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Is It Live?
Tim Cusack • Lighting & Projection • November 5, 2007

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Video technology is transforming live performance — what does that mean for the live
performers?

In a theatrical environment where cutting-edge technology can now realistically represent, to an

unprecedented degree, almost anything a playwright can imagine, where does this leave theatre’s
oldest component, the live body and presence of the actor? From the most primitive DIY tech-
nology in tiny o -o -Broadway spaces to the largest and best-endowed performing arts palaces
like BAM and Lincoln Center, more and more actors are being asked to perform for the camera
and with scene partners who sometimes aren’t even physically present.

The result is a new kind of acting for the stage, one that combines the physical expressiveness of
acting for a live audience with the physical restraint traditionally associated with lm acting. For
the artists involved in these often highly experimental productions, it’s a chance to blaze new
territory in the ever-evolving craft of acting and to use the many skills gained from years of
training and practical experience in new and unexpected ways.

More Technical, More Physical

Catherine Yeager, a member of the acting company of the New York–based 3-Legged Dog (3LD),
has trained with such giants of experimental theatre as Liz Swados, Peter Brook and Ann Bogart’s
SITI Company. While the work of her mentors di ers widely from one another, all are united by
an abiding interest in the live immediacy of the performative body onstage.

But for Yeager, the physical rigor and intense focus developed through immersion in the View-
points and Suzuki techniques espoused by the SITI Company are invaluable for the highly medi-
ated work she does with 3LD. According to Yeager, working with 3LD’s state-of-the-art Eye-liner
system requires “speci city of movement so you don’t break the illusion…you have to know how
to hit your mark.”

That’s because the Eyeliner enables the company to create three-dimensional images onstage
that are so convincingly lifelike that audiences often can’t tell which actors are “real” and which
are video projections. Originally developed and patented in Copenhagen, Denmark, by the
theatre company Vision 4, 3LD holds the exclusive American rights to the technology and has
spent much of the past few years exploring its practical uses in creating innovative theatrical
events. For the actors who actually have to interface with the technology, this translates into a
mandate to “keep the energy contained and focused,” as Yeager puts it.

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 After all, a single ill-timed or overly broad gesture, and the actor could literally end up slicing
through his or her scene partner. Acting with someone who isn’t really there understandably pre-
sents many challenges, especially for actors trained to draw energy and inspiration from the
other performers onstage. Yeager says that the highly physical training she’s received “helps keep
your physical body alive” onstage in the absence of other actors.  Her colleague at 3LD, Israeli-
born David Tirosh, points out that the physical speci city needed even extends to the muscles of
the eye —“You must learn how to shift your eyes so that they meet the eyes of the video image”—
all in the service of maintaining the delicate balancing act between live and mediated performers
that characterizes much of 3LD’s work.  

But the unique acting problems inherent in this type of theatre aren’t just those experienced by
the live actors. Being a video image also creates its own set of aesthetic puzzles to solve. In 3LD’s
Losing Something, Yeager played an ex-girlfriend of the central character, who exists wholly in his
memory. During the course of the performance, she only actually appeared twice in the show —
for the rest of the play, her video image did the acting.

“It could be challenging coming every night to the theatre to do a show and only having two
scenes be live. I didn’t get to go from where my character begins to where she ends, but some-
how I still had to have the same level of emotional investment. I would sit backstage and listen to
how I had done my scenes before and relive the experience of doing them in my body. That way I
could be at the place I needed to be when I actually entered.”

Mediation Leads to Authenticity

One common theme that emerged from discussions with many of the artists for this article was
that their experience of the technology provided them with the opportunity to bring a greater
quality of naturalness and ease to their work, what Tirosh calls “sincerity.” Rizwan Mirwan, an
actor with The Builders Association, echoes this sentiment when he describes how mediated
technology frees him to use “my own natural voice” in performance, as opposed to the projected
and carefully placed speech of traditional theatre.

He is currently workshopping The Builders’ new piece, Continuous City, at Berkeley Rep, in which
he plays an Internet entrepreneur. Mirwan, a New York–raised native of India, enthusias-tically
describes how this kind of theatre allows for an almost-documentary level of realism. “We’re
using my actual family in video chat rooms during the piece: someone in India, someone in
London. We’re using real stories, and my real family gossip.” For Mirwan, this allows for a truer
emotional connection to the material, as opposed to the manufactured or imagined emotions
usually required of the actor when performing a traditional play.

While Mirwan views this technology as an opportunity to bring the realness, for his fellow
Builders Association member Moe Angelos, it has enabled her to indulge her love for creating
characters often radically di erent from herself in a believable way. Or as she puts it, “Put a wig
on me and an accent, and I’m good to go!” In the Builders’ piece Super Vision, the 40-something
Angelos, who’s Caucasian, buried under layers of latex and dark-colored makeup, played a 72-
year-old Sri Lankan woman who communicates with her granddaughter in the United States via
Internet teleconferencing.

While her image was projected on a huge screen at the back of the stage, Angelos herself was
seated downstage in front of a camera — something audiences often didn’t notice, focused as
they were on the mediated character. Angelos had ethical concerns about playing a woman of a
completely di erent age and race, but says, “People really bought it, and I wonder whether it was
the frame that the video provided or the old-fashioned tricks of makeup and acting?” The litmus
test arrived when a group of Sri Lankan immigrants came to see one of the performances. “I
thought they would string my ass up, but they couldn’t have been more gracious and lovely. I
think it was the frame. I am indebted to that frame for the success of the role.”

While 3LD and The Builders Association represent the upper echelon of this kind of perform-ance,
video technology has been used at all levels of theatre. New York–based playwright and solo
performer Wendy Weiner incorporated video into her rst one-woman piece, Defying Freud, at the
now-defunct Todo con Nada on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. For Weiner, the choice to use this
technology was a means of expressing her character’s emotional isolation.

“There’s a disconnect between her and the other people in her world, so they are represented by
cardboard cutouts and video projection.” This choice, in turn, fueled her work as an actor, help-
ing her get in touch with a character who felt powerless to have any impact on the people around
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her: “Usually when you do a scene, you’re trying to have an e ect on another actor. But when
you’re acting against a video image, you can try as hard as you can, you’re just not going to have
that e ect.”

Technology Adds a Beat

Sometimes, even the limitations of the technology can lead actors to choices they wouldn’t have
otherwise made. In 1999, Peculiar Works Project, a New York–based company staged a bi-coastal
play titled Privileged and Confidential, in which actors in New York and Los Angeles simultaneously
acted together via teleconferencing.

What the PWP directors hadn’t taken into consideration was the several-second sound delay that
plagued the technology at that time. Undeterred, the actors playing legal eagles involved in a
nasty sexual harassment lawsuit, turned it to their advantage, according to Co-Artistic Director
Barry Rowell. “The delay helped underscore the communication problems and the power
struggles between the attorneys. The actors kept saying, ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m sorry I didn’t
hear what you just said.’ They could use the delay to augment that tension.”

For many of the actors interviewed, sharing the stage with video projection is just one more ele-
ment to juggle in the complex multitasking that occurs during any live performance. As Weiner
puts it, “It reminds me of an ice-skating routine. You have to hit your jumps at the right point in
the music — and make it all look e ortless.”

3LD’s Yeager is more philosophical. Having to work with so many technical experts in rehearsal
and constantly being required to make choices based on the demands of technology translates
into “not showing up to the theatre in your own bubble. It’s humbling, which is important when
you are trying to express something about humanity.”
  
Tim Cusack is co-artistic director of Theatre Askew in New York City.

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