Join us for a conversation on liveness, presence, and mediation, with the creative teams behind two formally innovative productions – with Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim (creators of asses.masses), and Joshua William Gelb (founder of Theater in Quarantine). Moderated by Professor Tom Sellar (Yale).
What’s in an audience? What do liveness & presence mean to us now, embedded in cyborgian screentime? The promise, and premise, of live performance – bodies onstage faced with bodies in the audience, all contained in the same spatial and temporal box – is under continuous inflection as theater and performance artists reconsider what’s possible in and against those limits. Covid lockdowns mark one recent milestone in these conversations, while anxieties around technology’s effects on attention to the arts seem to refresh with every new technology – from the switch to electric lights to VR, AR and AI.
This fall, two NYU Skirball productions offer inverse experiments in relation to liveness, mediation & audiences. In asses.masses, the audience gathers to face an empty stage, with no (live) performers – the fourth wall is occupied by a giant screen displaying a video game, and the performance asks them to take control and shepherd the story, sharing a single video game controller over the course of several hours. Phantom of the Opera, in contrast, disperses its audience – performing live from a domestic space that’s undergone a conversion to the theatrical, with a team of actors and technicians working diligently together to connect to unseen crowds via individually held phone and computer screens.
Patrick Blenkarn (he/him) is an artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. Often engaging with the politics of participation and interactivity, his recent works feature sustained investigations into the subjects of language, labour, democracy, and the art economy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books. His work has been featured in film festivals, galleries, and performance festivals across Canada, and recently in Argentina, Mexico, Germany, and the Arctic. He is the Producer for The Elbow Theatre in Vancouver and one half of Guilty by Association. Patrick has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film from the University of King’s College and an MFA in interdisciplinary art from Simon Fraser University. He is passionate about languages—speaking English, French, Spanish, and German. patrickblenkarn.com
Milton Lim (he/him) is a digital media artist, game designer, and performance creator based in Vancouver, Canada. His research-based practice entwines publicly available data, interactive digital media, and gameful performance to create speculative visions and candid articulations of social capital. This line of inquiry aims to reconsider our repertoires of knowledge aggregation and political intervention in the contemporary context of big data and algorithmic culture. Milton holds a BFA (Hons.) in theatre performance and psychology from Simon Fraser University. His work has been presented across Canada, and internationally in the US, Argentina, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. He is a co-artistic director of Hong Kong Exile, an artistic associate with Theatre Conspiracy, a founding member of Synectic Assembly—an Artificial Intelligence focused art collective, and an Artistic-Leader-in-Residence at the National Theatre School of Canada. miltonlim.com
Tom Sellar is editor of the journal Theater and Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale University. Formerly chief theater critic for the Village Voice, his criticism and arts writing have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Artforum and other publications. He has curated series and programs for American Realness, the Prelude festival, Philadelphia Fringe Arts, Prague Quadrennial, Queer Zagreb, and the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue.