review of DEADMEAT
@ the west yorkshire playhouse, Leeds
21 may - 5 june 1999
http://www.deadmeat.com

DEADMEAT is an 'interactive' theater piece that attempts to fuse
nightclub, theater and on-line worlds into one. Adapted from 'Maverick
Londoner' Q's own novel, it tells its story of cyber-vigilantes,
art-world politics and fraternal strife through a mixture of
performance, breakbeats (live and mixed), video projection and 'web
visuals'. The stage is set in the round, with performers appearing in,
on and around the stage (as well as on screen). A nice touch is the
inclusion of an fully-operational bar in the performance space,
presumably to give the event a live club feel, but acting instead as an
excuse for barflys like me to go for 'refreshments' whenever the
narrative drops off the pace.

Which it did. Often.

It's one of the pitfalls of this type of media-rich performance that the
media often takes precedent over the content. Admirable thought it is to
see such pioneering attempts to break theater out of the proscenium
arch, very often the temptation to throw everything into the hat means
that some basic narrative elements, like characterisation, or plot, stay
undeveloped. In this instance, there was an attractive noir-ish story
beating underneath the fragmented surface of the projections and video
screens, and the author Q has lots of experience working with disjointed
narratives (previous work was distributed as pamphlets in London clubs
or published on the web). Jude Kelly is also one of the most respected
and innovative directors in the UK, and has supported the work of
Improbable theater and their wonderfully inventive performance/media
hybrids (70 Hill Lane, Animo, Shockheaded Peter…) So it should have
added up to a really astonishing performance.

But instead it lost the thread too many times. The story revolves around
Clarkie (played by Q), just out of a prison sentence for defending his
brother, Bones, in a street fight. Bones has since risen to the heady
heights of the mainstream art-world (nods to Basqiuat) and sells his
work for a fortune through his aristo-camp dealer Hunter (played
entirely via projected video by Ian McKellen). Bones' girlfriend Melanie
is a high-class lawyer who defended Clarkie in court, but has now moved
on to more lucrative corporate cases. Various sub-plots involve a
visiting NY DJ doing a residency at Bone's Chameleon Club, Froggie
(Bones & Clarkie's younger brother) and his attempts to seduce single
mum Pauline, and most importantly the hunt for a 'cyber vigilante' who
is systematically seeking and murdering child pornographers via chat
rooms.

The vigilante character is represented by his/her disguise - a
mexican-style wrestling mask - and this is used as a floating signifier,
representing the illusion of identity in cyberspace and the symbolic
transfer from real to acted, from innocence to guilt. Every character
seems to have a flip-side, or at least a pretty massive skeleton in
their closet. The first part of the play attempts to deal with this
characterisation upfront, through narrative events (some a little
forced) and simultaneous on-screen data. The rest of the play then
weaves these individual characters through each other, revealing their
half-truths, duplicate IDs and alternate on-line identities.

The central relationship dynamic between the three brothers works as
some kind of locus for all this, but the fractured style of the
performance doesn't really help the viewer from becoming hopelessly lost
at times. Sometimes it is played straight, and works well in a few
powerful set pieces from the (very talented) actors. Sometimes the
actors are reacting to video or multimedia projections, causing hang-ups
when timings were not exact. On other occassions, actors were on screen
in location shots while acting on stage, providing a nice contrast
between real and imaginary locations. A few narrative moments are even
delivered through song, though fortunately it isn't a full-blooded
musical…

All these techniques collide together, not in the happy synergetic mass
that was perhaps intended, but as a stuttering, only occassionally
successful event. The use of projected video is interesting, but the
quality of the video is very poor, and ends up being frustrating,
especially to the actors, who occasionally seem too conscious of their
strict timing limitations to deliver a truly compelling performance.
This is not just a geek comment about technology or resolution, but a
recognition that multi-media must be used carefully, and executed well
enough to stand up as individual elements. The scenes involving
chat-rooms and the cyber vigilante are not badly dealt with, especially
considering some of the naff representations of on-line worlds that have
littered screens recently (stand up Lynda La Plante…), but overall the
use of multimedia was just a bit too gratuitous, and actually hindered
rather than helped the narrative.

As is often the case in ensemble works, individual elements stood out,
like afro-beat drummer Tony Allen's live percussion, and actress Nina
Sosanya's performance as Melanie. The pace and variety of performance
managed to carry interest, but ultimately the whole event was
compromised by its main ambition - to blur the boundaries between three
very different experiences - theater, club and Internet. Like many
multimedia events with similar ambitions, it ended up delivering none of
these experiences with any grace. At the end of the play, the actors
encouraged the audience to stay behind and continue the evening as a
club night, at which point the venue cleared as fast as if they'd
announced a bomb scare. It might have been the predominantly WASPish
tendencies of the audience, but its difficult to feel anything but
self-conscious when invited to get 'interactive' in what still felt like
a predominantly theatrical venue.

There is a lot of potential in blurring the boundaries between these
genres of entertainment, but there is the same 'lean forward/lean back'
boundary to participation that will probably define passive and
interactive TV formats. The few models that seem to work either involve
intensely personal interactive experiences (one-on-one events that cross
the line between performance art and theater, such as the recent HOUSE
in Huddersfield) or are those that treat audience interaction as a mass
spectacle, as with Loren Carpenter's early interactive works, or even
the great british tradition of pantomine (call-and-response anyone?).

Call-and-response is actually a good analogy, as it was the failures in
communication that ultimately let this piece down. The anxious pauses as
the real actors waited for cues from their on-screen avatars were
mirrored by the audience's reticence to participate in the early warm-up
shouts from the DJ or to 'party on' at the end. In the headlong rush
towards our interactive entertainment future, one of the most
significant obstacles to these communal experiences may be something as
intangible as the audience's discomfort, necessitating a kind of social
ergonomics, an enhanced interface that could melt what feels like a very
english form of reserve.

To get really geeky it's like there was a poor ping response. Server may
be down/audience not reacting. Perhaps better protocols are needed?
(after all, theater's traditional protocols have been in general use for
a few thousand years now…)