Heterotopia and Multimedia

Abstract

Since about the 1990s, performance has increasingly deployed a range of different technologies to generate new theatrical (and non-theatrical) effects: live video, digitized presences, cyborg actors, motion capture, among many other possibilities.¹ While some of these technologies are costly to mix effectively with the more conventional experience of live performance, the ready availability of many multimedia practices has made it achievable for even low-budget performances to incorporate aspects of new media into‘old’ theatre. The ubiquity of screen technology has already altered the way we think about space such that in Simon Phillips’s 2013 production of Verdi’s opera, Otello, at the Lyric Theatre in Brisbane, Otello looked into a regular computer screen to ‘see’ what Iago wanted him to see on what the audience assumed was a live surveillance camera (his unfaithful wife in conversation with Cassio). This scene is usually staged in the opera version with Iago and Otello looking off-stage into the distance or with the manufacturing of a glimpse of the two watched characters that the audience can also see, depending on the complexity of the set. With Phillips’s production on Dale Ferguson’s set of a military ship, we could see nothing except the act of looking since we were not even privy to what was on the screen, only seeing the back of the monitor. But our understanding of Otello gazing into another space was rendered‘real’ for us (even if what he was ‘seeing’ was faked by Iago).