In the era of Internet, the border between an amateur and a professional artist is barely discernible: so much for the sacredness of the status of a gallery, theatre, movie theatre, when everyone can address the audience of millions uploading a video to YouTube or a picture to Instagram. The most advanced theatre directors no longer want to be “artists with a capital A”: they are ready to reconsider their relations with audience members and to turn them into co-creators of their production. Amateurishness is no longer regarded as shameful: actual theatre is observing the Internet creativity of common users with interest. This leads to surprising results.
Growing into the net
The group named Premier Stratagème (which means “the first stratagem”) was founded by two directors, the Italian Giuseppe Chico and the Croatian Barbara Matijević; all of the productions are performed by Barbara alone. The tandem is completely unknown in Russia, although they are in great demand at western festivals; in 2011 Matijević and Chico marked their presence at the principal theatre forum of Europe – Avignon. There is hardly any other theatre group, engaged in the reality of the net to such an extent: all the projects of Premier Stratagème are in one way or another connected with the Internet.
The production Forecasting (2011) has dozens if not hundreds of anonymous co-authors. Its backbone is a 40-minute cut of amateur videos, found by the directors on YouTube: in most cases these are ordinary videos with pieces of advice for every life situation – from baking to parrot training, but there are also non-trivial videos, such as pictures of a drinking throat. In art this is called ready-made, on the Internet – repost (to think of it, repost is a form of ready-made: when you are sharing someone’s image or post, you, like the father of ready-mades Marcel Duchamp, express yourself with the help of something already made).
Forecasting can be performed on any – even the most unprepared – stage: in order to perform it, Barbara Matijević needs only MacBook. Every time when a person appears in a video, the actress takes a pose which would make the hand in the video look like an extension of her hand, and the head – an extension of her neck. She seems to be growing into the screen, merging her own blood circulatory system with the world-wide web.
The tempo of the production is ultra-fast, within a minute Barbara changes a number of roles: a moment ago she was stroking a rubber dildo and now she is already making roses on a cake (note how the editing adds a new meaning to the videos: an inoffensive cake decorating bag turns into a phallic symbol). Some stories are entertaining, others touching, some of them are even truly scary. A succession of similar videos featuring gun shooting makes one think about the spread of weapons around the world; the actress forces the audience to feel that moment deeply, pointing another gun at her own chest.
However, this pacifist note disappears as easily as it appeared. Forecasting is a half-serious, half-humorous long poem about everything and nothing, looking like bouts-rimes with videos instead of words. The trajectory of the performance is totally unpredictable, as is the user’s travel through the Internet. In fact, this project is dedicated to the process happening in our head, when we are going through the news feed on Facebook, rambling around YouTube, or pointlessly clicking on Wikipedia links. A compassionate friend, an enraged citizen, a sentimental cat lover – how much time do we need to switch from one role to another?
The Robinsons of YouTube
So far the most recent project of the tandem is I’ve never done this before (2015), which is also about YouTube. Here Barbara tells about eight extraordinary people, whom she accidentally came across on a website. These are mostly engineers-enthusiasts, who make curious gadgets – such as a device turning brain waves into electronic music – and test them on camera.
There are more props in this production than in all the other works of the directors’ duo combined: self-made devices from the video are scrupulously reproduced by a team of technicians and designers. In an hour and a quarter the actress tries on eight eccentric roles – from a fanatical follower of Nikola Tesla to a person with an artificial tail. Barbara’s own remarks (confused questions, comments, assumptions) are thoughtfully provided in the form of subtitles.
The production is well-suited to the material: YouTube frequenters are familiar with the format, when the presenter shows and comments on the videos found on the web – often ridiculous or funny (the pioneer of this genre was American blogger Ray William Johnson; Ray’s show has super-successful clones in Russian: “+100500” and “This is Khorosho” [“This is Good”]). The difference is in attitude: Stratagème treats YouTube curiosities as something quite serious. For them, the characters of the production are not freaks, but self-made artists. When Barabara reconstructs their experiments on stage, she echoes Marina Abramović who dealt with the reconstruction of other people’s performances, partly in order to celebrate their creators.
So, if these people are artists, their eccentric projects are open to interpretation. Not only does Matijević reproduce what she saw, but she also comes up with an interpretation, which is sometimes no less curious than the works on the web themselves. Among the devices and machines, shown on stage, there is a paper mouth, equipped with a simple mechanism; it is capable of talking and singing. Barbara compares the unknown female artist, who created this device, with Robinson Crusoe, her apartment – with an isolated island, and her paper companion – with Friday. “The only difference is that she is not waiting for rescue,” the director emphasizes, “because she does not feel lost.”
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There are very few Russian analogs of Premier Stratagème: if truth be told, only two Russian directors – Dmitry Volkostrelov and Semyon Alexandrovsky – have made the digital reality the leitmotif of their work.
Volkostrelov’s production Lecture on Something (2015) gives the audience members (although only two out of three) a relative freedom of choice: someone is allowed to switch the sound channels, others – the video channels, and someone may not have any influence on anything at all. The synchronizing of video and sound makes sense only in one situation: if you want to see how the application 4’33’’ from the John Cage Trust functions. With the help of this application, people around the world record their own versions of Cage’s canonical piece 4’33’’ (this opus has no notes; it will contain any sounds, which you will hear during 4 minutes and 33 seconds). The director gives the audience access to the musical catalogue, which can be contributed to by anyone who wishes to do so, and incorporates other people’s tracks from the Internet into his production, precisely like Premier Stratagème in Forecasting.
One of the episodes of the large-scale project Shoot – Get treasure – Repeat (2012) authored by Alexandrovsky, Volkostrelov, and Alexander Vartanov unravels on the Facebook page of theatre post – in the presence of the audience the actors are typing their characters’ lines from their own actual accounts. Sixteen mini-productions of Mark Ravenhill’s plays are being shuffled according to the will of an audience member, who moves from one room to another as he or she pleases (even this form already reminds us about the freedom of the Internet user). Facebook’s Birth of a Nation can be the first or the last episode of the theatre series consisting of 16 parts – depending on the order you are watching it in.
Every user of the social network can follow the correspondence between Ravenhill’s unnamed characters. Moreover, nothing prevents him or her from interfering in their dialogue (the audience members can do the same, provided that they have not switched off their smartphones). Thus, moving into the virtual space, the hermetic drama action turns into an open structure, which entitles the audience almost to the same rights as directors and actors.