Here, There and In-Between: Rehearsing over Skype

Abstract

The gathering of people together in a contiguous physical space in order to make something is the most basic description of my typical rehearsal process. My rehearsals have, until recently, always been dictated by the ability to gather a group of collaborators together at the same time and in the same geographical place. In this analogue version of rehearsal, tea breaks and side conversations have dictated as much about the process of creation as the work done in the centre of the space and physical presence has been an implied requirement of participation. Starting in 2007, I have been collaborating with the New York based dance company Tiffany Mills Company in the role of dramaturge and performance coach/director. Because I live and work in England, I am not able to be physically present in the New York dance studio on a regular basis. Instead, we have worked over SKYPE, an Internet-based telephone and videoconferencing programme. The physical space of the rehearsal room has been destabilised as a result of our trans-Atlantic collaboration: our process occurs in a space between my home in England and the dance studio in New York, in a space that contains images and sounds, which acts as both a portal between here and there and as a space in its own right. Johannes Birringer (2004: 172) has described the destabilisation of expected spatial relationships in relation to live performance as “telepresence”. He notes that in Here I come again/Flying Birdman (ADaPT, 2004), which had seven performance sites, seven performance ensembles and seven audiences all linked via multiple screens, that the collaborators were “separate but appear to be together in a shared virtual space of the Internet” (ibid). Birringer, and others, have mostly focused on the delivery of performance using the distribution networks made available by the Internet. In this article, I am concerned primarily with the way that collaborative technologies have shifted the landscape of the rehearsal room, and the rehearsal process itself, radically altering the synchronous way in which we participate in rehearsals.

Notes

¹ We did eventually rehearse in the same physical location, but we were nearly a year into the collaboration before that happened.

² We eventually switched from using an external camera to using the built-in camera on Tiffany's laptop to limit the amount of bandwidth we were using (and therefore to increase the quality of our video).

³ Tomorrow's Legs was created with and performed by Jeffrey Duval, Luke Gutsgell, Whitney Tucker and Petra van Noort.

⁴ This process of repetition correlates with the way that the human brain translates perceptions into conceptualizations; through practice, the embodied brain develops an ability to understand and apprehend experiences and make meaning out of them (Heath 2006: 137).

⁵ More details about this piece, including a description of what happened when I visited New York, are included in my PhD dissertation (2010).