Command Performance

My book project, drawing together performance history, media theory, and histories of capitalism, has the tentative title Command Performance: Theatre, the Automatic, and the Limits of Capital.

The book discusses a series of attempts to make theatre, opera, and dance automatic: to deny the labour of performers, to eliminate mediations and chances for error, to control the process of performance production, and arrange matters such that performances seem to perform themselves. In short, these figures have tried to make theatre resemble the idealized production of capital. By doing so, they unwittingly shed light on knotty questions of how much accumulation capital can actually achieve within performance and the broader sphere - service work - that resembles it. This book adopts the historical shape of works like Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance, Chris Salter’s Entangled, and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s Cyborg Theatre in order to retell their canonical story of theatre rejuvenating itself with new media as one of theatre undergoing intensifying, though often faltering, capitalist subsumption.

My chapters each take up a figure or figures with a scheme to take that unruly, uncooperative form of live performance and transform it into a system of automated event-production. Some found more success than others.

Raymond Roussel wrote theatrical novels and staged less theatrical plays with an algorithmic method that won him surrealist celebration, Michel Foucault’s veneration, and public disdain. I approach Roussel as did his contemporary critics: as a wealthy heir whose historic challenge to the stage was less aesthetic than financial. Roussel’s obsession with French colonial subjects affords a dive into the links betwen racialization and automaticity, and the limits of recent academic admiration for surrealist primitivism.
Adolphe Appia produced a theoretical vision for theatrical design whose effect on scenography, lighting, and stage architecture remains dominant one hundred years on. He was also a fascist sympathizer whose proposals for scenic reform stemmed from a broader, spiritual vision of submitting performance to a physically binding, regulating racial will. Appia’s contradictory thoughts about new technologies help specify the attractions and perils of the fascist critique of modernity.
Gordon Pask, a British cybernetician and lifelong musical theatre kid, issued several plans for a “Cybernetic Theatre.” Indeed, his entire philosophical system attempted to draw theatre and cybernetics together, in a manner strongly resembling the later STS turn towards actor-network theory. Also encompassing cybernetic robot animals, live EEG music, John Cage, modular architecture, and the broad midcentury popularization of cybernetics, this chapter explores how such ontologies of performance (and of market exchange) find friction with theatre, then and today.
Analivia Cordeiro, a Brazilian choreographer and media artist, produced a series of computer-choreographed dances amidst the dictatorship of the 1970s. She soon discovered that she was joining an accidental international movement of artists generating computationally randomized dance scores. This movement took part in the burgeoning cultural turn towards neoliberal theory, one critiqued in Cordeiro’s work. This chapter will expand on my article on the topic published in Theatre Journal.
Frederick Bentham, lead engineer at UK lighting monopoly Strand, designed computational light control because he wanted theatre to be less automatic. Reading patents, design documents, trade journal advertisements, operation manuals, and the often moving meditations found in Bentham’s writing, I show how misconceptions of automation can serve the very tendencies they claim to oppose.
Robert Wilson built his characteristic style by realizing the potential of digital control before few others did. Those few others worked in commercial theatre, which found its way back to profitability just as Wilson found his way onto the global stage. Together, Wilson and the new spectacles of the West End defined what computation meant for theatre, how performance really could become automatic, and constructed the principles of stage aesthetics that remain prevalent today.
Since 2008, theatre and dance artists have produced a whole series of machine-driven spectacles, algorithmic scripts, AI-animation exhibitions, machine-learning dances, and many other varieties of the automatic. But unlike their predecessors, these artists do so not as a project of general reform but as a procedure of social critique. The prospects, and failures of the automatic - which is to say, of capital accumulation - have finally come into public view. What do we talk about when we talk (and talk) about AI and the arts? Today’s live artists show that we talk about our acts of working, buying, saving, and selling: and our realization that these acts may no longer be adding up.

Excerpts from this project have been shared at MLA Philadelphia, IFTR Reykjavik, ASTR Arlington, ASTR San Diego, University of Toronto’s Institute for Dance Studies, and at King’s College London. I look forward to bringing this project to future conferences and campuses.

Some images:

Gordon Pask, Eidophor Proposal, n.d. (c1975).

Still from Jeanne Beaman’s untitled ballet about computers, WQED 1965.

Still from Ian Cheng’s Emissaries (2017).

Douglas Eacho IntroductionPublicationsTeachingCommand Performance EmailCV BlueSky

Douglas Eacho

Introduction
Publications
Teaching
Command Performance

Email
CV
BlueSky