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Visual Impact
The integration of multimedia into productions is engaging
audiences like never before
In their review of James Scruggs’s “Disposable
Men,” a multimedia exploration of the media’s treatment of African-American
men, the Village Voice said that “no performance piece in recent memory
has made audiences feel at once so engaged and so culpable.” The visceral
emotional power referenced in this review was driven not just by the work’s
incendiary theme, but also through the brilliant integration of Scruggs’
searing monologues with nine simultaneous, highly-coordinated video streams.
The writer/actor sensed from the project’s incubation that he couldn’t
successfully illustrate media attitudes without using media itself in the
production. In its earliest incarnation, though, the integration was primitive
at best.
“I had done the piece a year before,” says Scruggs. “I think
I used six or seven VHS players. I pushed ‘play’ on all six and
they ran for like 40 minutes. It was really haphazard and pretty crazy, but
I had the infrastructure in there that I wanted.”
That infrastructure, which included images from Hollywood horror films as
well as both archival and original footage, served as a blueprint for the
final production. But like any blueprint, it was merely a plan. To bring it
to fruition, a much more sophisticated level of coordination was required.
Choose a Method, Avoid the Madness
Scruggs began meeting with a creative team at the home of his director, Kristin
Marting, executive director of New York’s HERE Arts Center. The group
went through Scruggs’s script while watching many hours’ worth of
collected footage on two televisions, determining how to best combine the
onstage action with the projected visuals while ensuring that it didn’t
all come off as a jumbled mess.
“We assigned different screens different kinds of information,”
says Scruggs. “We had one screen that was assigned all the original footage
and personal mythology, and a larger, 9x12 screen got information that was
documentary in nature, and monster footage.”
As other perspectives came into view, the group added monitors with supplemental
information, a curtain screen that reinforced the actor’s emotional content,
and a monitor in the audience commenting on the action on stage.
The end result was an emotional tour de force that included an audience participation
recreation of the shooting of Amadou Diallo, a Guinean man who was fired upon
41 times by the New York City police.
“The strongest part,” says Scruggs, “was at the very end. We
had a policeman on a 9x12 screen, and me live on stage, and we communicated
back and forth. The audience was given 41 laser-pointed guns, each gun numbered,
and as the video progressed, the video prompted the audience members to shoot
the man on stage—gun number one, point it here, all the way up to number
41. Through the use of video, the audience got to see what it feels like to
aim a gun and shoot it, and to be prompted to do it.”
Moderate Use, Maximize Engagement
While creative and judicious use of video was the key to maximizing the show’s
emotional resonance, Scruggs and Marting both note that overusing or misusing
video could just as easily dull a production’s vibrancy.
“It’s about finding the balance between the live performer and the
video so that the video doesn’t overwhelm the performer, because video
is a really strong medium,” says Marting. “You need to look at scale.”
In order to prevent the video from eclipsing Scruggs’ monologues, “Disposable
Men” displayed it on a variety of surfaces, including several TVs that
moved up and down, a circular screen, a fabric screen, and even, at times,
content projected onto Scruggs himself. The show utilized four projectors
of at least 2,000 lumens each, including one that was mounted onto a Media
Beam, a system that allows video to be manipulated and then projected anywhere
on the stage, including onto the moving actor.
“All these different ways of using the video, and what footage we chose
to put on those different surfaces, had different resonances for us,”
notes Marting.
Incorporate Media Early On
But if judicious creativity is one key to multimedia success, the other, the
pair agrees, is early integration.
“The time we spent organizing what we were going to show really made
a difference,” says Scruggs. “We had rigid rules for the world we
were creating, like only certain types of images went on any particular screen.
So when people watched it, they did not get confused. And very few people
came out and mentioned, ‘Wow, there were a lot of screens.’ Most
people came out emotionally affected. People would come up to me in tears.”
“There was no way to do the dramaturgy of the show without having the
video element as part of the rehearsal process,” adds Marting. “You
need to do a work in process that incorporates the technology. Don’t
wait to put it in at tech. It is an element in rehearsal, just like the actor
and the music. You’re putting it in as you’re building your narrative.
That way it becomes a really integrated part of the story you’re telling.”
Marting, who has developed several multimedia projects, learned the importance
of early integration the hard way. Her first experience with multimedia production
was for a site-specific dance/theatre work called “Dead Tech,” inspired
by Ibsen’s “The Master Builder.” As the show concerned a man
facing his own obsolescence, Marting included video footage of modern ruins
as a metaphor, and another video element representing the character’s
own mind and self-perception. But the end result, says Marting, was “underwhelming,”
as the video wasn’t a fully-integrated aspect of the production.
