I’m being strapped into what looks like a homemade electric chair, thick black wires gathered in a pile around my feet and sprouting above my head. A man in a white lab coat puts a fancy pair of goggles over my eyes and headphones over my ears, and I am thrust into “In The Current of Being,” which tells the story of Carolyn Mercer, a trans woman who underwent electroshock conversion therapy.
“In the Current of Being” is one of the eleven works presented in the “Immersive” program at this year’s Tribeca Festival, “In Search of Us,” which might have been better entitled In Search of A Definition of Immersive Storytelling.
Few of the works are easy to categorize. Some come closest to conceptual art, others are a type of video game or 3-D cinema or interactive museum exhibition; several are best described as AI/high-tech toys. Only one involves actual human beings in person (as lecturers, rather than performers), and none of these installations seem on the surface to have much to do with traditional immersive theater. It’s surely a reflection on the disorienting pace of modern culture that I can refer to a genre of theater that began in 2011 as “traditional.” Still, it’s the only ongoing tradition I know of in which “immersive” has something approaching an agreed-upon meaning — and thus perhaps a useful measure by which to gauge these experiments claiming the label. As it turns out, the approaches by several of these installations do seem to have applications for live theater. Some theater companies have already started incorporating them.
Under normal circumstances, “In The Current of Being” might be considered a theatrical monologue. Cameron Kostopoulos, the work’s creator, wrote a first-person script in which Carolyn Mercer narrates her experience: “I was taken into a room, a windowless room…the doctors who administered the conversion practice, they wanted to help me…They strapped my arm to one of the arms of the chair. They soaked electrodes and saltwater in brine and attached them to my arm…Then they threw the switch…For the next fifty years, when I recalled that treatment, I physically shook. Think about it. To get people to hate themselves causes lifetime damage….”
But there are two ways this was not a normal theatrical monologue, only one of which was deliberate. The use of three types of technology were meant to simulate for me what Carolyn Mercer went through. With the use of Virtual Reality (enabled by the goggles), I saw photographs of women that she was supposedly shown while being zapped, in order for her to associate the female gender with pain; most of the visuals, though, consisted of abstract tree-like imagery with occasional flashes of light, surely meant to resemble the synapses of the brain. The haptic technology (those were the straps around my body) was intended to simulate the (far more severe) zaps from the electroshock. With a recording (the headphones), I was meant to hear an eerie underscore while learning the details of Carolyn Mercer’s story. But, during my individual demonstration, neither the haptic straps nor the tape recorder functioned properly. I spent twenty minutes somewhat baffled as I looked at women and abstract tree limbs, and felt a steady tingle. The technicians hired to assist were deeply apologetic, and got ahold of the script for me. Such glitches are an occupational hazard of new technology, not a reason to dismiss it. Indeed, haptic suits have already been used a a more directly theatrical context. Deaf Broadway’s production last year of the musical Rent at Lincoln Center offered them to deaf members of the audience so that they could feel the vibrations of the music.
My failure to connect fully with some of these pieces usually had less to do with any technical problems on their part, and more with my inadequate grasp of the underlying complexities and procedures involved with XR (AR and VR and MR) — and my difficulty in even parsing the language the practitioners of Extended Reality (Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality) employ. “Uncharted” by Kidus Hailesilassie struck me as at heart a dance theater piece on film, but the description he provided indicated otherwise : “Enter Uncharted, an immersive cosmic choreography where the body becomes a vessel for ancestral storytelling. Mapping 6,500 characters from African and diasporic writing systems, the piece fuses AI Data sculpture with one of the world’s oldest technologies — the human body. Through dance, this language archive comes alive in a new form of pan-African storytelling.” There are two screens in this installation, one mounted on the wall ,the other viewed through goggles. It’s the one through goggles that features a woman dancing. The other screen…flickered; that must be the AI Data sculpture.
With “There Goes Nikki,” I experienced something of the opposite effect from “In the Current of Being.” Everything worked too well, The creative team (Idris Brewster, Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster) describe their installation as “an AR ode to the late poet Nikki Giovanni.” The core of the piece is Giovanni’s poem “Quilting the Black-eyed Pea (We’re going to Mars)” It’s a witty and pointed poem that compares modern space travel with the Middle Passage to enslavement (which is a poor summary of a poem that should not be summed up; it should be read.) “There Goes Nikki” begins with a video monitor showing a short documentary about Giovanni, then we are led to an elaborately cultivated garden (in what is essentially the sixth floor of an office building on Water Street) and handed headphones and an iPad. There we see the magical appearance of digital flowers augmenting (sometimes blocking out) the actual flowers in the garden, and the face of Giovanni floating in what appears to be a shimmering celestial body as she recites the poem. Afterwards — Act III? — there is another video on a screen on the wall with headphones next to a wall label with the poem.
There is something inherently theatrical in Giovanni’s poem; I could see a performer reciting it on a bare stage at La MaMa and enchanting an audience. There is nothing inherently wrong with bookending the poem with documentaries to put the poem and poet in context, or creating a set of an elaborate garden, or even asking us to hold an iPad and, standing in the midst of the three-dimensional garden, focus on the narrow screen with flowers and stars and Nikki Giovanni’s face. It shows the creative team’s passion for the poem and the poet. But did her reality need to be quite so augmented?
“A Father’s Lullaby” and “Lullabies Through Time” use some of the same technology as the Giovanni installation in a way that is more commensurate with its ambition — an extensive compilation of lullabies recalled, and sung, by formerly incarcerated fathers.
Such technology has proven useful in works by theater companies such as the Arlekin Players, during the pandemic, but also since then, in works such as The Orchard.
.The installation I found the most fun, and the most promising, is inspired by a real-life horror. At the start of “Fragile Home,” by Ondfej Moravec and Victoria Lopoukhina, I sat on a couch while a man (this time not in a white lab coat) fitted me with goggles and headphones (this time not with haptic straps.) While I hear singing of what sounds like a folk song, I first see the table covered with a colorful cloth, then a vase materialize on top of it, and a pitcher, and some glasses, and little plates with snacks. A cat suddenly materializes next to me on the couch The table and the couch are real, the vase and the cat aren’t — thus MR. This is a mixed reality without a mix of human beings (other than the disembodied ones singing in my ear), but the cat does seem to arch its back when I pet it (my hand seems to have turned into a cartoon, but the cat looks real), and everywhere I look, the cottage seem to be turning into a lovingly decorated home, fully lived in. There is a prominent rooster figurine, and a dining room with a jar of pickled tomatoes, a pot full of some kind of stew and four settings, and a view outside the open front door of undulating green meadows The seasons apparently pass, because the front door closes, and is eventually decorated with a Christmas wreath. I notice the cat has moved onto the window ledge looking out at the picket fence, and fields of wheat on this beautiful day — when suddenly there is an abrupt blast, and the house turns to rubble, with a big gaping hole in the wall, and what looks like fallout, but could be snow.
We are in Ukraine.
What I find even more delightful that my own experience with “Fragile Home” was, no longer wearing the gear, watching two later participants going through the imaginary cottage, picking up the imaginary art objects, and petting the imaginary cat.
“Fragile Home,” it seemed to me, just needed one more element to be a fully realized “traditional” immersive theater piece — at least one person besides me in the mix.
“In Search of Us” is running through June 29 at WSA (161 Water Street)
