GINA BLOOM: Well, thank you so much. I wanted to start by thanking the Shakespeare Institute all of you for taking the time to be here.
I wanted to start by thanking the Shakespeare Institute for inviting me to speak to you tonight, and all of you for taking the time to be here.
The Folger was the first research library
to welcome me when I was a graduate student
some two decades ago, when I spent a very
memorable summer poring over translations
of Ovid in the reading rooms. And, really,
I count it as the highlight of my career to
be able to be here to speak to you on the
occasion of Shakespeare's birthday.
It is especially ideal and amazing to be speaking
from the stage of the gorgeous Folger Theatre
in light of my topic today. I'm going to be
talking about Shakespeare performance as a
site of experimentation with media technologies,
the most recent experiments being those that
involve motion-capture technology.
So some of you may know that the Royal Shakespeare
Company, to cap their landmark 2016 season—I
won't ask you to guess what happened that
year: the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's
death—used motion-capture technology in
their production of The Tempest, and they
touted this as the first major theatrical
production to do so. And what they did (I'll
just give you an image here): they had the
actor who played Ariel, Mark Quartley, wear
a costume that operated as a controller for
his digital avatar, this projection. So Ariel
appeared on the stage in a human bodily form
and, simultaneously, in the form of this animated
avatar, whose movements mirrored those of
the human actor, and I'll play you a couple
of very quick clips just to give you a sense
of what this looks like.
PROSPERO: I am ready now.
Approach, my Ariel. Come.
[EERIE MUSIC]
ARIEL:
All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail!
I come
To answer thy best pleasure.
BLOOM: And I'll give you one more, just so
you can see when Ariel actually comes onto
the stage.
ARIEL:
I have dispersed them 'bout the isle.
The King's son have I landed by himself,
Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs
BLOOM: That's Ariel down there.
ARIEL: In an odd angle of the isle, and sitting,
His arms in this sad knot.
PROSPERO:
Of the King's ship,
The mariners say how thou hast disposed,
And all the rest o' th' fleet.
ARIEL:
Safely in harbor
Is the King's ship.
BLOOM: So to make all of this possible, the
RSC collaborated with two companies on the
cutting edge of entertainment technology:
Intel, which makes those powerful processors
that allow computers like this to work, and
also a company called the Imaginarium Studios.
Some of you may have seen The Lord of the
Rings, the famous Lord of the Rings, that
had Gollum controlled via motion-capture technology;
the actor who played Gollum was one of the
founders of this company.
The choice of The Tempest for this collaborative
experiment was so predictable that it had,
in fact, been anticipated earlier by another
theater company, David Saltz's Interactive
Performance Lab at the University of Georgia.
They used motion capture to animate Ariel
in much the same way in their production of
The Tempest about 15 years earlier. The directors
of both productions point out that The Tempest
is a logical choice for technological experimentation
because throughout its very long production
history, the play has challenged companies
performing it to use their latest and greatest
technologies to create these illusions for
the audience. Shakespeare's First Folio (which
we can find here at the Folger in many versions),
the First Folio has a stage direction in it
that calls for "quaint device[s]" to be used
to help the earliest Ariel perform his magical
acts. So Saltz notes that the interactive
technology of motion capture (that we just
saw here), what I'll be calling "mocap," is
just our present-day "quaint device."
Given that mocap has been used quite widely
in contemporary performance, including even
in Shakespeare, why did it take so long for
the RSC to come on board and experiment with
a mocap Ariel? Imaginarium Studios says this,
by way of explanation: "We've always wanted
to marry performance capture with the stage....
