In September 2004 theatre group De Daders from Holland wants to release a performance in which there will be live-stream video through internet connection with different countries.
For this performance we are looking for theatre groups and media-institutes to take part in this project in which the main focus will be to create a performance using internet connections.
Cooperating theatre groups will be performing live for a Dutch audience using the internet.
This project is an initiative of the Dutch group De Daders/Jan Langedijk. The concept has been developed by the English theatre maker Julian Maynard Smith from Station House Opera.
We are looking for contacts with theatre makers, who are interested in an international collaboration.
We are also looking for (media)institutes or universities working with new media that could help with technical facilities.
Please read the following notes by Julian Maynard Smith on the principles of the performance.

NOTES FOR POTENTIAL COLLABORATORS/FACILITATORS

We propose to make a two-way live video connection linking three places around the world. Through this we shall instigate a theatre piece which links live performance from all three places, presented to an audience at each location. There may be technical and time-zone reasons why the event cannot be presented to the three audiences at the same time, in which case the performance can be repeated three times, to audiences at each of the three locations in turn.

The quality of the image will provide for an adequate but not high resolution projection of two meters by one and a half meters. Transmission over the internet means that there will be some delay of up to ten or fifteen seconds in receiving images. The live performers in front of their audience will be accompanied by their own live video image projected side by side with the projections of performers at the other two locations, in a combined three part image.

We have particular interests in pursuing this format for creating theatre, and rudimentary ideas about how to develop them.. We also realise that at this early stage it is important to find collaborators for the project, collaborators who may have, or will certainly develop, their own ideas about the cultural and political relevance and potential for this idea. Therefore before fixing too much on the form and content of the piece we feel it is important to identify possible collaborators, and begin a dialogue about how to make such a project possible and interesting. Issues which are bound to arise include the relationship between the three partners and how to avoid undue influence or control of one over another. How is it possible for each partner to produce a performance which reflects their own decisions, while bringing the three threads together in a complex arrangement as a single event?

There are obvious technical and financial constraints on how to achieve the video links, and at the moment we are considering using broadband connection to the internet, such as an ADSL line with 1MB download and 256kB upload. This is a relatively low-cost solution to video-streaming, but sadly and inevitably it does mean that the range of potential collaborators in the project will be limited to those who can gain access to such a connection.

Each side agrees on a form which allows a part to be shared and part to remain local; creating in effect three world views out of a common material, views expressed by the local, untransmitted context the common material is put into at each location. Any exploitation or appropriation of the performance contributed by one partner as transmitted to another place, is balanced by the possibility of the opposite effect happening also: the project as a whole may in fact point up the differences between the perceptions of the self and the other in a social, political and geographical setting. It may address the idea that we know that other groups, other individuals exist, but to what degree can we perceive them the way they perceive themselves to be. On the other hand, there will likely be degrees of connection between the three partners in many unexpected areas.

One fundamental of the idea (as conceived by us) is of the knowledge that others exist in the world, but that mere transmission of their images are as likely to deceive as illuminate our understanding, our sense of sharing, of contact. What is it that creates theatrical presence? We do not think that, ultimately, presence is either helped or hindered by transmission through the media, but that presence is created by the human mind using the technology available, whether the human nervous system linking eye and brain or a wire or a radio signal. Presence is a question of understanding the fullness of another’s existence, their spirit. We wish to assert the theatrical presence of people in geographically distant places, not by blending their mediated image into a multimedia mix, but by revealing the gaps, the discontinuities, which paradoxically underline the individual realities of those involved in their own environments. By creating a visual and aural combination, we wish to examine its failings, and allow the audience to become aware of that disjunction between their cognition of the image and the reality which created it, but which in some ways remains unreachable. But others may have different ideas.


Julian Maynard Smith