The Set & Media Delivery System

The hardware delivery system for Dark Ride was comprised of 12 Samsung Syncmaster 460UTn (46”) monitors, part of a 20 monitor video wall display system in the IPL assets inventory. My initial concept for Dark Ride’s media delivery system was a screen made of shark’s tooth scrim or tobacco cloth stretched across an 8’ x 8’ wood frame for rear projection. The screen would be suspended above the set at a point 8’ feet above the floor at a 45° angle in the up-stage right or up-stage left corner of the playing space. Positioned to face the center of the space with one projector for media delivery suspended behind, this configuration naturally lent itself to an aesthetic concept of screen as ‘god-voice’ or ‘god-box’ in the dialogue between performer and media.

A set of playing boxes in a configuration similar to the one actually used would allow performers to be closer to the god-box when appropriate and vice-versa, prompting for textual and performance explorations of UP and DOWN metaphor systems like good-bad, light-dark, guilt-innocence, shame-pride, etc. When the video wall became available for use and replaced the rear-projection concept, aesthetic possibilities for the performer-media dialogue altered significantly and new conceptual framings were needed.

None of the Video Wall’s constituent components would be suspended, making the dialogue space horizontally planar. Actors and media would occupy the same plane allowing for the possibility of equals to engage in a dialogue of hide and seek. As one of the vocabularies of Dark Ride was ‘quest,’ the idea of an oppositional quest inside the media delivery system, taking place in real-time while the performers played out the text of Dark Ride, occurred as a viable concept rife with performance and media possibilities.

My initial conceptual framing for using the video wall was loosely structured around a ‘Percivalian’ based myth with aboriginal American undertones that could be designed with a minimalist style of animation and an original music score. The intention from the outset was maintain a minimalist approach. My preference for aesthetic leanness along with knowledge of available resources made a minimalist approach practical and appealing. For purposes of sculpting media to support performer action, creating an animation design concept that was easily and simply deployable was paramount. Dark Ride finally became a composition about power sharing. The ride metaphor as a central theme eschewed linear individual character biographies in favor of characters that were pieces of the machinery. Biographies were fine so long as they supported what was taking place at any given moment. Character objectives were subject to change in the blink of an eye. The Media Delivery System (henceforth referred to as the MDS) provided the perfect grounding for the power metaphor and the introduction of the MDS into the rehearsal process brought an electric charge to individual performances. 
The first order of business was learning how to use the Video Wall. The monitors weigh 65 lbs. each and were mounted vertically on stands provided for that purpose. Each stand occupied a 40 ½” x 2’ footprint. Each monitor pulled 3.5 amps of power and 4 monitors could be connected to a power strip without tripping the surge suppressor.

The central control for the monitors was a standalone Mac Pro with dual boot capability and 2 x 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon processors. Two sets of six monitors were each linked via HDMI cables to a pair of HDMI splitter amplifiers. The two amplifiers were then linked to another HDMI splitter that tied all twelve monitors to the computer. The monitors were arranged in five banks. The monitor banks were placed in a semi-circle in a style similar to Neolithic ‘standing stones.’

Figure 1. The Standing Stones of Stenness: Neolithic monument on the mainland of Orkney, Scotland.

The banks were numbered 1 thru 5 from stage left to right. Banks 1 and 5 were single monitors, each on their own stand. Banks 2 and 4 were stacks of three monitors, each stack on a stand. Bank 3 was the center monitor bank, a stack of four.

The central playing space of the set was a platform made up of 12 24" x 24" x 18" Wenger Stage Boxes®. The boxes are designed to connect using a patented screw assembly and each box is designed with molded thru-handles. The leading threads on the many of the screws had worn away and the boxes could not be bound conventionally. The screw assembly is proprietary and the thread pitch is different from conventional hardware making up-keep of the assembly difficult. To bypass this problem and effect binding, the boxes were turned upside-down and ratchet-strapped together as a unit passing the straps thru the handles of each box. The bound unit was then placed right side up.

The main platform playing space measured 8’ 1/8” x 6’ ½” x 18”. From the front center of the main platform protruded a 4’ ¼” W x 5’ ½” x 12” step unit from the same company of the same style and material.

The depth of the Cellar Theater at UGA where the play was presented is approximately 36’ 5” from the center front row of the house to the back wall of the playing area. To insure open site lines for the monitors while maintaining access to key power sources along the back wall and backstage, and keeping traffic lanes open for actors to pass with enough space to maintain cable integrity, the three middle monitor banks could be no more than 8’ from the back wall. Bank 3 was 6’ from the back wall and banks 3 and 4, 8’. I allowed for 2’ of between space to separate the three larger banks. Anchoring the three tallest banks to the main power supplies allowed greater flexibility for the placement of the two remaining single monitor banks, which could be tethered to banks 2 and 4 as children.