But there are so many risks involved. There's
no room for error." What he means by this
is that, unlike in a video projection that
can be recorded in advance and then edited
carefully afterwards to be error free, the
animation created in live mocap is rendered
in real time. Sensors on a motion-capture
device essentially read the position of an
actor's body in space and then they transmit
that data to a computer that processes the
data really quickly and then maps it back
onto the avatar's skeleton, so that the avatar's
bodily movements appear to mirror those of
the live performer—and that's what you saw
up there a minute ago. Live mocap is risky
because computers are not always great readers
of human bodies. If the performer moves in
a way that the system can't understand, the
computer gets confusing data, so it doesn't
know what to do with it, and tries to make
sense of it, and it creates an animation that,
to us, looks “glitchy.” The RSC and its
partners invested huge sums of money and put
in tremendous labor to lessen or eliminate
these kinds of glitches, this glitchy animation,
for their momentous Tempest production, and
I want to argue that they did so at great
ethical cost.
To demonstrate these ethical costs, I'm going
tonight to contrast the RSC's heavily financed,
corporate-driven mocap theater with a much,
much, much smaller mocap Shakespeare theater
project that I developed with colleagues at
the University of California, Davis: the augmented
reality game Play the Knave. In part because
I and my collaborators lack the finances of
Intel and in part because of the logic of
our game's design, Play the Knave's users
and players and audiences encounter repeated
glitches. Indeed, avatar glitchiness is the
predominant experience of play—I think most
who have played it have discovered this! Instead
of apologizing for “this rough magic," I
want to suggest that the game's glitches are
at the center of its ethical promise. As Play
the Knave presents its users' avatars as warped
and even monstrous mirrors, the game requires
users to engage with the digital other—not
as a tool to be controlled, but as a partner
with which to collaborate and from which to
learn. As the game demands that players accommodate
the digital other, it prompts players to inhabit
their bodies differently. So The Tempest is
an ideal play for using mocap technology,
but not for the reasons the RSC cites. That
is, it's not because mocap produces these
magical illusions for an audience. Rather,
what I'm going to suggest is, it's the riskiness
of mocap and the tensions that it creates
between the bodies of the human player and
the digital avatar that make it such a fascinating
technology for thinking through The Tempest—The
Tempest being the Shakespeare play that perhaps
more acutely than any other stages a confrontation
between human and nonhuman or subhuman species.
Whereas the RSC's mocap Shakespeare experiment
celebrates the triumph of human over alien
technology, Play the Knave users use Shakespeare
to foreground our enmeshment with digital
worlds and to expose the inherent glitchiness
of the human body. As a result of all this,
these experiments with using gaming technology
to perform Shakespeare open up very different
interpretations of The Tempest that I'm going
to think about with you today.
So ... Part 1: The RSC.
I want to start by looking at The Tempest
from the RSC and how the company understood,
or at least expressed, the relationship between
human actors and digital technology as something
of an antagonistic confrontation: human actors
versus digital technology.
So the RSC (I think you've heard of it?) is
a heritage institution with a very long tradition
of performing canonical drama. Its partnership
with two technology companies on the cutting
edge of new media entertainment was several
years in the making, and everybody drummed
up excitement about it by saying that the
project might just fail. Right? That's the
best way to get people to come. And so from
the start, the RSC and its partners expressed
anxiety about whether they could meld their
two worlds: the world of canonical, traditional
Shakespeare and this new media entertainment.
That anxiety was largely played out through
the body of Mark Quartley, the actor playing
Ariel physically and virtually. In interviews
and promotional videos, the RSC artists and
their collaborators comment repeatedly on
the Ariel avatar's supernatural qualities
and alien identity. One Imaginarium representative
described the Ariel avatar this way: he says,
the avatar "was created with 336 joints to
match the human body, takes over 200,000 'discrete
files' to run in real time, and is animated
... by a PC that is loaded with 50 million
times more memory than the one that humankind
put on the moon." This is the computer whose
disconnection from, and even antagonism toward,
its human actors was emphasized through its
nickname. It was called "the Beast." The question
on the minds of RSC creators and audiences
was whether the beastly technology would overshadow
or, worse, undermine the human actors trying
to tell their stories seamlessly and compellingly.
The Beast and the avatar it helped animate
turn out to be worthy opponents for Quartley.
I'm going to play you a clip from a promotional
video the RSC put out, which includes some
interviews with Quartley on the first day
that, they said, he was starting to work with
the technology.
