterdam. I’d like to start by asking you both to outline the event so that we have a common ground for this discussion.

Ze Moo: First of all, I should point out that Joyce and I met in SL. We share a mutual interest in the field of theatre, and I mean ‘theatre’ in the broadest possible sense of the term. I co-organized the ‘Live Machinima Theatre’ event on August 30th 2008 in Amsterdam in collaboration with the grassroots art & technology lab ‘Meta.Live.Nu‘. Joyce was an essential member of the production team. The show you’re referring to was called Goodbye Dollar. It took place in SL and it fused musical theatre, performance art, stand up comedy and experimental cinema.

Joyce: In Goodbye Dollar, the ‘real’ or physical audience watched the SL performances on a screen in an auditorium in Amsterdam – the venue was De Balie, it’s well known for housing experimental art work. There were numerous acts in Goodbye Dollar by artists from around the world and the SL medium provided the possibility for audiences to interact with the artists.

AE: Interact? In what sense?

Ze Moo: Some audience members had laptop computers and were connected to SL so they could use text or audio chat.

AE: So the audience was split between people in the physical space at De Balie and people logged into SL from around the world, what about the cast and crew?

Ze Moo: The night was divided into time slots and the artists were responsible for the content of each slot. All artists were operating from home, or in studios. In terms of the crew, there was a production team present at De Balie.

AE: What did the production team do?

Ze Moo: The production team (of which Joyce was a part) had to coordinate the programming and facilitate the various technologies used in the event. I directed the whole night at De Balie like a TV channel showing different ‘programmes’ in real time. But for those accessing the event remotely and not logged into SL there was also a live TV stream broadcast on the Web. So we had multiple streams of media running in parallel.

Goodbye Dollar Event viewed from inside De Balie

AE: Let’s move on and talk about the role of the artists. Could I ask both of you to choose one particular artist involved in Goodbye Dollar and describe a particular performance? Starting with Joyce?

Joyce: I’ll talk about the stand-up comedian Lauren Weyland and her show “LaurenLive: The Dollar Undone”. What you saw on a virtual stage in SL was the avatar of a pretty girl combined with Lauren’s deep masculine voice, cracking sexist jokes about men.

Lauren’s performances are all about playing with gender identity and stereotypes. You see the graphic image of a woman but hear the physical voice of a man so you’re always conscious about both levels: the physicality of the actor and the virtual avatar he uses.

The strange thing is of course that as a stand up comedian you are very aware of your audience’s reactions, their laughter, their silence etc., but in SL it’s different. People react and laugh, but you cannot see their faces, you can only hear those logged into SL who use audio headsets.

Ze Moo: Large parts of audiences at Lauren’s performances always use microphone headsets so it’s possible to hear real laughter and comments in real-time about Lauren’s material.

Joyce: This can create a strange effect at times and it’s one of the areas that needs working on if virtual theatre is going to improve in the future. I’d like to be able to see the facial expressions of both the actors and the audience.

AE: Would it be possible to see everyone involved in the performance simultaneously?

Ze Moo: Not at the moment in SL, but it will be possible in the future I am quite sure. People can already project their webcam faces onto their avatars. There have been numerous experiments with that, but technically speaking it’s still at an embryonic stage.

AE: Could you clarify what an avatar is in the context of SL?

Joyce: The avatar is the ‘doll’ you walk around with in SL, you create it yourself by selecting your own appearance, gender, skin colour, shape etc., and you can even become a beast if you want to. This opens up a new range of possibilities for transformation, both for the actors and the audience. In the theatre, you need to use your imagination when it comes to seeing actors perform complex roles. In SL that transformation is immediate and seamless.

AE: So the SL audience no longer needs to suspend its disbelief?

Ze Moo: Virtual theatre is more immersive, like being part of a live, interactive movie.

Joyce: Yes, it is like cinema. More is possible, so as an audience we might expect more; when I see a beast on stage I can accept that it’s an actor who delivers the roar…but in a movie I want to see the beast in all its three dimensional ferocity!

Ze Moo: But imagination definitely still plays a role and in my view the stimulation of the brain in SL with all kinds of visual illusions can be an even more intense experience.

Joyce: Imagination is an interesting aspect of SL right now; everything is possible, but we still tend towards reality. There are artists now who are changing that in SL they are exploring ways of stimulating their audiences’ imagination.

AE: Are the artists beginning to develop a ‘vocabulary’ of performance that is specific to the context of SL?

Joyce: Yes, I think so.