Figure 2. Monitor configuration in Interactive Performance Lab.

Media Director Josh Marsh developed a customized media delivery system using the Unity3 game development tool. At my request he grounded the design in the ability to deliver media to the monitors singly or collectively in numbers and configurations we could control. It was important to make certain that previously deployed media assets, aside from the POS images, not be allowed to continue running, unseen in the background, eating up CPU resources. Eventually Josh developed a GUI interface for the Unity based Dark Ride system that made running the production media simple enough to be easily handled by one of the crew. The work of the media director was crucial to the success of Dark Ride.

The capacities for collaboration and improvisatory conceptual expansions and contractions were qualities that Dark Ride’s media director had in quantity. These vital assets made it possible; not only to see the delivery system in action by the third week of rehearsals but also to avoid the lengthy tech rehearsals that tend to be a hallmark of mediated theater.

Notes on Media

David Saltz (current head of University of Georgia’s Theater and Film Studies Department) has identified 12 possible functions that media can serve as components of the live theater event:

Virtual Scenery. The media provide a backdrop depicting the environment within which the staged action takes place. This virtual scenery can either be static or animated.

Diegetic Media. Diegetic media exists as media within the world of the narrative--when, for example, character onstage turns on a radio or television set.

Instrumental Media. Interactive technology is used to create new kinds of instruments. For example, one could cover the stage floor with pressure-sensitive tiles and program each tile to produce a different sound or different image when a performer steps on it.

Interactive Costumes. Interactive costumes invert the relationship established by virtual scenery: while virtual scenery provides a backdrop against which the live actors perform, interactive costumes use the body of the live performer as a canvas for the media.

Dramatic Media. This type of media representation functions dramatically by interacting with the performers as a character in the narrative.

Virtual Puppetry. The media create a performer's double, functioning as a virtual performer in its own right under a performer's control.

Affective Media. The media produce an emotional effect on an audience. Affective media are nondiegetic; they do not exist within the character's world. The most familiar form is the background music that gave melodrama its name, now ubiquitous in film.

Subjective Perspective. The media depict the thoughts, fantasies, dreams, or sensations of some or all of the characters onstage.

Alternate Perspective. The media depict the events enacted onstage from another visual perspective.

Synesthesia. Synesthetic media is similar to affective media, but does not serve so much to tell the audience how to feel about the events onstage as to mirror the performance in a different sense modality. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulating one sense organ triggers the experience of another sense; for example, a person might "hear" colors or "see" temperature.

Although this is not an exhaustive list, having the available taxonomy was helpful for suggesting possible media uses and identifying places where media might be utilized for multiple purposes. If we knew, for example, that media was being used as synesthesia and illumination, adjustments to that specific cue were made taking both elements into consideration. In the third scene, when the Jeweller approaches an open window to acknowledge the incoming sunlight, color saturation levels were higher closer to the nexus of the media and the actor’s hands as he explored the temperature of the glow (figure 8).

When the MDS was used as virtual backdrop, the images utilized were always in motion, never static. This was done to evoke motion perception and maintain the kinetic illusion of the ride (figure 4).

Dark Ride consists of 24 scenes with 18 locations. I expanded the number of scenes to 103 in order to identify spaces in the text where possibilities for kinetic alteration were strong and to create an overall document to identify cues for light, sound and media. That document could then be used to create separate cue sheets for each department.

A dark blue moving image with animated smoke or fog made with particle animation was created in Autodesk® Maya® 3D animation software as a virtual backdrop to avoid having the CPU go to ‘sleep’ during a period of inactivity and also provide a ‘point of stasis’ (POS) for the media delivery system. This was meant as place where the monitors were displaying some imagery or light that complemented the production without being distracting. The POS image ran constantly in the background. The system would default to POS when there was nothing specific to a particular action of the play running in the foreground.

Notes on Acting

Performance is a fluid artistic expression of our embodied experience, and a means by which theatre communicates its imaginative foundations. According to Tobin Nellhaus, one of a handful of theatre scholars currently exploring the intersection of cognitive science and theatre performance, “Image schemas are fundamental to acting, performance space, dramatic narrative and audience response. These elements form . . . integrated systems — performance strategies — each governed by a small set of image schemas and primary metaphors.” Building image schemas is largely the work of conceptual imagination and conceptual imagination is prompted by and understood in terms of metaphor. Thus, the importance of understanding the semantic underpinnings of image schema creation and its relationship to imagination for the contemporary theatre artist is quite significant. Lakoff and Johnson further elucidate the role image schemas play in the formulation of complex abstract concepts.

