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SECTION 1: Introduction
Dramatic Forays into IT: working computers with a broom handle Barry Smith
Editor 1. IT and Live Performance This Guide is noticeably different from its predecessors in the series: for a start it is largely anecdotal. Less than a manual of 'how to do it' it is primarily intended to encourage you to use 'it' in the first place, whatever 'it' may be. I have admired the Arts and Humanities Data Service's Guide to Good Practice Series since the first ones in Archaeology and History appeared: as I relate briefly in the 'building archives' chapter below, my first conscious dealings with IT as a new phenomenon within the academic community came via a colleague involved in early Archaeology, History and Humanities experiments with digital facilities in the early 1980s. Years later the Guides which emanated from those scholars, by then well versed in the particular practice of IT applications to their subject domains, were brief, sharp, focussed and offered no-nonsense guidance for individuals and organisations involved in the creation, use and maintenance of relevant digital services, resources and applications. Very much to the point and 'fit for purpose' they were eminently usable and direct. But they didn't seem to have a lot to do with 'drama'. I was therefore slightly bemused but delighted when asked to edit one aimed at introducing and encouraging development of IT and digital resources amongst my colleagues in the performing arts. 'Performing arts' of course covers a vast range of interests and skills, involving as it does designers, directors, actors and performers, musicians, critics, technicians, analysts, administrators, theorists... And certainly some of these colleagues had made noticeable inroads into highly specialised computer applications particularly in areas such as musical composition, computer aided design, stage management and all the spreadsheet and mailing list applications of administration. But if archaeologists and historians were early starters in the application of IT to their particular fields of study - perhaps only preceded by scientists who understood at least some of its strange workings and in particular chemists who at one stage seemed to monopolise large tracts of it - if these were the speed merchants of IT applications in academia then some groups within the performing arts were certainly the recalcitrant late developers. This Guide is primarily for them. That IT seemed to offer little enticement to some individuals working in the performing arts was - and is - not altogether surprising. Performing arts as in theatre/drama/live-art performance more than any other field of study save perhaps sports, inevitably puts at its core 'live performance'. Even as we enter the Twenty First Century with all the extraordinary IT developments of recent years, 'live performance' is one of the few applications that IT has hardly touched upon. It is of course true that the recent advent of the digitised image - and in particular moving image - sound and vision, web-casting, CD Rom and DVD -have begun to make inroads across that final frontier; even more so - or so the press and sci-fi industry would have us believe - at the more extreme boundaries of current robotics and Artificial Intelligence research. And as these developments have occurred so the drama/theatre/performance community has started to take greater notice. This can be verified by briefly noting productions of large-scale theatrical events such as the Robert Wilson/Philip Glass Monsters of Grace (1998), the current multi-media Laurie Anderson Moby Dick or at the other end of the scale the increasing frequency of city festivals in the UK advertised as having both digital and performative aspirations such as Manchester's Digital Summers, Sheffield's Lovebytes and Nottingham's Radiator. But for many these digital/performative experiments are still largely seen as being little different to what video, film and back projection have offered for decades, most frequently an accompaniment to the live act, at worst a distraction or unnecessary special effect. Suspicion about the relationship between the 'live' event and the film/video/screen event persists, as the old wounds reopened in Philip Auslander's Liveness (1999) testifies. All branches of theatre, drama and live performance value highly the simple stunning theatrical moment - even durational performance which in some ways is a quest for it - and that moment, when achieved, is measured in effectiveness rather than complexity. It is equally true that digitally controlled lighting, sound and theatrical effects have become more sophisticated and the much loved broom-handle technique of simultaneously putting on or off a battery of stage-lights (hitherto a common device in amateur and studio theatres when the lighting rheostats were hot, bulky and unwieldy) or of using a large sheet of metal as a thunder generator may fast be becoming memorabilia and curiosities. But the metal sheet always produced the sound of thunder (and some would maintain 'better' thunder!) whereas the small sound-cue button may not always prove quite so reliable or convincing! If those suspicions exist amongst its core community a good guide must confront them or its going to be a poor guide. And a central tenet of this Guide is to encourage colleagues to consider some of the advantages that digital resources may now proffer and the price which must be paid. The performing arts has not been the only discipline to with-hold judgement on whether new is necessarily better: until quite recently significant proportions of the visual arts remained extremely sceptical and in many quarters still is. Hardly surprising, a mere twenty years ago the much heralded