Ze Moo: The ‘Bunnyken’ were created specifically for performance in SL by Arthole in a piece called Orientation. Arthole is a US/Brit art collective who use SL as their main medium.

AE: Was this also part of Goodbye Dollar?

Ze Moo: Yes Arthole performed at the Goodbye Dollar event. They were one of the top art collectives in 2008 to use SL as a medium of expression.

AE: Could you describe their performance in more detail?

Ze Moo: It began in the SL reception area that Arthole had created. The audience was instructed to gather in this space before being told to swap their regular avatars for ‘Bunnyken’ creatures.

Bunnyken in performance Orientation by Arthole

The Arthole members ushered the audience, now dressed in Bunnyken avatars, around the performance space. Don’t forget that this was being observed on the big white De Balie cinema screen in Amsterdam. And since some people in the auditorium had laptops, they were able to participate as Bunnyken.

AE: So an audience watching an audience?

Ze Moo: Yes. In the SL performance, the audience were made to sit in rows in an amphitheatre. They had to listen to strange alien-like speeches; the whole thing had an Orwellian feel to it. There was an atmosphere of intimidation, of control and the speeches were a form of ‘white noise’. Amazingly, most of the SL audience went along with this and did what they were told to do. In the end they arrived in a type of factory where they were made into a sort of pink mud food.

AE: Right…I see. What was the ultimate direction of the piece? Were Arthole working towards a particular outcome?

Ze Moo: A machinima was produced from it a week later (the event was projected on a live Web video stream as I mentioned earlier). Seeing it live on the large auditorium screen was far more impressive than the YouTube viewing experience.

AE: What makes you say that?

Ze Moo: It was the thrill of being there combined with having the option to interact in real time. My aim as director of the experimental ‘live-cross-reality‘ art section of Goodbye Dollar was to try and bridge theatre and film in a way that has not been done before, while at the same time exploring the boundaries of art, media and technology.

AE: Thank you for sharing your accounts of the two performances. Your last point Ze Moo, on bridging theatre and film segues nicely into the last two themes I want to pick up on: ‘liveness’ and interaction. Starting with liveness I’d like to get a sense from both of you of what it was like to be a spectator at this event. Did you feel part of a community in the De Balie auditorium?

Joyce: For me, there was more a sense of community online than in the auditorium, simply because by nature of the virtual environment there was more potential to interact and participate as a virtual audience member then a physical one.

AE: Could you give some concrete examples of interaction?

Joyce: So in the comedy show I mentioned, Lauren Weyland could hear you laugh or speak if you were online. Also, every performance throughout the evening took place in a different SL location; so you had to ‘teleport’ yourself (avatar) to a destination. This act of teleportation engages the audience from the start. Then there was another performance in which the audience could help build a giant tower.

Ze Moo: Interaction options in SL consist of: text chat, voice chat, individualized avatar shape, looks (fashion) & animations (body language). And also: building (aka ‘rezzing’), moving, altering objects and backdrops and environmental sounds. This adds a whole new ‘live narrative’ (non-verbal) layer to communications, that thus far hasn’t been humanly possible.

AE: I’m curious about Joyce’s teleporting. What’s so special about it?

Joyce: Well usually you don’t teleport in such large numbers in SL. Walking in the SL environment is often a solitary thing. But as a group there’s a sense of community just by walking together. It’s very much the same phenomenon you experience in a real life installation or promenade performance.

AE: Thinking about the audience in the auditorium, to what extent would you have to be knowledgeable about SL to appreciate the whole event?

Ze Moo: Good question.

Joyce: SL users got more out of it I think. For audience members who weren’t familiar with SL there was a narrator in the auditorium who provided voice over commentary and explained what was going on. There were also volunteers present, explaining the event on a person-to-person basis.

AE: One final question. How important was it from the production side of the event to create a ‘streamlined’ show? Presumably there were many stops and starts for technical reasons?

Joyce: Actually, it was surprsingly smooth, but Moo was incredibly busy!

Ze Moo: We were all very busy. Getting everyone in the right place at the right time took a tremendous amount of effort. We prepared several months in advance for the event and worked to a tight schedule. In the end it all went much smoother than I had expected. The only serious technical failure was in the video documentation of the event. But I don’t believe it would be possible to completely document/archive such an extensive interactive live experience anyway. That is why we concentrated more on preparing the live event itself. We are doing the same for one of our largest upcoming events of the year: The ElectroSmog Festival in Autumn 2010.

AE: Thank you both very much indeed for your time this evening. It has been a fascinating discussion. I have many more questions to ask and I hope there will be another occasion to explore this further.