Image schemas are meaningful, and can play the role in abstract cognition that they do, precisely because of their ongoing connection to sensorimotor experience. Since image schemas are computed via structures in the sensorimotor system, they cannot be ‘‘severed’’ and still do the same computational work. They certainly take input from parts of the brain in imagination (as in mental imagery experiments) and in dreams, but their essential function—fitting what we see, imagine, and dream about in our visual system to our language—cannot be done without those computations in the sensorimotor system.

I worked with the cast of Dark Ride to create spaces that offered absolute permissions, spaces where student actors might have the experience of stillness without the bias commonly associated with not being in the moment or adhering to hard-wired notions of what that phrase commonly entails. This, I believed, might incite the desire to seek this state of stillness in space for future work. Blair rightly claims that approaching the work from

this perspective also provides the actor with a model for how to free herself from the sometimes limiting personal-psychoanalytic perspective of some American acting “methods,” because it is about how to prompt creative responses rather than excavating psychologically repressed memories from one’s emotional history. Actors must re-imagine themselves, creating new pictures of the relationship among their bodies, feelings, and intellect; they have to find new blends and compressions for understanding what it is that they’re doing.

This novel invocation of mental spaces in the service of acting pedagogy is not in conflict with training based on the procedures outlined in Konstantin Stanislavsky’s codified system for actor training. Many of the principles of Stanislavsky’s “method” still retain theoretical and practical eminence in the field of actor training in this country although they tend to be utilized piece-meal, Actors and directors have historically chosen those aspects of the system they felt were most useful in their work and most are aware of only a portion of know little of Stanislavsky’s original canon. Clurman clarifies the impractability involved with practicing all of Stanislavsky’s precepts:

The Method has never really been practiced in the United States. It is employed by some, it is taught by many, but it has never been completely employed. The reason for this is simple. One cannot wholly follow Stanislavsky’s . . . procedures under the conditions, which obtain to our stage: there is just not enough time. One has only to read Stanislavsky’s suggestions on building a character to realize how complex are his demands and what protracted and arduous effort they require.

We should return to the phrase in the moment for some clarification about its conceptual underpinnings. In the moment is an ontologically grounded metaphorical idiom for general use. Theatrically, it is frequently called on to describe the work, during a rehearsal or production, of a performer or cast that seemed particularly immersive or had the aura of a heightened sense of connection with all the scenic elements involved. General inferences suggest that being in the moment often equates to being totally immersed in the character and shares metaphoric entailments commonly associated with the theatre is magic vocabulary. John Lutterbie has elucidated a working definition that is coherent with my work when he characterizes being in the moment as “a metaphor used to define a way of being that — at least in the sense that it used in the discussions of the acting process — privileges attendance to perceptual data over the self-isolating ruminations of thought.”

Theatre artists have understood for more than a century the role of imagination and the importance of metaphor. Twentieth century theatre vernacular was strongly influenced by a metaphor system conceived of in terms of magic. This magic metaphor system can be extrapolated from one of our most common artistic metaphors when we speak of, the magic of theatre. The magic of theatre is a compressed metaphorical reference to the workings of theater and entails all of the production aspects — lighting, costumes, performance, direction — and by its use, implies amazement; something magical has taken place allowing all production aspects to merge and create production. It is a phrase common to all participants, front and back of house. Actors, directors and audience members all regularly invoke the magic of theatre metaphor which finds its expression in phrases like: “I was enchanted by the work,” “he became that character,” “her transformation was mesmerizing,” and “the play held me spellbound.” Any actor who has studied Stanislavsky has probably encountered his theory of the magic if.

It is not unusual to invoke the impossible when talking about theater. Renowned teacher and actor Stella Adler, in her book The Technique of Acting, conceives of and explains one aspect of the craft of acting in terms of the impossible: “The actor has in him the collective consciousness. It’s as if all knowledge and all wisdom are contained in his mind. Through his vast imagination he inherits the wisdom of his ancestors without having had the personal experience.” In a recent 60 Minutes interview with Meryl Streep, Morley Safer, a highly respected journalist and correspondent, characterized Ms. Streep as someone with “a unique gift for not just portraying a character but literally becoming her.” We know logically that both of these statements represent concepts that are physically impossible but our imagination, coerced by prompts from several input spaces; all knowledge, all wisdom, in his mind, literally becoming, help us imagine things in terms of the impossible as Fauconnnier observes,

Blending of the impossible with the ordinary yields emergent structure. For example the power to traverse walls can be strong or weak like any other power. When it is too weak, the ““passe-muraille”” may end up stuck inside the wall. . . . When they [The blending that goes on to build these strange worlds] are part of shared . . . beliefs, such worlds are understood not as impossible fictions, but rather as the deepest reality behind our conscious experience.

