The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: THEATRE PRESENCE
SUPER VISION tells three stories
1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveller gradually is forced to reveal all of his personal information, until his identity becomes transparent, with no part of his life left outside the boundaries of datasurveillance.
2. A young woman (Jen), addicted to the white noise of constant connection, maintains a long-distance relationship with her Grandmother. As she makes efforts to digitally archive her Grandmother's past, the Grandmother slips into senility.
3. A father covertly exploits his young son's personal data to meet the demands of the family's lifestyle. This ploy escalates beyond the father's control, until he is compelled to disappear. His wife and son are left with a starkly diminished data portrait, and his escape is shadowed by the long reach of the datasphere.
Nick Kaye: You were talking earlier about acting and theatrical presence – I was wondering how being in all that visual play, how that affects your sense of a theatrical presence within this performance?
Rizwan Mirza: You know it is very interesting, because sometimes that theatrical presence is a very intangible quality. You say to yourself; OK, I am on this screen, I am being projected 20ft high and we adjust to different sizes of audience and auditorium. I think to myself, well, you have actually to resonate more somehow. What do you do? There are internal switches if you are a performer. Something does happen. It’s the timbre of your voice, it’s intonation, but then again it is completely intangible.
Nick Kaye: Are you focused on the projection?
Rizwan Mirza: I am really thinking about the emotional content of what I am saying. And what energy level I am putting behind that emotional content. Without making anything seem hysterical – hysterically serious or hysterically funny. That’s where – for lack of a better word – that magical thing happens with live performance – that’s what it is. It’s that one thing that one night someone might say was a little off. You don’t have that thing that you had the other night. You are saying the same lines; you are almost delivering them the same way. So that’s the age-old thing, isn’t it, about it was ‘on’ tonight or it wasn’t ‘on’ tonight. It has nothing to do with whether you have missed your mark or not. You can miss your mark five times in a show and still have your best show, because you were just so dynamic.
see also: playing to camera | presence on stage |
Left to right: Rizwan Mirza (the traveller) close up in projection and
live onstage; Joe Silovsky (the TSA agent) live mediated onstage
and on forestage.
Video still.