In search of a new theatre

Portrait of Meyerhold.

In the early 1900s Meyerhold was still involved with symbolist drama but had begun to experiment with specific elements of the stage; improvising with the proscenium and playing with light. In his production of Alexander Blok’s The Fairground Booth in 1906, he put some of his new techniques to test. The simple but archaic theatre included elements of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, traditional Japanese theatre and characteristics of the old theatres of Spain and England. The most significant development was Meyerhold’s use of a theatre within the theatre, demonstrating the potential of a deliberate display of theatrical illusion. The scenery was non-realistic and sets were raised and lowered in full view of the audience. The Fairground Booth enabled Meyerhold to explore a form which challenged the theatrical conventions from inside the dominant symbolist framework of the day.

The beginnings of Biomechanics

The production of Mikhail Lermontov’s play Masquerade marked a significant step in the development of Meyerhold’s ideas. The decor of the production by Alexander Golovin was designed as an emotional codex which would reflect and in many cases set the mood or atmosphere of the play as it progressed through its various stages. The colours of the curtains and backdrops were designed to lead the viewer from one stage of the production to another so that it became an intricate part of the actors’ performances on stage – highlighting and emphasising their emotional content and psychology. The rising and falling of curtains was not simply a device for opening and closing an act, their graphic input became part of the dramatic process and helped develop the action of the play itself.

The curtains in Masquerade.

To use a musical analogy, the curtains were meant to play the role of an overture with additional orchestral interludes. This was the beginning of breaking up the hierarchy in Russian text-based theatre. Here the abstract graphic element of set design began to play a more equal role in the production as a whole and with this the first seeds were sown of a new acting technique which Meyerhold would name ‘Biomechanics’.

The influence of Constructivist design

Meyerhold’s production of The Magnanimous Cuckold became his boldest experiment in this process. Meyerhold was already developing the acting technique of Biomechanics, a series of exercises to develop and release the emotional potential of the actor through movement. He enlisted Lubov Popova to design a set for the performance. The result was a machine-like moving structure with platforms and whirling wheels against a plain curtain backdrop. The actors’ performances formed a dynamic, pulsating spectacle, moving in unison and integrated with the rhythmic movement of Popova’s constructivist structure. The result was an organic unity on stage between actor and set.

The Man Who Was Thursday Set Drawing.

This production sparked a trend in collaborations with constructivist artists to design theatre sets. The most well known was Alexander Tairov’s production of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday designed by the artist Alexander Vesin. He built a structure with lifts and moving walkways which, it would seem, befitted Chesterton’s literary creation. However the set itself was a disappointment. In many cases it appeared clumsy and actors found it difficult to perform within Vesin’s labyrinth-like and reputedly cumbersome design. Part of the reason why Vesin’s design did not succeed as intended is because the implications of Meyerhold’s innovations had not been entirely understood. The structure was abstract and constructivist in character, but it was also a fairly concrete object and in some sense representational and functional. It was a space in which actors could interact with each other and a world which bore resemblances to emerging forms of the time. In some sense a return to naturalism, albeit of a contemporary or constructivist/urban/industrialist character.

Popova’s Machine

Popova’s machine was completely different in character. It was machine-like but far from the common structures of the day. In present day terms we might refer to it as an installation. It was abstract, it blurred meaning, and had no function other than to be an object in the production. This suited Meyerhold’s desire for the crossing and re-crossing of the borders between tragedy and comedy, pathos and farce and hence embodied his experimentation with theatrical form.

Popova's Machine in production.

The blurring and crossing of borders can be found in Japanese artistic and theatrical forms; as can the emptiness of the stage which like a monotone Japanese landscape painting depends on what is taken out, giving the audience a chance to use their own imagination to fill the void. In this sense, while wanting to stimulate and lead an audience, Meyerhold did not want to control their emotions.

Popova's Machine poster.

Meyerhold’s interest in Japan

To further understand these developments in Russian theatre, it’s important to note Meyerhold’s interest in the traditional performing arts of Japan, particularly Kabuki and Noh. One of the principal characteristics of Noh, and a paradox in a theatre of masks, is that the theatrical process is “unmasked” in full view of the audience. Stage technology is revealed and incorporated into the “work of art”, so that the process becomes an important medium for preserving and relaying information about the play.

Scene from a Noh theatre production of Okina Hōnō.