technological revolution was incapable of producing a picture worthy of the name. Eager beavers may bring about the future but wiser beavers perhaps wait for it to arrive. Two episodes from those times are burned into my memory. One was my Dean of the School of Art & Design trading his first IT allowance for some extra space - "We are artists, designers, performers! We have no use for number crunching machine! What we desperately need is more space". He was a textiles expert but clearly should have been an actor. There was a deafening silence until the Dean of Engineering duly obliged by trading an old dishevelled terrapin hut for the extra IT allowance. (That story has now come full circle with the current Dean of Art & Design trading large tracts of design studio space for high-spec Macs for Graphic Design.) The second tale involved a fruitless search for images on the Internet which took me on a pointless trip to York (where eventually a Scottish University Home Page eventually appeared on a flickering screen bearing a black and white crest) and a frustrating afternoon with a computer buff who claimed to have seen images on the Net - a near equivalent of the visionary blind-seer - which resulted only in the transmission of a cartoon image of a dismal-looking cod from the University of Reykjavik. Trying to console me my colleague opined "Yes it is a bit disappointing, it doesn't work very well yet... But I think it's going to get better!" She was right. It has got 'better' and more relevant on all fronts - in it's functionality and practicality within performance practice and events, as a medium for studying, recording, analysing and then recording and disseminating conclusions , as a storehouse of research documentation for future generations and, not of least importance to academics and teachers, as a novel and potentially vibrant and massive teaching and learning facility. It is still in its infancy but the signs and future are now increasingly clear: version 1.0 at least has been completed, version 2.0 is well advanced.. For performance that much was evident a few years ago when the MIT Professor Janet Murray published Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), investigating the then current and future potential of computer-based performance narrative. Interestingly enough the earliest forms of attempted 'internet theatre' - for example the Oudeis Project which commenced as early as 1995 (see http://www.oudeis.org/) often and appropriately took classical 'wanderings' as the essential narrative and that is still evident even in current digital performance experiments - for example the Catalanian solo performance-artist Marcel.li Antunez Roca's most recent performance event Afasia (ICA, London: June 2000). Both pieces are based on Homer's The Odyssey. The same tendency is still evident in the current webcast experiments in the latest application of technology top performance/media, called 'inhabited television' (where 'audience' can begin to interact with the performers, presented simultaneously both to conventional passive viewers and to on-line participants): presented recently by the Mixed Reality Laboratory of The University of Nottingham (see http://www.illumin.co.uk/avatarfarm) a classical narrative tale of humans versus the gods is played out against a background closely resembling Stonehenge. At this stage both gods and humans are portrayed by avatars and the human variety, interestingly enough, featuring the control and voices of Equity actors. Mention of Equity actors is not entirely accidental: computer generated film animations of the Toy Story variety (which still fall into the 'drawn cartoon' variety) have more recently given way to common-place assumptions that firstly special effects such as in Titanic (1997) and Star Wars: Episode 1 (1999) has now developed to the point of apparently recreating dead actors (Oliver Reed's final scenes in Gladiator (2000)) or wholly creating advertising digital divas such as Motorola's 'Mya' complete with fan club. In the face of a recent American actors' strike advertising executives are beginning to mutter that it might be cheaper to use virtual actors. Perhaps fortunately that economy is not yet the case but it's an indicator of the pace and direction of development. Those distant tribes and native groups who were teased for not allowing explorers to take their photographs because they believed it would in some way capture their soul might eventually be proved right! Replicants and the predictions of Blade Runner (1982) seem ever nearer in the world of theatre, drama and performance. 2. Using IT As all such developments have occurred with ever increasing rapidity, Higher Education authorities have struggled magnificently to stay abreast and provide their communities with help, guidance and encouragement. These are major shifts and not easily managed as they happen on a national and global scale, involving as they do a mix of new technologies, invention, bewildering applications not to mention changes of attitude and opportunity. The Arts and Humanities Data Service has been in the thick of it from the outset and two subgroups of particular significance to the performing arts academic community - the Performing Arts Data Service [PADS] and the Visual Arts Data Service [VADS] - have been established to offer first-hand advice on any digital resource project from its outset. I cannot overstress the importance of contacting them early in the development of an idea which relates to digital resources. Within the performing arts academic community PADS is the obvious first port of call and, as images and particularly moving images begin to play an ever increasing role in that sector, VADS becomes another source of specialist information and advice. They both have web pages which offer further information on making initial enquiries: PADS: http://www.pads.ahds.ac.uk/