MARK QUARTLEY: We're still trying to work
out the dynamic, the relationship, between
Prospero and Ariel and the avatar of Ariel,
how that ménage à trois works. It's a bit
of a—a bit confusing at the moment. I think
it's getting clearer and clearer, the more
we do it.
[MUSIC: "And I try to work it out ..."]
QUARTLEY: I'm a bit tired now. It's been a
long day, energetic day, I feel like we're
really getting somewhere. I think we've cracked
the way that I can visually have a relationship
with Prospero at the same time as the avatar can.
BLOOM: So note how Quartley repeatedly describes
himself and his avatar as totally separate
beings, each of which relates differently
to Prospero. His confidence, he says, grows
as he continues to work with his digital double,
but even after a long day of "trying to work
it out," he continues to see a divide between
his body and that of the avatar. These are
two entities that can have an intimate “relationship,”
but they're not integrated. Quartley has tried
out this really amazing technology that challenges
conventional ideas about human identity, but
he leaves the studio feeling his human identity
is unchanged and intact. He remains an autonomous
self, right? He has these fixed, stable boundaries.
The RSC's view of digital technology as the
other, and even as the enemy, is rather unfortunate.
Virtual environments provide an ideal opportunity
to abandon liberal humanist desires to dominate
our environment and instead approach the body
as part of a flexible, adaptive, distributed
system. This is not just a missed opportunity
to engage more thoroughly with digital technology
in Shakespeare performance, but I think it's
an evasion of the ethical issues at the heart
of the play being staged here. Characterizations
of Intel's technology as “beastly” are
especially worth pause, given that The Tempest
is about a white European man, who secures
his home on an exotic island by using magic
to subdue the island's one native inhabitant,
Caliban, a character constantly described
as less than human and frequently staged in
performance history as part beast. This is
just some of the images that you can find
through the Folger's Luna project, showing
images of Caliban from different time periods.
From Prospero's perspective, Caliban is something
like a glitch, a noisy and unpredictable disruption
in Prospero's plan for mastery over the island's
inhabitants and visitors.
The RSC's narrative of human actors successfully
conquering beastly technology uncomfortably
mirrors Prospero's own narrative of conquest.
The Tempest is, of course, centrally concerned
with the problem of turning other beings into
tools for human progress, and yet the RSC
production manages to sidestep this issue
almost entirely. Reviewers describe Simon
Russell Beale's Prospero as (and I'll just
give you one quote) "less ... colonial tyrant
than sorrowing mentor" to Caliban and like
a loving father figure to Ariel. So that's
how the production came across to reviewers.
Beale's Prospero does exhibit remorse, but
not for his treatment of Caliban or Ariel,
but for his treatment of his noble political
enemies. Now we've seen this sympathetic portrayal
of Prospero before; it's not unusual, this
emphasis on his humanity, and one reviewer
calls this "the most human, complex, and vulnerable
Prospero I've ever seen." This is not unusual
in the play's long production history, but
it is particularly noticeable in this case.
So, Beale: the last time he performed in The
Tempest for the RSC was 25 years earlier,
when he played Ariel, and he was a vengeful
Ariel who was so angry. His iconic gesture
was to spit in Prospero's face when finally
released from servitude. That anger, which
highlighted the problem of forced servitude,
is completely invisible in this 2016 production.
This production, instead of grappling head
on with The Tempest's central and uncomfortable
ethical dilemma—that is, how can we empathize
with a protagonist who forces into servitude
the entities he finds on this island? (this
is central to The Tempest)—the RSC, instead
of grappling with that, I think presents a
metanarrative of their own capacity to master
the alien other of digital technology. In
the production and in the commentary around
it, Prospero is a conqueror, but not of island
inhabitants, for whom he cares deeply in this
production; he's a conqueror of technology,
the beast that must be made to serve human
will. And, not surprisingly, a lot of the
reviewers who praised this production's effective
use of mocap technology frequently conflate
the production's director, Gregory Doran,
with Prospero. They represent both figures
as triumphant in their quest to tame their
beasts. Here is just one reviewer (to give
you a bit of this discourse): this reviewer
writes that Doran "presses not just the sprites
of the island, but the wizardry of digital
technology into Prospero's power." So every
Tempest production testifies to Doran's and
Prospero's mastery as long as the technology
functions seamlessly. In this triumphal account
of the play and of the relationship between
humans and computers, there is definitely
“no room for error,” no room for the glitches
in animation that would betray human failure
to master the digital other.
