INSERIRMEDICAMENTRECEPTA

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nimation and video are frequently used as part of the scenography of con-temporary theatrical productions through the use of projected backdrops.

At the beginning of the research process in 2006, I created manipulated video sequences for the queer performance artist Ursula Martinez and her trilogy of shows, Me, Me, Me, performed at BITE at the Barbican and touring internation-ally to Edinburgh, Bulgaria, Poland and elsewhere. The projections extended the geographical space of the stage, provided additional cast members in the form of a choir of OAPs and enabled Martinez to morph into an old lady. The integration of moving images with live performance, such as in this example, is becoming commpnplace and projection media are now routinely used to create spectacular backdrops for West End shows such as in theatre designer Wil-liam Dudley’s work for The Woman in White.¹ Going beyond scenography, the musical Avenue Q, inspired by the children’s television show Sesame Street, incorporates a range of live actors, puppets and clips of projected character animations. Other theatre companies - such as Forkbeard Fantasy² and 1927³ - incorporate animation in more complex ways in which projections are used not as mere backdrops, but in interaction with the performers. Other artists create works of animation into which they integrate their own live performances. The animator, Kathy Rose, often shows her work in a dance context, creating live works in which she projects animation directly onto herself.⁴ Similarly, the art-ist Miwa Matreyek creates complex and beautiful animated worlds in which she interacts live in the form of a shadow on a back projection screen.⁵ In the work

1 cf. Simon McBurney et al., “Projection in Performance” (seminar, Barbican Theatre, London, 2009).

2 Forkbeard Fantasy, “Forkbeard Fantasy Homepage,” n.d., http://www.forkbeardfantasy.co.uk (accessed January 4 2009).

3 1927, “1927 Cabaret,” n.d., http://www.19-27.co.uk (accessed January 3, 2011).

4 Kathy Rose, “Performance,” Kathy Rose, n.d., http://www.krose.com/performance.html (accessed September 15, 2010).

5 Miwa Matreyek, “Performance,” Semihemisphere, n.d., http://www.semihemisphere.com/

performance.html (accessed September 15, 2010).

2. Production: The animator as performer

of Rose and Matreyek, the live animator / performer becomes like Alice in Won-derland in a fantastical world.

The use of multi-media projections in theatre is not new and can, for example, be traced back to the theatre of the Bauhaus, Futurists and Russian constructivists, Vic-torian spectacles, Medieval religious dramas and far earlier beyond the scope of this thesis. In their book Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt have coined the term ‘intermediality’¹ to re-conceptualise contempo-rary theatre as a ‘hypermedium’² in which many art forms and media are combined in a live context:

Where the art forms of theatre, opera and dance meet, interact and integrate with the media of cinema, television, video and the new technologies; creating profusions of texts, inter-texts, inter-media and spaces in-between.³

An example of an intermedial combination of artforms can be seen in the work of Faulty Optic, which features puppetry, pre-recorded sequences of animation and live stop motion in a theatrical context.

Founded in 1987 by Liz Walker and Gavin Glover, the theatre company Faulty Optic has pioneered a form of animation theatre - a term they coined to get away from the connotations they perceived lay behind the idea of puppet theatre. Walker and Glover came from a background in puppetry through working at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre in London and established their company to create puppetry for adults that is non-verbal, surreal and physical. This was influenced by their interest in animations such as those by the Quay Brothers, Svankmajer and Bob Godfrey, automata and kinetic sculpture such as that made by the artists Paul Spooner and Tinguely, as well as the physical theatre of early Complicité and Pina Bausch.⁴ In their work, Faulty Op-tic combine puppetry, live narration and foley sound effects, pre-recorded animation clips, automata, scrap sculpture and live digital video feeds from miniature sets and

1 Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds., Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Third.

(Amsterdam; New York: Editions Rodopi, 2007), 29.

2 Ibid., 37.

3 Ibid., 24.

4 Walker, interview.

2. Production: The animator as performer

Figure 26. Faulty Optic, Bubbly Beds, 1996.

The three-tiered stage features a flooded basement on the lower level. The top level is a live video feed of tiny puppets being manipulated.

2. Production: The animator as performer

manipulated models to create what is, in essence, live stop motion mediated through the lens of the camera, but created in real-time.