VADS: http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/ For any individuals unfairly labelled 'computer phobic' I can only offer one insight: it's a myth. Few if any are going to avoid an approach, device, technique or resource if they are persuaded that it is genuinely beneficial to them and repays the required investment in time or money or energy. 'Computer phobics' are the wiser beavers not yet persuaded that benefits accrue for the investment required. No-one wants - or 'wanted', it has acquired a certain status as of late - to be labelled a computer phobic. Some computer experts at my own institution tried to be helpful to those they considered ill-informed and ran a course called 'I'm a computer phobic too' and were surprised that it recruited poorly. But faced with such a bewildering barrage of terminology, devices, applications and claims I suspect everyone is computer phobic at some stage. Certainly the difference between 'computer literacy' and 'computer illiteracy' is one of gradation rather than absolutes, one is reminded of the Monty Python sketch "I am Middle Class: I look up to him. But I look down on him." For anyone who has felt any inadequacy faced with meaningless technical gobbledygook I offer them this guidance: the glaze. The glaze is a simply technique of skipping those bits that don't make sense and skimming the words until they seem to fit together again into vaguely meaningful sentences. The equivalent in conversation is an impassive face (try to keep your eyes open!) until the speaker runs out of jargon. This isn't quite as negative as it may sound - the same words recur and by dint of repetition the most frequently recurring ones begin to make sense. You can hasten the process if you so wish by deliberately placing yourself in environments where such terminology is likely to occur - reading this guide for example, or glancing through the IT articles in newspapers, listening in on conversations. Just as most people's practical abilities with IT begin with some form of typing or word-processing, moving on to email, moving on to Lists, possibly moving to other applications, as with any language or skill curve it's a relatively easy and painless process providing it's staged. If something occurs that seems too big a step just glaze! There may be moments in this volume when you will need to glaze but I hope you will find them few and far between. All contributors including myself have tried to reduce the technological jargon to acceptable chunks which will be informative to those looking for further detail without causing others to sustain eye damage through over-lengthy glazing. Our combined intention is not conversion but encouragement and I suspect all contributors feel (and some say directly) "If I did it, you can do it." This Guide is in fact not the first to acknowledge the increasing interest in the use of digital resources within the performing arts community: that accolade belongs to Mark Batty who authored for the SCUDD IT Group (Standing Conference of University Drama Departments) 'A Very Basic Introduction to IT'. Generally known under its diminutive title of 'Idiot's Guide' or more politely 'SCUDD IT Guide' it was distributed free to members of the SCUDD [Association] in 1998/9. The opening sentence of the Foreword marks the same spot: "Information Technology has become an essential part of all our lives, whether we like it or not. This booklet is for those of us who do not like it..." but by a gentle process of straightforward explanation of the fundamentals - naming of parts, distinguishing between Mac and PC, networking etc - notes on software, file management and the Internet and an extensive Glossary, it achieved its aim of being an informative booklet "for the least computer literate without teaching everyone else how to suck their eggs" (Batty, n.d. [1999]). I'm delighted that the excellent Glossary in that booklet has been expanded by Mark Batty for inclusion in this Guide and is highly recommended as a plain English explanation of any terminology that is unfamiliar. A 'Guide' is not a 'Manual' and even though many of the chapters give tips, hints and occasional 'don'ts' - their function is not a step by step account of how to control IT technology but a step by step account of how particular outcomes can be achieved using IT technology. And in all cases the framework used for those accounts is one very familiar to dramatists (but never let it be said that I suggested it was the only one), that of telling a story. And thus the emphasis on the anecdotal. So each chapter has a standard plot and the plot in each case is of the 'What Katy Did and How She Did It' variety. And whom she met along the way. A common theme of the majority of the contributors is that along the way Katy met a competent technician who could facilitate her chosen production aims, helping to translate her aspirations, designs and intentions into a performance that worked. A common aspect of all contributors, indeed a qualifying necessity, is that they have directed successful projects involving various aspects of digital resources related to the performing arts. In some instances it was for documentation purposes, in some for teaching purposes, in some for research purposes, in some for all three. The strong underlying assumption - that collaboration must play a significant part (with the audience/user, with fellows and colleagues, with technical staff, professionals and specialists) is not an unfamiliar one to the performing arts community which has always recognised that it must use what's possible to make whats extraordinary. Page 1 of 2 Top of Page
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