So what might happen if we let the glitches
remain? What if we stage, instead of trying
to eliminate, human failures to master the
digital other?
Just as Caliban serves as a constant reminder
of Prospero's ethical compromises, so glitches
in mocap can have a productive function. They
can expose the ethical stakes of aesthetic
commitments in Shakespeare performance. To
explore this further, I want to shift now
to another mocap theater project, Play the
Knave, and I'm going to talk in a moment about
why I want to read the RSC alongside Play
the Knave. But first I'm going to give you
a demo of the game for those who are not familiar
with it. (And Brandon, you can switch over
to this other computer. Thank you.)
So the basic idea here is that users stage
a Shakespeare scene of their choice. They
can also write their own script and upload
it to play any script that they would like.
But first they have to design their virtual
production.
I'm just going to give you a quick tour of
the menu so you can see it.
So they can "warm up.” They can play a set
of "theater games" that were designed by Sawyer
Kemp, who is here in the audience. Where's
Sawyer? There's Sawyer back there. These are
sort of improv theater games. And then, as
I said, write their own scripts (through our
website) that they can then just upload right
into the game. They can play around with it.
What we're most interested in is "Performing
a scene from Shakespeare." So let's perform
a scene from Shakespeare.
"Tragedy, comedy, history." We're looking
for The Tempest. Any guesses where we're going
to find it? Any guesses? We're going to find
it in "comedy," just like the Folio. There's
our Tempest.
You can also, if you're not sure, filter by
the number of players you have. You can filter
by “theme”—this is if you don't know
which play you're looking for. So I would
like "a fighting scene"; "famous lines"; I
would like to sing; "death” ("death" is
always a popular one). Or you can have it
choose a scene for you.
But we know what we're doing, so we're going
to go back over here to The Tempest. And these
are all the scenes for The Tempest. Depending
on what you want to do, a quick cast comes
up here and, if you don't know the scene,
a synopsis of the scene. Thank you to the
Folger Digital Texts, where we get a lot of
the texts that we're using here that we edit,
because it is open access and available for
us.
And so we're going to do “To free or not
to free." This is the scene where Prospero
talks to Ariel, his servant, and tells Ariel
what more he needs him to do. So we're going
to choose that one. You can do a "warm-up,"
which we won't do today, due to lack of time.
You can do the warm-up; we'll skip the warm-up
for now.
And then we have two versions. I actually
have a team of undergraduate interns who edited
Shakespeare scripts to put them in the game.
There are hundreds of scripts; we have them
in two versions. They're always edited because—we
all know this about performance—you always
edit the scenes. So we edit them also to make
them playable in the game. The full version's
a little longer and some of Shakespeare's
more complex imagery is left in. And if you're
really new to Shakespeare or you're dealing
with kids or you just kind of want to get
the story line right, you can do the abridged
version. We're going to do the full version
today.
And then it's going to be karaoke, so you
can choose how fast you want those lines to
come at you. I like this because I think,
for teaching purposes, it's nice to have people
move through different speeds: Start them
slow, move them up. Our actors are pros, though—they
got to try it a bunch of times this afternoon—so
we're going to do… and don't worry, I won't
be calling on you guys to act. We'll do "Fast."
And then you decide who's going to play. So
we have our script, right? We're creating
theater here, virtual theater. We have our
script and we know the characters we need.
Now we need our actors. It's a virtual production,
so we need avatars.
Now we're going to select our avatars. So
we have lots of different avatars here and
the easiest way to find them is to filter
by costume. We have ancient avatars—maybe
you're doing a Roman tragedy or you just want
to set something in ancient Rome or Greece.
