July 6, 2008 at 9:14 am · Filed under SUSAN, new york city, abt, performance, advice, audience, audiences, american balet theatre
The other night, I returned home after an evening of ballet-ing in an unusually funky mood. (Suffice it to say that the company in the seats beside me were far less pleasant than the excellent company on stage.)
Imagine my surprise, then, when I began flipping through the program a few days later to discover an interesting addition to that evening’s playbill. Because Volpe is so much more elegantly eloquent than I am—but, mainly, because I adore his graceful use of the (ghastly) “heinous”—I wanted to share his thoughts on:
I shall spare you the lengthy rant about the obvious blight of ringing cell phones or the agony of late arrivals stepping on our toes or that awkward moment when you find your orchestra seats being warmed by sheepish looking third balcony hopefuls. That said, let’s review the more obscure yet heinous crimes that might send us fleeing back to our home surround-sound and plasma-screen systems, and far from live performances that require us to be a part of a civilized communal experience.
Gentlemen, if you must snore, make sure your companion has sharp elbows.
Fanny packs are never an acceptable “Performing Arts” accoutrement, save it for the mall.
Humming is a crime that is almost forgivable as it’s committed unconsciously. Still, never, ever, hum along with the music—the musicians really don’t need your help.
Never leave a performance before intermission, unless you are injured and bleeding profusely. While you may be “bloody bored,” those around you are not.
Ladies, please do not bathe in your Clive Christian No. 1 perfume prior to a performance. Gentlemen, you might want to skip the cologne altogether; you are in close quarters, not the French Quarter.
Refrain from leaping to one’s feet, zealously clapping and shouting “Bravo,” while the rest of us are still waiting to hear the last glorious notes of the aria.
Dress Appropriately. We all know that casual attire is encouraged these days, but let’s keep casual from becoming catastrophic. Shorts and a tank top might be appropriate in Branson, Missouri, the home of country music, but not in Avery Fisher Hall, the Home of the New York Philharmonic. We must keep the concert halls alive by our patronage for the next generation. As a young man I would attend such transporting musical evenings wearing a borrowed jacket and dress pants purchased from the Salvation Army. I made an effort despite my “standing room” or “student ticket” status and rose to the occasion on limited funds while showing respect for the performers and fellow audience members.
There is no substitute for a live performance, whether it is ballet, classical, jazz or soul. Miss Aretha Franklin demands, and gets, what she literally spells out for us—R-E-S-P-E-C-T. And that’s what other audience members and the performers on stage deserve from all of us.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I am guilty of (at least!) one of the above violations. (Oof!)
I wonder if this strikes a chord with anyone else?
Am I an anomaly in thinking that being in the house for an evening’s performance is just as challenging (in different ways, of course) as being on the stage?
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October 22, 2007 at 12:47 pm · Filed under studio, architecture, technology, TONY, science, theatre, space, dance technology, visible, stage, video cube, sarah lawrence college, you, politics, set design, performance, school, michel foucault, discipline, dance house, design, audience, intermission, ASHLEY, performance space, theory, art installation, THE ( INTER ) MISSION, social network
Over the past few weeks of my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students and I have been programing, dissecting and repurposing surveillance systems to develop mediated performance outlets/environments. To aid and inform our strategies in this project we have been thinking and reading about panopticism.
What is panopticism anyway? wiki wiki
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical architecture imagined in the 1780’s, is illustrated above. The name literally means the “all-seeing place.” He describes it as a multi-purpose architecture whose design principles are applicable to constructing factory, school, prison, hospital or asylum. A multi-story ring of individual cells surround a central watchtower; every cell is visible from the watchtower while the watcher remains invisible.
The viewer can see everything while remaining invisible.
This panoptic prison named Presidio Modelo, built under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in Cuba, once held the one and only Fidel Castro. It is now a national monument.
Foucault uses the Panopticon to analyze the new ways in which power is exercised in the modern world and the role surveillance technologies play in creating a disciplined/docile body. He describes Bentham’s architecture as a kind of multi-staged performance space.
The unverifiable possibility that a subject is being observed at any time is the essential mechanism by which the machine operates. Visibility, as Meghan noted in class, makes one take responsibility for their own subjection.
He who is subjected to the field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play simultaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Discipline and Punish 202
What does this have to do with performance? Everything…
Foucault describes the stacks of cells; “They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
In one way the panopticon is like a super-theater, a nesting of many stages.
However Foucault stresses that surveillance architectures are exactly the reverse of those of theater. He writes, “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.” Survellence allows one to see many while theater and spectacle is based on many seeing one
Compare the structure of the Panopticon to that of the Globe Theater.
Different yet the same. Definitely involved in a complex tangle.
This assembly can be used as a dance technology. On April 28th and 29th 2007 Martha Williams directed and performed in a dance installation entitled Stacked, converting an out of business clothing store into a surveillance menagerie. Each dancer took residence in one of nine changing rooms which they themed and designed the interiors of. Camera feeds from each cell were composed and projected in the central room so that all of the dances could be seen at once.
Turning the panopticon back into a performance space constitutes a double reversal.
With this in mind, take another look at the dance-cube I prototyped last fall. In this staging the cameras are on the perimeter of the studio so that the gaze is directed from the outside in (as in theater) rather than from the inside out.
Though still, looking at this dance I am reminded of the cells of the panopticon.
“They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Could we characterize the structure of the internet as panoptic? Here is a great essay that explores that question.
This very space is haunted by panoptic geometries. Have a look at the contributor list in the sidebar, look at all those little faces, “perfectly individualized” subjects you can see all at once and may click on to reveal “so many small theaters.”
The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once. This is where things become slightly more complicated. Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower.
All these ideas should not creep us out. Rather, they should inform our thinking about performance and visibility and the way technology provides new venues for artistic expression. It is an open problem. In my estimation projects like Martha William’s Stacked, my dance-cube, or The(Inter)Mission are all part of a project to reverse-the-panopticon. While flirting with aspects of surveillance and making the subject hyper-visible, they enhance communication rather than simply separate us into little boxes.
So next time you feel like you are under surveillance consider it an opportunity to put on a show.
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