This appealed to Meyerhold who proceeded to turn his theatre inside out, rejecting the play as an art form wholly based on text. The theatre that Meyerhold wanted demanded a new type of actor with a new style of acting, and Kabuki with its emphasis on dance and physical movement served Meyerhold’s purposes well. The rhythm of dance was important to the futurists and avant-garde artists because through rhythm a new life could be presented and a new type of person would embody this rhythm for a new future era where movement speed and dynamism were optimum. Biomechanics with its visual/graphic potential was meant to be a living synthesis of this transformation.

A ‘return’ to classical drama?

By the time Meyerhold put on his version of The Government Inspector it was heralded by the authorities as Meyerhold’s return to classical drama. Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment (Narkompros) had earlier criticised Meyerhold’s experiments but welcomed Meyerhold’s return to traditional theatre. However, looking at the photographs and designs of this production the innovations which Meyerhold had pioneered were still apparent. Meyerhold had not abandoned his experiments and they continued to inform his work as much as before. As he himself commented, “Just because we are not rushing about the stage waving red flags does not mean that theatre is not revolutionary”.

Mannequins in the making.

Moreover the revolutionary quality of the production was borne out with Meyerhold borrowing techniques from cinema. In some scenes, several events take place simultaneously and the action spills over from one side of the stage into the other in a torrent of movement uncharacteristic of earlier classical productions. Meyerhold went even further. In the final scene where actors are required to freeze in still poses to dramatise the ossified and static nature of the world portrayed in the production, Meyerhold substituted the actors with specially designed mannequins.

Mannequins in Meyerhold's production of The Government Inspector.

The graphic quality is unmistakable with echoes from Bunraku (puppet theatre of Japan) puppets and the dramatic poses or mie of Kabuki actors. Meyerhold’s vision was bold and radical in its strong integration of the graphic component into the production and emphasises his ability to transcend the boundaries of theatrical form. In this case, instead of real people playing the role of frozen mannequins, real mannequins played the role of people. Whatever Meyerhold’s intention, watching rows of lifelike figures gaze into the auditorium, transformed like idols from an another era, must have made for an eerie climax.

There are very few professional theatre critics in the UK, by which I mean people that earn a living from theatre criticism alone. Of those few, the vast majority are of what most people like to call ‘a certain age’. I knew this before attending the discussion; as a young person working in the field of arts journalism, it has a direct effect on my life. What I hadn’t considered was the effect it has on the evolution of theatre journalism as a form.

The small cadre of professional critics was represented on the panel by Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Telegraph. From the off, Spencer declared himself openly hostile towards theatre bloggers. He accused the blogosphere of watering down critical discourse with a morass of uninformed opinion, and claimed that same morass would soon put him and his colleagues out of their jobs.

Spencer labelled his hostility “a generational problem”, and admitted that he simply didn’t like computers and technology. He also labelled himself “the last of the Luddites”; unfortunately, this epithet is not as accurate. His contemporaries are, if anything, older and more set in their ways than he is. Which means the most powerful portion of the critical establishment wants nothing to do with new media.

How is criticism supposed to evolve and find a place in the media as it exists today, if its biggest names think blogging is the enemy?

Not everyone in the industry is resistant to the change new media offers. Andrew Dickson, arts editor for the Guardian Online, was also a panellist. The Guardian have been quicker than their competitors to embrace online content. But the publication still follows the formats and processes of print journalism. Dickson commissions reviews, blog posts and podcasts or videos in the same way as his print counterparts.

No one has yet fully grasped the potential of new media. No one has fully exploited the combined power of online journalism, podcasting, social networking and mobile synchronisation. I still structure my reviews for London Theatre Blog the same way I would for a print publication. But if the critical community is held back by an older generation with a lot of clout and no love for web 2.0, by the time we get there technology will have moved ahead of us again.

In some ways perhaps it already has. Wired magazine declared the death of blogging in October, and the theatre industry still has yet to fully acknowledge its legitimacy. Whether or not the problem is generational, there is indisputably a problem: technology moves fast, and we’re being left behind.

Brickbats in Cyberspace took place at the Royal Court Theatre on Monday 1 December 2008. The event was braodcast live online and here is the full audio archive of the event.

The participants were as follows:

Chair:
Karen Fricker, critic for Variety magazine and lecturer in Theatre Criticism at Royal Holloway university

Panellists:
Andrew Dickson, arts editor for guardian.co.uk
Judith Dimant, producer for Complicite
Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Daily Telegraph
The West End Whingers, theatre bloggers

ML: Cinema may be dead, but it seems that you are determined to revive it.