You can also go for the more traditional Elizabethan
avatars. We tried to have avatars that look
like America. We have a boy here, a little
boy. And then, of course, we have modern avatars.
And there's a lot of range here. Some people
like to choose somebody who looks like them;
others like somebody who doesn't look like
them—that's always fun. You can, again,
have the avatar chosen for you, which is also
a lot of fun. And then finally, we have fantasy
avatars. So there're your fantasy avatars.
We're designing our theater production here,
we're thinking about Ariel, so what do you
guys want to see for Ariel?
AUDIENCE: The alien… the blue one…
BLOOM: The blue one? How many people want
the blue one? Hands? How many people want
the alien? Okay, blue one's the winner. All
right, Ariel.
And then we have Prospero. Should I go back
to any? Do we want to make it historical?
Do we want to go for something… what do
people want to see?
AUDIENCE: The alien.
BLOOM: The alien? Yeah? The alien Prospero?
The alien? All right, let's do it. People
love this alien. This is the one you want,
right? Yeah. All right.
And so we've got our costumed actors, we've
got our script, and now we want sound design,
right? So we've got some options here—this
music was written by an undergraduate.
You can listen to it. A little "Anger." A
little "Eerie." "Despair," maybe for Hamlet,
big speeches. Well, maybe here, "Grand speeches."
And then we have "Atmospheric sounds," which
are also an option. I won't play them all
for you. I think we like the "Storm” scene
for this one. Yes? We like the "Storm” scene.
So now we have most of the components, but
we still need a theater stage—we've got
to have our play put on somewhere. So we have
several different theaters here. We have the
"Rose Theatre in London” (and these are
all donated to us by some of the people who've
helped to make these, theater historians);
we have "Queens College temporary stage" here;
the "Container Globe," which is a version
of the Globe that's been made out of containers—we
have the 3D model here; and then the "Stratford
Festival stage," partly because the game was
up there in Stratford. So we're going to go
with this, "Queens College," because I think
it shows up best for you. Yeah? Look good
to you all? Okay.
So we've done it all. We've got our production.
[Screen shows “Disclaimer” and "OK" button]
Sign your life away here.
And then I'm going to invite up our actors
who are here to play for us. So Justin Gross
and Raquel LeBlanc!
[APPLAUSE]
Justin and Raquel are from Montgomery Blair
High School and they are here to play for
us. Take it away!
JUSTIN GROSS: Okay. [LAUGHTER as alien avatar
appears] Yes!
RAQUEL LEBLANC as ARIEL:
All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I
come
To answer thy best pleasure.
GROSS as PROSPERO:
Hast thou, spirit,
Performed the tempest that I bade thee?
ARIEL:
To every article.
I flamed amazement. Sometimes I'd divide
And burn in many places.
PROSPERO:
My brave spirit!
Who was so firm that this coil
Would not infect his reason?
ARIEL:
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and played
Some tricks of desperation. The King's son,
Ferdinand
Cried "All the devils are here!"
PROSPERO:
Why, that's my spirit!
But was not this nigh shore?
ARIEL:
Close by, my master.
PROSPERO:
But are they safe?
ARIEL:
Not a hair perished.
The King's son have I landed by himself
PROSPERO:
And all the rest of the fleet?
ARIEL:
Safely in harbor
Is the King's ship.
PROSPERO:
Ariel, thy charge
Exactly is performed. But there's more work.
What is the time of the day?
ARIEL:
Past the mid season.
PROSPERO:
At least two glasses. The time betwixt six
and now
Must be spent preciously.
ARIEL:
Is there more toil?
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised
Which is not ye performed thee.
PROSPERO:
How now? Moody?
What is 't thou canst demand?
ARIEL:
My liberty.
PROSPERO:
Before the time be out? No more.
ARIEL:
Remember I have done thee worthy service.
Thou did promise
To bate me a full year.
PROSPERO:
Does thou forget
From what I did free thee?
Hast thou forgot
The witch Sycorax?
ARIEL:
No, sir. No, sir.
