Screened stages and turbulent collisions

Abstract

Margaret Tedesco's performance of Cameo. Nights, and night is set with her standing before a screen onto which a feature length film is played with the sound turned off (the evening of the performance it was Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963)). The audience cannot see the screen. The performance unfolds as if narrated from a space of blank neutrality yet is tinged by Tedesco's own subjectivity. The turbulence of such encounters creates excess and stretches the dimensions between screen and stage. In Tedesco's performance, the seemingly stable boundary between film and performance becomes something unstable and in-between. This collision between cinema and performer alters both: the perception of ‘cinema’ and the status of ‘performance.’ This creates a turbulence that disrupts the fixity of both performance and the film text.

At first glance it may seem that Tedesco performs the film. Instead, the opposite is true—the film performs Tedesco, transforming her into something other than actor. She becomes a human stand-in: a medium channeling the film that is unmistakably (despite its invisibility) the central “actor” of the performance. Her subjective responses to the film become a feedback look that changes the infinite ability for the film to repeat in the same way that the film is changes Tedesco's perception of her own presence and encounter in front of an audience. This encounter between reproducibility and the corporeal presence of the human body crosses the boundary between performance and film and creates a new moment somewhere between screen and stage, reproducibility and subjectivity. This moment changes spectators’ relationship to past and present and offers a new version of the future in which theatre and film are embedded within the other and in a constant feedback loop in which the turbulence between forms becomes the performance.

Notes

1 The performance of Cameo. Nights and night that I saw was at Performance Studies International's2013 conference at Stanford University.