“We didn’t get the video in early enough in the process, and it
didn’t have the depth we wanted,” says Marting. “We had ideas
of what was going to happen where [during rehearsal], but it wasn’t the
same as seeing the footage in the context of language, and feeling it was
really rooted.”
For her next multimedia production, a hybrid performance production of “Erendira,”
Marting began working with the video with two weeks left in rehearsals. The
extra time made a world of difference.
“We were able to work with screen setups approximating where we would
have screens [on stage],” says Marting, “and make changes, cut and
add stuff, and look at the balance of the video through the whole piece, because
we had the last two weeks.”
Avoid Superficial Sampling
While “Disposable Men” was a success, it was also unique in both
its worldview and its application of video. As you talk to developers of multimedia
productions, it becomes clear that no one technique applies across the board—including
the applicability of video in the first place.
Before deciding on when and how to work with video, therefore, the bigger
question to ask is “why”? It’s easy to dive headfirst into
using multimedia without having your reasoning thought out. Ten-time Obie
Award winner and MacArthur Genius Fellow Richard Foreman avoided the use of
film or video for almost 40 years—until his current production.
“I’d never been too interested in media in the theatre and I hadn’t
liked too much of what I’d seen,” says Foreman, “because I
couldn’t see the relationship between the projected relationship and
the acting. It was always either a gimmick, or we were supposed to be confused
for a moment about what was on the screen. It just seemed like the yoking
together of two worlds that didn’t make aesthetic, coherent sense.”
Evolving the Process
Foreman’s first use of digital video, in his latest production, “Zomboid!
(Film/ Performance Project #1),” was derived from inspiration opposite
that of Scruggs, as he started with film he had shot in Australia and built
a show around it, treating it as a found object. But what the two creators
shared was the tremendous amount of trial and error involved in integrating
video projection and stage acting.
“We were editing the film by continually changing the action,” Foreman
says, “continually changing the lights, the music and the sound effects.”
Foreman found that working with video greatly altered his long-standing development
process.
“I normally rehearse and end up with a play that’s twice as long
as I want it to be, so in the course of things I throw away a lot of material,”
says Foreman. “Here it was going to be an hour and five minutes, because
that was the length of the film. That changed things.”
In determining the film’s relationship to the action on stage, Foreman
made creative use of lighting, projecting lights onto the film with varying
degrees of brightness, to “bleach it out, bring it back, make it more
or less visible at different times.” He also overcame a budgetary problem:
as with most theatres, he couldn’t afford the most expensive projectors
available. So he used two projectors, each on two 9x12 screens (which was
really white paint on a flat wall), superimposing the image in order to double
the brightness.
Adding to the Creative Toolbox
While “Zomboid!” was Foreman’s first multimedia production,
it will not be his last, as his next production will be created in a similar
way. At this point, Foreman views video as one more tool in his creative arsenal.
“It’s another color from the paint box,” says Foreman. “It’s
something else—different materials that you suddenly had an interest
to work in, and that called out of you slightly different aesthetic statements.”
And that seems to be the consensus opinion: The use of multimedia is a tool,
not something to be utilized for its own sake. Michael Comlish’s experimental
theatre/ opera work “Darkling” dealt with the Holocaust by way of
photos found in a shoebox in an attic, and used video to create the illusion
of memory.
“I thought from the very beginning of this piece, which takes place in
the mind, that video would be good,” said Comlish, “because it would
represent the fleeting thoughts and images that go through your mind.”
Comlish worked with original and archival footage as well as home movies from
the 1930s and ‘40s, and faced the challenge of working in a small theatre,
leaving him unsure as to how to handle the projection. After much experimentation,
he decided to keep the images inside the box.
“Everything was backward, in a sense,” he says. “The front
projection screen was projected from the back of the theatre space, the back
projected from the front, and the two sides were each projected from the opposite
side.”
Rewarding for All
The production of “Darkling” just goes to show how unique every
multimedia project really is. If there are universal constants in multimedia
theatrical production, they include early integration, experimentation, and
leaving yourself as much time as possible to answer the innumerable questions
that will arise.
Despite the extra time and effort, if handled with thought and care, integrating
multimedia into a theatrical production can provide a rewarding experience
for the audience.
“When it works well, it can create a really visceral and immediate world
for them to be immersed in,” says Marting, “and a greater connection
to their experience than traditional theatre.”
Continue the conversation online in the forums at www.dramabiz.com/forum.