PROSPERO:
Thou hast. I will rend an oak
And peg thee in his entrails.
ARIEL:
Pardon master.
I will do my spiriting gently.
PROSPERO:
Do so and after two days
I will discharge thee.
ARIEL:
That's my noble master!
What shall I do? Say, what?
PROSPERO:
Be subject
To no sight but thine and mine, invisible
To every eyeball else. Go, hence!
BLOOM: Thank you. Thank you, guys. So, by
the way, this whole production gets recorded.
I won't play it for you now. But they've essentially
made a little animated video that they can
then look at or edit or share it with somebody.
So you can see that Play the Knave is similar
to The Tempest production of the RSC in certain
ways. [LAUGHTER] Certainly we're performing
Shakespeare via live mocap, yes. And the players
and actors are performing before all of you,
live spectators, and you're watching them
animate their avatars in real time. Play the
Knave differs, though, not only because we're
using amateur performers here, instead of
the RSC actors, but also because, as you saw,
Knave's mocap is profoundly glitchy.
So you may be wondering why Ariel's avatar
doesn't look like this. I can give you a very
long technical explanation, but I won't for
now. What I will tell you, and what's important
to know, is that the RSC system is astronomically
more complex and expensive than what we have
here. Our players, you may have seen, are
not wearing special suits. They just stepped
right up. We're using that tiny little camera
in the front there. That's all we're using
instead of 27 cameras, or sometimes people
use more. And I'm just using this regular
PC computer—any of you might own the same
one. So it's hardly a beast. It's powerful,
but not a beast. So were we to use the RSC's
equipment, Play the Knave would not be available,
as it is now, for classrooms and theater lobbies
and museums and this lecture. But I want to
set aside why the glitches are there because
I want to think about what's at stake in their
presence for players and audiences of The
Tempest.
So we can observe, first noting that the glitchy
avatars look unnatural, indeed monstrous,
even if they had been played by humans—maybe
we should have put a human avatar in there
so you can see. But regardless, anything up
there, you're going to see hands and feet
twitching erratically. We got to see floating.
You sometimes may have seen a hand penetrate
through a stomach, an elbow contort in an
unnatural direction. A head sometimes sinks
down into the body, a body disappears entirely—we
played with that, but it is, technically,
a glitch. So you can see why a company like
the RSC would have been worried about glitches
in mocap.
These kinds of glitches are especially disturbing
in mocap, compared to other kinds of animation,
because of the relationship mocap sets up
between the human actor and the digital avatar.
When actors use their bodies to move their
avatars, they are invited to feel a sense
of intimate connection with their digital
doubles. The physical performing body melds
with that of the avatar, producing a shared,
distributed body that exists across and between
the screen and the ambient space. Technically
speaking, in fact, the body of the avatar
is not materially distinct from that of the
human controlling it. To help you understand
this, it's useful to think about the differences
between mocap and something like photography
or film. In photography and film, the human
actor's body is translated into or represented
through another form. But mocap works topologically—that
is, it works via mapping—so mocap doesn't
leave behind the physical form of the captured
body. There's this meshing of the physical
and the virtual that allows players to develop
a significant connection with their digital
doubles.
There's a flip side, though. The disruption
of that… You get this amazing connection,
but the disruption of that connection provokes
repulsion. And this Kinect motion-capture
camera that I have there in the front, which
we use. has been especially associated with
this response of repulsion. This might be
one reason why Microsoft decided to pull the
camera from production about a year ago—they
stopped making it. This has been great for
my project, however, because there are lots
of cheap Kinects around. I buy them up, and
then I have an equipment loan program so that
teachers who can't afford the technology or
don't have it on hand can borrow a kit from
me and have the equipment sent to them. So
it works for me. But what Microsoft found
is that the experience of playing via Kinect
could be unsatisfying and even horrifying.
Indeed, most commercial games that are made,
or were made, for Kinect, lessen the horror.
They do this by stripping the user of any
actual control over the avatar. Some of you
may have once played this game: Dance Central.
