Live Performance Web
Posted on February 2, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
Irish Times
The essence of risk is disappearing from “Live performance” as live becomes edited, mediated by production companies and time-shifted by viewers. Under pressure from the immediacy of contact between people across the World Wide Web though creative producers are having to redefine the essence of entertainment.
Reality TV is the definitive new genre of the past fifteen years though its life may be shortened by the rise of new web-inspired relationship-based, and live, genres.
Reality TV is essentially “as-live”, recorded and edited from live footage so therefore containing no risk of failure for its producers. Celebrity Big Brother is a case in point. In the recent “Jade Goody” episode it emerged the racism that so famously hit the screens could have been edited out by the producers.
The broadcaster Channel 4 deliberately took a chance on racism as entertainment and then had to deal with the fallout. For viewers, it became apparent that the “as live” genre is manipulated with possibly mendacious intent. These programmes promise the tension of live performance without taking the risks.
The real essence of real live performance is handled only by rare artists like Lenny Bruce and Peter Cook, comedians who were capable of taking audiences to the precipice of the performer’s potential for failure.
There is a trend now towards simulating those distant risks and that is essentially what Reality TV has traded on. It is characterised more by imminent fabricated deadlines and time-sensitive challenges than it is by any concept of reality. Celebrity Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity or The Restaurant are programmes that satisfy in us a need to believe decisions can still involve adrenalin and really matter. They have reintroduced to audiences the potential for failure, the long walk that we used to take once in a generation with real artists.
The drama of live entertainment, even when simulated, has become more compelling. Now it’s branching out.
In Amsterdam the Paradiso Club hosts significant up and coming bands from around the world. Those live acts are now available through www.fabchannel.com. Fabchannel is cementing Amsterdam’s reputation as a place where innovative cultures like rock music meet the innovative edge of the web. Media Republic’s Eccky is another example. Eccky’s are baby avatars. Cartoons to me and you and they represent a new form of entertainment.
On the Eccky website people have the opportunity to pick a partner with whom to have and raise an Eccky, a baby. It’s relationship building without the messy bits in between.
Phenomenally successful Ecckys are sponsored now by a variety of large Dutch companies. Your Eccky comes with free insurance courtesy of insurer OHRA. Why? Presumably so that companies such as OHRA can get the inside track on your fantasies.
What Eccky’s have in common with reality TV is that they too simulate adrenalin but in this case with relationships rather than failure.
Relationships are an essential part of today’s live performance culture. Zabberbox, an American website, takes these principles a stage further with its Soup of the Day, a “relationship entertainment experience” where Brandon, a photographer has three girlfriends and a blog. Three times a week Zabberbox showed three to five minute films of Brandon with one of the women. Viewers then have access to Brandon through his MySpace page. Soup recorded 6 million downloads in the first couple of months of its life.
Zilo.com takes the principal of Live to the college campus. Its producers and contractors tour America’s colleges culling live video performances from the average undergraduate. The performers ad lib in front of their friends and classmates rather than in front of an anonymous audience and although all they have to do is tell a true story, the results can be excruciating.
Clearly some people are trying to be different. One who succeeds and who may eventually find a place up there with Bruce and Cook, is Peter Greenaway. Greenaway, director of numerous avant garde films beginning with The Draughtsman’s Contract, is parleying the reputation of his new home Amsterdam to new heights. Greenaway has become the lord of the VJs, the video jockeys that ply their trade in the clubs of Amsterdam and London mixing video into ad hoc themes, narratives or plain delirious mash-ups.
Greenaway uniquely mixes scenes and shots from his own movies, right now Tulse Luper Suitcase, into ad hoc narrative and multi-faceted live creations. It debuted in Amsterdam last July. In his new act he produces performance movies in real time, an innovation that will surely pressure creative minds elsewhere to drop the storyboard and live a little nearer the edge. Greenaway explains that narrative film is too one dimensional and brings in to play too few of the artist’s senses. To create movie experiences in real time is no mean feat. All that’s needed now is the international acclaim.
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