Columns:: Making media a method

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 15, 2002

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Campus News

Making media a method

By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

David Saltz, an assistant professor in UGA’s drama department, is overseeing the final University Theatre production of the

David Saltz

season, an updated version of the “Living Newspapers” that were produced through the WPA theater project during the 1930s. He talked to Columns about how the production will work and what it will accomplish.

Columns: What led you to the Living Newspaper idea?

Saltz: The Living Newspapers are very well known to people who teach theater history, as I do. I have always been intrigued by the Living Newspapers because they were among the first productions to make use of media with live performance, and that has been my particular interest for several years. The production of the Tempest that we did here focused on that, and the drama department’s interactive performance lab has been dedicated to exploring that relationship. I began wondering what a new Living Newspaper would do with the new media technology. That’s how I initially came up with the idea of juxtaposing a 1930s Living Newspaper with a brand new Living Newspaper.

Columns: And the idea of putting it on the Web is in part to play off the use of technology in the original productions.

Saltz: That’s exactly right. The cutting edge media technology in 1930s was slides and film clips. In 2001, it was the World Wide Web.

Columns: So incorporating the Web is not so much a matter of letting people see the production without going to the theater as building the technology into the production?

Saltz: The experience you will get watching it online will be radically different from the live experience. The online audience will affect what the live audience will see--they will become part of the live event. It’s not just a one-way communication, and for me that’s a very vital aspect of it.
We are developing a Web site that is keyed to what’s happening during the live performance. As you are watching the video stream you’ll see a series of questions relating to the issues that will be dealt with in the next scene. You might select images or answer questions. Then in the next scene, those responses from the Internet audience will be projected behind the action.

Columns: Will the Web responses affect the live action?

Saltz: The playwrights wrote one scene, called “Ambiguous,” to be played in different ways. The live audience and the Internet audience will choose which issue they want to see, and each night we’ll perform that scene twice, once for the live audience vote and once for the Internet audience variation.

Columns: You mentioned the interactive performance lab and the University Theatre production of The Tempest in the past. How many students are involved in the lab?

Saltz: The interactive performance lab is a facility in this department where we can develop productions incorporating technology. We teach technology courses for undergraduates, such as animation, and we have an M.F.A. in dramatic media. This is the place where our live performance season and our media work come together.
For example, in this production, an M.F.A. student is the media director--which is a huge job. In fact, it’s her thesis project. She’s been working very closely with the New Media Institute--she has been teaching a course at the New Media Institute and those students are developing the Web site and other media for the production. At this point almost all of the digital media graduate students are involved at least to some extent in the production.

Kathryn Hammond (far left), Rachel Lamber and Jenny Butler, Jenny Butler

Media director Kathryn Hammond (far left) encodes the video signal during a “streamed” rehearsal of Living Newspapers. Onstage at left is Rachel Lambert, who represents a woman from 1935, with Jenny Butler, who represents a woman from 2001. (Photo by Peter Frey)

Columns: This production sounds closer to what I think of as “interactive”--the audience interacting with the production. That wasn’t true of The Tempest.

Saltz: By interactive performance, we mean the interaction between the media and a live person. In some cases that can be the live performers. In The Tempest, the central idea was the use of the motion-capture technology. A live actress was controlling the media so that those animations could interact with the live actors in a way that a canned video sequence never could. In the previous interactive lab production that I directed, Kaspar, sensors were built into the furniture, so that the set was actually interacting.
The interactive performance lab is the place for moving beyond traditional theater, or even the simulation of theater, into art forms that really fall outside the old disciplines altogether. Right now the students in my class on interactive media and live performance are working on their final projects. They are all interactive, for the audience, in the sense that you meant. Everybody is doing something very different. Some are the sort of thing you might see at Disney World, with robotics and animatronics and sensors and videos. Some are the sorts of things you can see in an art gallery--live, interactive sculptures, but all with a dramatic and theatrical quality.

Columns: And yet these projects are in the drama department and not the art school. There are lots of homes for this kind of technology.

Saltz: And the art school is doing it too, but the focus is different. The bottom line here is that everything we do with this technology we do to dramatically enhance stories. Like the Kaspar production, it can be quite experimental and intellectually challenging and perhaps not very accessible the first time--but even then, it is based on character and narrative.

Columns: How about your new project to put vaudeville routines on the Web?

Saltz: The vaudeville project is the most purely digital of all the projects--creating a virtual-reality simulation of a live performance. Still, the research goal is to find ways to represent the experience of being at a live performance--as opposed to creating a film of a live performance.
In a film, the camera takes over for you, so you don’t have any choice about where you are looking. Most importantly, you completely lose the community of spectators, the context of the audience. The purpose of the virtual reality approach is to put you in the theater surrounded by other spectators.
Basically we are using video game technology for a scholarly and artistic purpose. The challenge is that the animation demands are much greater than the typical video game. We are hiring live professional performers and using motion capture technology.
Everything has to be incredibly accurate in detail. It should be a lot of fun.

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Columns is produced by the UGA News Service, a unit of UGA Public Affairs.
Beth Roberts: Columns editor, Juliett Dinkins: Columns managing editor,
Janet Beckley: Columns art director. Peter Frey: Columns photo editor

Questions or comments should be directed to columns@uga.edu