Here’s what happens when you come see one of my pieces.
You’re watching three things at once. Three different versions of reality: or “ontologies of the real,” if we’re being insufferable academics about it. Which, fine, I am. PhD and everything. Doesn’t mean I have to sound like one.
First: the actors. Right there. Meat and blood and sweat, breathing the same recycled air you’re breathing. That supposedly pure, unmediated thing theater’s been claiming to be for two thousand years. Except, and Peggy will tell you this, even the live is never actually untouched by representation (Phelan 146). Nothing’s pure. Everything’s contaminated. Get used to it.
Second: live video. We’re shooting them right now, real-time, throwing their doubled, tripled, fractured images across every wall we can find. It looks seamless. It’s supposed to look seamless. It’s absolutely not. Auslander. Christ. I wish I could ignore him, but he’s annoyingly, frustratingly right when he says liveness isn’t some mystical essence anymore. It’s an effect. Something you produce through its relationship to recording tech (38). The camera doesn’t capture reality; it manufactures a version of it that the world recognizes as real. We need the mediation to believe the thing actually happened.
Third: pre-recorded footage. Stuff we shot last week, last month, whenever I could get the actors and the space at the same time. This is my attempt at cinema inside a theater. A film nested inside a performance. A ghost haunting the present tense.
And here’s the thing: people watch video differently when there’s a living, breathing human in the room with them. They watch that living human differently when his body’s simultaneously being torn apart and scattered across screens. The presence changes the absence. The absence stains the presence. Makes everything feel wrong in exactly the right way. Rebecca Schneider, who I wish I’d studied with but that’s another story, says performance doesn’t just disappear into the ether. It “leaves remains” (Schneider 33). In my work, those remains multiply like a fucking virus. They contradict each other. They argue. They refuse to settle.
We amplify everything. Wireless mics, mixers, speakers positioned where they’ll do the most damage to your sense of spatial certainty. The voice you hear isn’t the voice leaving the actor’s mouth. It’s routed, processed, relocated. Shannon Jackson calls this the “infrastructure” of performance (Jackson 12)… all that backstage labor and technological scaffolding that quietly, invisibly determines what you think of as “live.” The body is never alone up there. It’s already networked, already compromised, already distributed across systems you can’t see.
What this does, what I’m trying to do, is make the body impossible.
The actor becomes:
* The person captured and remixed on live video.
* The person we recorded last Tuesday.
* The voice coming from speakers mounted in places you can’t quite locate.
Distributed. Fragmented. Unfixable.
And this shattered body pulls off two completely contradictory tricks at the same time. Which is either brilliant or completely fucked, depending on who you ask.
One: It reminds you this is theater. Capital-T Theater. This character? This body? They’re constructions. Aesthetic objects. You can see the seams. You can see where we glued the thing together. Auslander calls this “refusing to naturalize the live” (101), which is academic-speak for: I’m showing you the machinery. I’m letting you watch how the sausage gets made. And by showing you the same person in four different registers at once, I’m making it impossible for you to pretend any of this is natural. It’s all fabrication. It’s all performance. Even the parts that feel real.
Two: It makes everything feel more real.
Because—and this is where it gets dark—mediatization is how we know things are real now. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call it “remediation” (45). We don’t trust something until we’ve seen it reproduced, circulated, verified through screens. The live performer doesn’t feel legitimate until they’ve been captured, doubled, turned into an image. The mediation doesn’t corrupt authenticity. The mediation is the authentication.
You scroll through your feed, Instagram, TikTok, wherever you get your reality these days, and you authenticate your own existence by seeing it reflected back to you through a screen. You perform yourself for devices. Your body is already fragmented, already distributed across platforms before you even walk into my theater.
So here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: I’m not trying to make the performer more human.
If anything, this is a leveling. A flattening. The everyday, the endless avalanche of images we’ve been conditioned to mistake for life, collapses into the fictional. The live body, the screen body, the archived body: they all become the same thing. Interchangeable. The boundary between the real and the performed doesn’t just blur. It dissolves entirely.
Which, let’s be honest, is exactly where we’re living anyway.
We’re all dispersed. We’re all performing. We’re all trying to authenticate ourselves through images that may or may not capture anything true. My work doesn’t fix this. I’m not interested in fixing it. I’m interested in staging it. Making you sit inside the fragmentation long enough to feel its weight. Its truth. Its horror. Maybe even its beauty, though I’m not sure I believe in beauty anymore.
Because if the contemporary body is already a mediated composite, if we’re already living in fragments, already scattered across devices and platforms and screens, then theater isn’t the antidote to the digital world. It’s not some pure space where you escape the machines.
Theater reveals the machine. It performs the condition we’re already living in. It makes it strange enough to see. Uncomfortable enough to feel.
That’s the job. Not to comfort. Not to console. But to show you what you already know but have learned not to see: that you don’t exist in one place anymore. You’re distributed. Impossible. Already gone and still somehow here.
And maybe, maybe, if I do this right, you walk out of my theater feeling less alone with that impossibility. Not because I’ve solved anything. But because for ninety minutes, we were all impossible together.
Works Cited
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2008.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999.
Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. Routledge, 2011.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge, 1993.
Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge, 2011.