Touring the UK, France and Spain from 2003 to 2007, Faulty Optic’s show Soiled is described thus:

Through the machinations of a boxing ballerina, a soil spitting psychic and a sparrow with Teurrets [sic.] disease, a Beckettian innocent discovers a deadly secret of love, guilt, loyalty and deception.¹

In his review of the show for the Irish Times, Finton O’Toole describes the richness of the references the work draws upon:

Soiled is extraordinarily difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t seen it. It seems to have a narrative but not a coherent plot. It draws on an extraordinarily wide range of traditions and ideas, among them the Japanese kabuki and bunraku styles, the sym-bolist dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, silent movies, surrealist spectacle and perfor-mance art. It has one foot in English whimsy and the other in modernist experimental-ism. Its head is in the theatre of the absurd and its heart is at the end of the pier. Like a seaside Punch and Judy show, it has elements of knockabout farce. Like Tadeusz Kantor’s creations of the 1970s, it brings together puppetry, visual art and machines that move like automata.²

The central character in the show is a nameless puppet operated by two puppeteers

1 Faulty Optic, “Soiled,” n.d., http://www.faultyoptic.co.uk/soiled.htm (accessed September 17, 2010).

2 Finton O’Toole, “Kilkenny Arts Festival,” the Irish Times, August 15, 2003, http://www.faultyoptic.

co.uk/soiled.htm (accessed September 17, 2010). from Faulty Optic’s Soiled, 2003.

2. Production: The animator as performer

who are visible, but dressed in black, minimising their on-stage presence:

Audiences have said that even though sometimes we black-out, in that we wear masks and black clothes - and sometimes we don’t have masks on and have finger-less gloves so we are much more present - the audiences still say, that they block the human beings out and they focus on the puppets. The puppets are lit more than the human beings operating them, but I think that even without that, the audiences just take on this suspension of disbelief, so they will look at the puppets and they will forget that they are being operated. We just become strange shadows in the back-ground.¹

Through non-matrixed performances in which they manipulate their puppets, the agency of the puppeteers produces the appearance of complex acting in the puppet.

Although the puppeteers are the combined dual authors of the performance, it is enacted by the puppet and it is with this figure that the main attention of the audience resides.

The memory of the puppet hero’s lost love – a mermaid – is shown through a projection of pre-recorded animation. The show climaxes in a nightmarish sequence in which the puppet descends into an underworld necropolis to try to revive the corpse of the mermaid. This is made of old colanders, a dustbin and baking tins and can only be seen from the outside by the audience. A tiny camera is moved inside and the resultant images are projected onto a large screen, enabling the audience to see the interior world of the necropolis. Inside, small puppets and pieces of machinery are moved by the puppeteers in a process of live stop motion that culminates in showing a grinder crushing human bones and skulls. The main character is thus represented by different media: as a live puppet, in a projection of a pre-recorded stop motion animation, as well as a miniature puppet whose movements are projected via video feed in an act of live stop motion. Despite the use of different media to portray him, he is experienced as a coherent character by the audience.

Faulty Optic’s work combines multiple types of presence - puppets, puppeteers dressed in black, pre-recorded animation, live stop motion and live narrators. They use animation on stage to allow them to conjure up a past for their puppet characters

1 Walker, interview.

2. Production: The animator as performer

as well as to present fantasy environments, such as the necropolis in Soiled.¹ They are interested in creating whole, extramundane worlds on stage. Although Faulty Optic think of animation and live performance as two separate entities - they see animation as a pre-recorded, linear, filmic form and live theatre as a continually evolving process - they are able to bring the two together in animation theatre with their own brand of live stop motion which can respond to the live situation and involve an iterative reac-tion to audience feedback:

It is a very organic process of creating the actual show. The performance is blocked - we know where we are going to next - but it’s also a little bit open to interpretation…

we do feed off the audience… I think maybe this is why our theatre differs from anima-tion, because we are always working on it. It’s different for every type of audience, even if subtly different, and we take feedback from the audience to create it as we are going along so that in the end we are doing it for the audience… when it’s on film you have to make all of those decisions there and then, before it’s actually released, before the public see it, whereas we change it for the public.²

Faulty Optic’s work shows a continuity of practice from puppet theatre to anima-tion to a complex form of hybrid practice enabled by digital video and projecanima-tion technology. The animator / puppeteers are shown in the same space as the animated and the act of animation is shown as both pre-recorded and as a live process. This complex layering of techniques gives their characters a real physical presence along-side their live projection on a screen. The central character’s performance is created by two puppeteers and shown through multiple media, yet is read by the audience as coherent and continuous. This complexity in Faulty Optic’s work raises the issue of authorship in performance and challenges the notion of a simplistic correlation between performer and performance that I will consider in the next section and I will examine the idea that there could be a differentiation between whose intent originates a performance and who is the executor of that intent.

1 Ibid.

2 Ibid.

2. Production: The animator as performer

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