From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
From a speech presented by Chris Hardiman of Antenna Theater while wearing a walkman
Welcome to the Walkman Speech Delivery System: my way of delivering speeches without all those annoying cards falling on the floor. No need to stare at scripts; instead, you can stare your audience right in the face. You can't forget your lines: if you miss something, just rewind and try again. The Walkman Speech Delivery System is ideal for people who find the need to constantly repeat themselves: business execs, drill sergeants, ministers--and of course, politicians. The Walkman Speech Delivery System has drawbacks: these earphones, for instance, are too prominent and tend to make the audience feel that you're not relating to them--that you have closed them out, refused to hear their cries of protest or heartfelt applause. Also, users become afflicted with a vacant facial expression.
A possible solution to the headphone problem is to substitute hearing-aid style earphones. These earphones are discreet and generally go unnoticed--but the blank stare is another problem, and we haven't quite solved it. You may ask, "Is this system in use today?" Well, let me say this about that: if you've read the papers recently, you'll remember that our president has been equipped with a hearing-aid-type earphone.
On to the speech entitled "Another New Technology Steps on Stage." I want to talk about how technology has marched itself from backstage on to center stage, and how walkmanology has marched the audience from their seats on to center stage. And then, I want to suggest a version of the future in which we all march offstage together.
Now, technology has always been a part of the theater: always helpful, always handy--a good guy. But technology always knew its place: the actor reigned supreme, and technology provided him with his throne and crown. Technology backed him up with subtle scenery, atmospheric effects, computer lightboards--and certainly no actor complained--until technology actually stepped into the limelight.
Film was probably the first technology to step forward. It had been used in the theater since 1932, when a Russian futurist ran a film as a backdrop. But the moment I want to draw your attention to is the moment when a techno-machine replaced an actor as the focus of the performance. Film was probably used in this first instance to suggest a dream sequence or flashback, but be that as it may, the moment when an actor shared center stage with a machine, it was all over.
How could technology replace actors on stage? I suspect that it was the doing of the movie industry. Movies were having a profound effect on how people saw things: montages, closeups, cuts from one scene to another--all this fragmentation of information.
And then the real culprit, of course, was the Twentieth Century itself. It pulled people from their rural dwellings and built them big cities, divided houses into apartments and families into workers. Division. Fragmentation. And this all landed in the theater in the form of slides, video, movies, robots, holograms. With technology sharing the stage, only the audience was left out in the darkness--that is, until walkmanology.
Antenna is always on the prowl for ways in which the usual actor-audience relationship can be altered. For example, the script for Vacuum was composed of interviews with real vacuum cleaner salesmen and housewives. Questionnaires were distributed soliciting information from the general populace about vacuuming styles and door-to-door solicitations. We constructed a show in which the public had input and therefore involvement.
Another Antenna project was Moving Sculptures. Thirty-five life-size sculptures of local people were placed on the street, in the towns where the models lived. The sculptures were moved a short distance every three days, over a three month period, to create a sort of slow-motion cross section of modern life.
Another audience-alteration method, invented during the Snake Theater days, is what I call location shows: plays in which the audience was asked not to come to a theater but, instead, to a place such as a beach, gas station, or high school--there to see an environment which the audience recognized as part of their world, transformed into theater. Each of these approaches was, in its own way, an attempt to change the relationship between the audience and the stage.
Now, on to walkmen. During the 1981 European tour of Vacuum, while wearing a walkman, I became interested in the walkman's effect on the human tourist. Wearing a walkman turns real life into a film. It does this by obliterating natural sound and replacing it with a dazzling stereo musical score. Suddenly, once-random events become choreographed to music. And, because there's no sound to your footfall, you feel invisible--not part of the picture; you're like a camera, aware of what it sees but not of itself. There was a moment during a Parisian downpour when I swore I was not getting wet!
Another effect is that it's all private. No one else is in your movie, which is playing directly inside your head. And I thought to myself: walkmen could serve theater as well as they serve tourism--after all, what is an audience but a tourist in a theatrical space? And with that thought, walkmanology--the study of the theatrical application of the walkman--was born.
To date, Antenna has staged four walkman shows: High School, Pink Prom, Artery--which we open soon in Seattle--and Amnesia, which will be playing San Francisco this winter. So far, two formats have been tried: one is the walkman-walkthrough, in which each lone audience member is sent off into the environment to experience the show, interacting with the set and sometimes with the actors. The second is synchronistic walkmanology, where each audience member receives a different tape and all are started at the same time. In this way, the entire audience acts together to create the event, yet no one experiences the play from the same perspective.
As to the future: for me, walkmanology has great growth potential in the theater. Walkmanology and the theater have, of course, the same goal, and that is to turn the entire human race into zombies--to mesmerize, to entrance, to hypnotize the audience; in other words, to project a fictional world more potent than the one we inhabit. After a grueling day at the office, most workers want to forget the day's toil and be swept away by some riveting drama. But beyond this, I believe they secretly would love to stand up and, like a somnambulist, drift into some dramatic dream world, there to be surrounded by a total, tangible theatrical situation.
It is not inconceivable that talent and technology may soon be able to create an event so seductive that our reality-weary audience will be begging to get into it--and maybe walkmen will be the units that help them. But don't blame me if, after they get there, they decide not to return. That will depend on how good the show is, or how bad the world is.
Thank you.
Here is the index of this electronic book.
Click on logo to return to Cassette Mythos Home Page