Theatre Unplugged: The Technology of a Performer-Centred Theatre

If the technicians for a production are those who realize the visual and aural designs of the director and designer, what, then, if the onstage actors are the executors of the visual and aural aspects of the production? It’s a tangly suggestion, but an argument can be made for performer-based technical theatre. These are productions where it is the actors, executing instructions from the playwright, designer and director, who create the onstage “effects” or, in their physical or vocal actions, indicate the time, place and mood to the audience. This is most simply exemplified by scripts that have time, place and mood references in the text. But the theatre I’m talking about uses more than stated references to indicate this information. It uses the actors’ voices in music for the soundscape and their bodies in stillness and motion as the landscape. If it is the performers who are executing the main design of the designer, could we call them technicians? OK, they’re not, in a plug-in, soldering, climb-a-ladder, call-a-cue, run-a-show way, but they can be in an execute-the-design way. And because the focus of this CTR is the intersection of technology and theatre, humour me here, and let’s agree that some actors in some productions have more technical items than others. It’s not a new style in Canada: the choreography of the “set” of the Farm Show was most influential, and a great deal of performer—technical work is now done by companies like Video Cabaret, Theatre Gargantua, Theatre Smith Gilmour and many puppet theatres, led by companies like One Yellow Rabbit, who stand alongside the amalgamation of technically active performers and actual technicians in Robert Lepage s work. So lets call this brand of artist “performer-technicians” (just in this technology + theatre quarterly) – the actors who are responsible for the set changes and the sound changes, as well as the embodiment of character(s). In Vancouver, companies like Radix, Rumble and the Electric Company are calling this kind of performer who is involved in all aspects of the production an “artist” as opposed to an “actor.” Here the artist takes a fuller responsibility for the entire staged creation, from text work, to the moving of sets, to singing underscores. This seems to be prevalent in a lot of what is called “creation” theatre or “devised” theatre, but it isn’t as common as I had previously thought. There is a line, a very solid line, between theatre that uses its performers to create the space, the effect and the sound and theatre that uses actors solely to inhabit a role. A strictly role-inhabiting actor kindly pointed out this delineation to me just this year, as he grumbled through rolling a set piece. “This,” he said, “is bullshit.”