Building image schemas is largely the work of conceptual imagination and conceptual imagination is prompted by and understood in terms of metaphor; thus the importance of understanding the semantic underpinnings of image schema creation and its relationship to imagination for the contemporary theatre artist cannot be overstated. For the purposes of my work on Dark Ride I began mapping out a strategy I believed would by-pass conventional vocabularies of acting pedagogy in favor of a metaphor system less ephemerally cluttered.

The primary metaphor that generally informs our cultural concept of acting is ACTION IS MOTION, and shares with all metaphors the property of highlighting certain aspects of a concept while hiding others. Often, acting requires active stillness. The act of stillness onstage can be a difficult visceral concept for student actors whose performance vocabularies largely privilege impulsivity. I often highlight for students the importance of stillness as it relates to acting with this complex metaphor: when you move time controls you, when you are still, you control time.

I grounded the approach to Dark Ride by conceptualizing an ontological image schema based on the novel metaphorical idiom point-of-stasis, which has its grounding in the primary metaphor, STATES ARE LOCATIONS. The concept, point-of-stasis, can be partially defined in terms of place and partially in terms of being and is meant as a practicable means of achieving a calm physical and mental space, available anytime, where an actor can assess or re-imagine their relation to the world of the play and the world containing the physical components and realities of the performance space.

While the point-of-stasis schema finds its grounding in the primary metaphor, STATES ARE LOCATIONS, its conceptual image basis is the spatial-relation concept of a container schema, our sensorimotor experience of a bounded region in space. This schema is conceptualized as a safe physical and emotional space where the actor has permission to go without fear, and highlights point as a place arrived at and stasis as equilibrium. It is important to clarify the idea of strategy here as something created or adopted for use as an actor’s private work, and like many strategies, what may prove useful for some students may not for others. I did not challenge choice assumptions around movement, or my perceptions of intended strategies; I made certain I fully understood the reasoning used to support them however. Spaces in the text where the possibilities for a change of strategy were strong were privileged over moments where possibilities, although available, were weaker.

I chose what I believed was a clean, utilitarian vocabulary and simply began building in the point, the container to hold the self. The first action for physically cueing the image schema was the act of stopping fully and required a personal acknowledgement of completion before moving to the next cue in the series. The next cue was the act of looking away, away from the place attention wanted to go. In the beginning the choice for away was usually down. The cue prompted for the point where stasis could be achieved. My intent was to keep the conceptual space simple, unadorned. Designed to prompt for stasis, the first breath was one deep pranayamic inhale and exhale. I conceived of the schema as then being live. The next step was deployment of an initial data set. The original data was in the form of a question or series of questions, designed beforehand to be actively and internally asked, as a means prompting for answers. Answers to the questions were allowed to drop in fully, and the incoming data engaged for prompting new emergent structure in the form of responses. The response data was reviewed for strategic possibilities. Once a strategy was chosen and fully mapped, emergence from the space was a deliberate body and concentration shift towards engagement with the new strategy. I found my original impetus for the creation of this strategy echoed in Blair:

Part of how we might nurture this understanding of the acting process is to work with intensely specific images and image streams . . . , and liberate ourselves from the tyranny of causality, logic, and “motive” (in the sometimes over- determined psychoanalytic sense) when it doesn’t serve us, guiding the actor toward understanding that every moment is poetry—a compression.

It is important to note, this approach is designed for student actors and has the capacity to highlight deficiencies or impediments for a young actor viscerally, in his/her body, that might normally take much longer; while it may be easy to understand stillness in acting on a conceptual level, it is often much more difficult to understand corporeally. Repeated practice of this strategy in rehearsal results in the process requiring less time, becoming almost automatic, and after prolonged use, habitual, prompting for experiential gestalt. Habitual use replaces the need to locate specific moments for deployment and the strategy becomes another available tool, disappearing into use.

This process was largely improvisatory; that is, once the original concept was activated, each ensuing step was informed by new emergent structure in a way that clarified obvious and active choices. I suspected this might be true although I was not wholly certain at the outset. This work requires extraordinary permissions. Most of these permissions can be conceived of as granted by students to themselves as actors. Permission to engage in the process fully can certainly be an active part of the initial data set. My task was gaining permission to first, ask for trust, and then ask for complete control of the space.