PG: The English say: “The King is dead. Long live the King”. In this case it seems more appropriate to say “Cinema is dead. Long live cinema”. If cinema was born in 1895, you realize that it has been the same for a hundred-and-twelve years: films are mere illustrations of a script and film-makers yield to the supremacy of the text. If you think of other forms of art and their dramatic evolution in the past century, for example painting from Impressionism to Fontana, or music from Strauss to John Cage, you can understand what I mean by “death of cinema”. It is time to move on! Every art form needs to reinvent itself in order to survive throughout time. Statistics state it clearly: every year there are less people going to the cinema while more people are watching DVDs, comfortably sitting on their sofas. In the age of multimedia and interactivity, cinema still insists on forcing millions of hapless viewers to sit uncomfortably and passively in an architecturally horrible environment. Going to the cinema today, like a hundred-and-twelve years ago, involves looking in the same direction for two hours, and you can always expect a sequence of images based on narrative, realism and psychologically constructed characters. No smell, no touch, no taste, no real relationship with the audience, and the presence of the screen itself is never acknowledged. It is only a matter of restricted audio-visual stimulation. Which I find extremely boring.

ML: If cinema is dead, how is theatre doing? And what about visual arts? Are they in good shape?

PG: Theatre is perfectly healthy. In theatre, the performance changes every night and the relationship to the audience can be much more exciting and bidirectional. In fact, all other art forms are in perfect shape, they are lively and engaging, always changing and exploring new ways of communication. Cinema is a slave to the market place and to the standards dictated by distribution companies. Cinema, unlike painting or theatre, is imprisoned by fast-aging technologies and large-scale economic interests preventing its aesthetic evolution. But this might only be a prologue to what’s coming next. What I want to do is a present tense cinema.

ML: What do you mean by that?

PG: A cinema which is always different from itself. Ideally, I would like to create a 360-degree event, an experience without closures, an ever-changing work stimulating all five senses, exploring all possibilities offered by new cutting-edge technologies. I think that films like those we see today will become archaic some day, they will be forgotten like silent movies, nobody will watch them anymore.

ML: To refashion cinema, one has to disrupt it. Is that why you became interested in mixing visuals at live events?

PG: My films are based on the superiority of the image. Narrative is overthrown by ideas and themes. Picasso used to say: “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I think”. For my Tulse Luper VJ Performance (for more info on the upcoming world tour see www.notv.com), I perform a live cinematic event, improvising and mixing hundreds of pre-selected sequences from my latest film trilogy, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, on three different screens surrounding the audience, while DJ Radar plays electronic music. Can I call myself a VJ? I don’t think so, but every show is completely different in every venue, and that is what makes it interesting. Another example of present tense cinema can be found in my recent multi-media project Peopling the Palaces, which recently opened at the Venaria Reale palace near Turin, the newly refurbished “Italian Versailles” (www.lavenaria.it). We filmed a hundred-and-fifty vignettes of everyday seventeenth century life at court and then projected them on the palace walls, so that the wandering viewer can have a playful sense of “historic reality”, meeting up with dukes and scullery maids, marquises and cooks, grooms and hunters, almoners and maids-of-honour, who used to people the palace before Napoleon swept it all away. However, I believe there is no such thing as History, there are only historians.

ML: Your last film, Nightwatching, is strictly connected to an extraordinary multi-media event as well.

PG: It all started with my fascination for Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch“. It is by no means one of my favourite artworks, but I find the mysteries behind it very exciting. In 2005 I created a short film in order to give the painting a life and a voice of its own, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam allowed me to project this video on the actual canvas. The viewers would sit in front of it like they would sit in front of a cinema screen, but only for a few minutes. The result was a completely new way to experience a painting. Then, I decided I would write an original script for a feature film, investigating the background of Rembrandt’s theatrical and intriguing “J’accuse”, which covertly posits a deadly conspiracy within the Dutch regiment commissioning the work. This painting ultimately caused the artist’s own death.

ML: What should we expect from you in the near future?

PG: I am working on three new films, a ghost story filmed in Wales, a pornography set in Brazil and a horse story set in the ancient Chinese Empire. My partner Saskia Boddeke and I are working together on more operatic projects. Moreover, I am curating the new Design Museum at the Milan Triennale with Italo Rota, opening 6 December 2007 (www.triennale.it). We are designing an exhibition of objects without objects, inspired by André Malraux’s idea of ‘musée imaginaire’. I often find museums boring, unimaginative and uninteresting places, but I promise you a wholly unconventional museum experience.

ML: We shall look forward to that.

The top photo is by Daniel Malva and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.

The bottom gallery photos are courtesy of Change Performing Arts