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On Monday 20th of April, there was an event called Cybertheatre here in
Amsterdam. Three different locations were sharing the moment using
videoconferencing tools and trying to create theatre in that cyberspace.
When I first heard about the event, the same day actually, it sounded
fascinating so I told about it for friends back home in Finland and to
some others in the States immediately. Then it was quite a disappointment
to ask the organizers for the location when the answer was just hands
pointing in different directions and saying some names of streets that
meant nothing.
The play would happen over the Internet but would be not shared there.
That, not surprisingly, made the friends on the net ask "why" which
resulted only some mumbling about technical reasons down here which again
reflected back from the net as rather nasty comments about Central
European developing countries of telecommunication.
I felt a bit bad after first getting fascinated about the event and making
other people interested in it as well and then us all being let down. Many
friends in Northern Finland live in quite a cultural vacuum and were now
closed away from this too.
A weird mix of extreme curiosity and anger was buzzing me that evening as
the play was about to start. I had first gone to the Waag, which was
already full, so the friendly people had advised me to go to the [NES]
theatre instead. It all felt so ridiculous: even after being told that the
play was not going to be shared on the net outside the theatres I had
supposed that it would be co-operation with different places all over the
world. But no - all three were right here, five minutes biking away from
each other, and before the beginning I had already been in two of them.
Gee.
Furthermore I had been hoping to see some interesting new creative
technical solutions for shared collaborative net performing but there was
only a PC with CuSeeMe and obviously too little bandwidth. At least then I
was to drop all the false expectations and become more open for something
different.
[NES] hosts, as I heard soon, an improvisation evening every Monday so
this Cybertheatre was a regular event there, just with some net-hype on
the top. People came there like always and their expectations must have
been very different from those of mine.
The net-part of the play started soon after the beginning with a telephone
call. All of us in the audience could then hear the organizers talking and
then also the text chat started to roll. It was quite entertaining but
felt weird to follow without a keyboard under my own fingers. From time to
time the dancers on stage and the musicians on the sides would act a
little, like walk around, lie down or make some rhythms and sounds, but
often they were paralyzed and staring the screen above their heads to see
if there was something happening. Mostly there wasn't much.
Soon the audience was bored of the apathy, someone shouted something like
"start acting!", and later people started to go away. Then it became
interesting! The chat had developed to the point where people wanted to
meet each other and go for a drink. Someone went on a bike at the back of
the stage and went out from a door there. The organizers where on the
telephone asking each other what was going on and how people were leaving
and wondering what they should do - all that as a part of the improvised
play.
The room was soon half empty so there was more mental space to go around.
People started talking each other, in Dutch so I couldn't really
understand, and I went to the computer to (finally) participate in the
chat a little. The guy who had left with the bike came back with a woman
who turned out the be the one who'd been on the other end of the telephone
- to my mind those discussions had been the best part of the whole act.
In the end I really enjoyed the evening. I don't know if anyone else felt
it the same way but when following the technical troubles and peoples'
general confusion with these new ways of sharing things I thought that it
was good to have it all done with some poor off-the-shelf equipment. It
all gave a quite a realistic picture about what the net has been about.
Afterall, the net and telephones are often used to contact the people
nearby - places close enough to bike to when the technology reaches it's
limits. "all this communication possibilities but so little contact" (his
typo) was one line the guy wrote before riding the bike to meet the
others. Yet the technology did serve many purposes and in the end two
women at our end were really addicted to the text chat session they had
with the people on the other end .. saying things they would've never said
aloud .. just like I've seen happen countless times in Finnish schools
when IRC has been introduced and especially girls have been enthusiastic
about it.
Confusion and the change of roles were what I liked best. The actors
didn't do much in the end and most interesting things happened when the
audience felt the freedom to explore.
And perhaps it wasn't so bad at all that the thing wasn't accessible for
the friends back home .. I guess we should sometimes be able to dance and
fool around there ourselves instead of demanding access to every local
event that some other people elsewhere happen to have, although I'd be
happy to see also more openly shared similar events in the future. Thank
you.
BTW: if someone *does* know about good ways to create performances on the
net http://an.org/inet98/ would be happy to learn.
+ an + ~ Toni ~ : (t . !