I won't ask for hands. But the avatar essentially
moves independently on screen. And what the
user, the player, does, is try to mimic the
avatar. So it's the opposite. You try to mimic
the avatar and you get points scored whenever
a joint on your body matches the position
of the avatar. So you did it, you mimicked
what it said, you get a point. No matter what
the user does, what the player does, the screen
presents a beautiful, perfect dancing body.
Play the Knave differs from these games, though,
in that, like the RSC Tempest production,
it allows the player control over the avatar.
And this design decision, combined with our
low-cost mocap system, means that the monstrous
avatar body is allowed to display itself.
So players come into this thinking they're
going to get to be Ariel, but everybody's
Caliban when you play this game.
The experience of play is akin to playing
a fumblecore game. I don't know if any of
you have come across this genre of games,
but it's a genre of video games that intentionally
glitch in order to disrupt the seamlessness
of play and the user's sense of mastery over
an avatar. The whole point of these games
is to disturb players' conceptions of ownership
of their bodies and control over their bodies.
Play the Knave accentuates this phenomenon
because in a fumblecore game—and you all
know this, because you use a mouse and a keyboard,
right?—when the computer doesn't do what
you want it to do, you can say “aargh,”
blame it on the mouse or blame it on the keyboard.
But in Play the Knave, there's nothing to
mediate, no object to mediate your relationship
with the technology and with the avatar, because
the player's body is the controller. When
the player's body serves as both actor and
mediator, players feel more responsible for
the avatars' performance on screen. And this
is where we find the ethical promise of glitchy
mocap interfaces for Shakespeare performance.
There's a performance artist named Susan Kozel
who has used mocap in her work, and this is
what she says about it. She says, "When our
data seems to perceive and act independently
and at a distance from us, the composition
and sanctity of the self ... is called into
question." So Kozel is an experimental artist,
and she can embrace glitchiness as a value
in a way that conventional theater companies
like the RSC presume they cannot. For the
RSC, remember, "there's no room for error,"
right? So the RSC's insistence on displaying
perfection and human mastery over technology
in their production is not an inevitable approach;
it's a calculated and expensive decision about
brand identity that I think underestimates
what Shakespeare theater can do for its actors
and its audiences.
In fact, I think that glitchy mocap offers
a unique opportunity to explore how hierarchies
of all sorts operate in Shakespeare—hierarchies
between men and women, masters and slaves,
and even humans and technology. I'm currently
leading a large-scale collaborative data analysis
project where we're studying how thousands
of users of Play the Knave—because, remember,
I said we record all of this—at dozens of
installations, how they responded to the glitchy
interface. And this is a research question
that also informs my teaching with Play the
Knave in K-12 and college classrooms. We really
think about critical digital media literacy
and how we can develop that through Shakespeare
performance.
I'm going to give you just an example of one
installation that, because it focused on The
Tempest, illustrates my argument particularly
well. So this was an installation that was
part of a full-day workshop on performance-based
techniques for teaching Shakespeare, a collaboration
with Shakespeare scholar-teachers from several
other universities that are noted here.
So what we did is, we brought together a group
of undergraduate theater and English majors,
and they spent a day delving into The Tempest,
into the themes and the characters, using
different kinds of performance-based approaches.
We especially focused on the scene we just
saw and another scene involving Caliban and
Prospero. And then, as our culminating activity,
the groups performed these scenes via Play
the Knave's gaming platform. Some of you may
have done these kinds of theater-based techniques
for studying Shakespeare—a lot of the activities
that came first emphasized self-discovery,
and, as is generally true of much theater-based
teaching, they tried to get students to connect
more deeply with their bodies, so that they
could then use their bodies as expressive
vehicles for the text, to convey their interpretations
of the text. By the time the students came
to Play the Knave, they had established movement
patterns and voice pacing for the characters
that we were looking at.
Play the Knave threw a wrench into their plans.
Students felt that they had achieved some
mastery over Shakespeare's text and over their
own bodies, but they were now forced to take
on a new scene partner, a digital interface
that constrained their performance options
and their sense of personal expression. Some
students found this very frustrating, and
many players do find it very frustrating.
Others saw it as an opportunity. They improvised.
They tried out different sorts of bodily movements
or they just laughed at their follies as they
tried to get a seamless animation. These and
many other students who explore Shakespeare
through Play the Knave approach the interface
with a ludic spirit, often privileging "play"
as a process over "the play" as a product.
At the workshop, this playful engagement with
the digital platform opened up a rich conversation
amongst the students, not only about theatrical
performance—that is, we thought about the
relationship of director to actor, the function
of improvisation, the value of playful exploration,
all these things—but it also opened up into
a really interesting conversation about The
Tempest, a play that has often been read as
a metaphor for theater. Even more to the point,
The Tempest, as I've been saying, is about
the ethical pitfalls of treating others as
one's tools. Insofar as Play the Knave stages
an encounter between human player and what
is, from the player's perspective, a digital
other, the game puts every player into Prospero's
position. Prospero imagines himself as the
supreme leader who must grapple with recalcitrant
underlings: the slave who revolts, the servant
who constantly asks for his freedom. Play
the Knave's avatars proved to be similarly
untamable, and their glitches were constant
evidence of the human player's failure to
master the digital machine, master the other.
Knave's glitches thus prompted the group to
think very differently about the limitations
of Prospero's control over these beings he
sees as noncompliant tools. Like Prospero,
students discovered that in the act of controlling
another being, one creates a bond with it,
and this interdependence necessarily undermines
social and political hierarchies. Who controls
whom?
At the end of The Tempest, Prospero reluctantly
accepts responsibility for and kinship with
Caliban, a being he regards as a nonhuman
thing—"This thing of darkness I acknowledge
mine.” In much the same way, Knave's players,
through the process of play, acknowledge kinship
with and responsibility for the avatar bodies
that are, but are not, their own.
The stakes here extend well beyond a reading
of The Tempest. As users of Play the Knave
discover the limits of their bodily autonomy
and practice collaborating with, instead of
controlling, a digital other, they have to
set aside liberal humanist values of self-empowerment
and instead practice something like an ethics
of care for this entity, this avatar entity,
that they feel they don't have very much in
common with. Play the Knave's glitchy interface
reminds players of their responsibility for
producing semiotic meaning. That meaning is
only possible if the player adapts to the
needs of the machine. So if you want a smoother
animation, the player essentially has to empathize
with the machine. Where is it coming from?
How does it read me? What's our relationship
like? And you have to understand how that
machine reads the human body and then adjust
physical movements—so as to be more easily
legible. Significantly, there must be a tradeoff
in the aesthetics of the performance. To get
an animation that looks more seamless, human
actors have to undertake a physical performance
that looks more glitchy. (I'm sure our fabulous
actors would never have acted the way they
did, if not for Play the Knave getting them
to do that.) Or, to put this differently,
for the animated digital avatar to look more
human, the human actor has to be willing to
look a little more monstrous.
As players recalibrate their aesthetic standards,
they engage in important ethical work that
I've argued the RSC Tempest production evades.
I just want to close by recalling something
that game studies scholars Naomi Clark and
Merritt Kopas have said about glitches. They
write this: "glitches are a kind of queer
failure that we should celebrate; a failure
that's too drastic and uncontrolled for the
orthodox notion of 'try again and get stronger'
gameplay."
The same could be said for Shakespeare performance.
The RSC uses, essentially, cinema-quality
graphics to amaze us, and this is much like
gaming companies that invest heavily in the
best graphical displays for their video games.
But much, I think, is lost when we bring cinema-quality
graphics into the theater and into games,
and when we treat theater audiences and game
players like moviegoers. Stunning graphics
impress us, there's no doubt, but they move
us far away from the interactive and risky
pleasures that have always been at the heart
of gaming and of theater. When Shakespeare
ends The Tempest with a chess game, he reminds
us that games and theater are, at their core,
forms of play. No matter what technology we
bring into them—into games or into theater—for
actors and audiences, they need to feel like
play.
Thank you.
