While it can describe theatre and performance that incorporates dance and music, multimedia performance (or often ‘intermedial performance’) more commonly specifies work that mixes live performance with machines and/or mediated forms, such as computer technology, television, video, film and slide projection. Multimedia performance aims to extend and enhance performance by exploring the full range of expressive media available. By juxtaposing the live and the mechanical or mediated, it also raises issues of liveness and presence and interrogates the aesthetic and social potentials of contemporary technology and media culture as well as live performance. Multimedia performance was pioneered by futurism’s incorporation of machines and films into performance and by early twentieth century director Erwin Piscator, who put staged fictions in the context of real historical events by using large-scale documentary film projections as scenographic backdrops for live performance. It has proliferated since the 1960s as questions about the relationships and boundaries between humans, our identities, our bodies, media and technologies have become more pressing. Multimedia performance often questions our changing relationships to time and space by placing the ‘there and then’ of recorded performance within the ‘here and now’ of live performance. Artists including Orlan, Stelarc and Laurie Anderson question where, how and by whom our identities, bodies, voices and realities are performatively produced in a technologically developed culture. As performance at the interface of the live and the mediated has expanded, it has developed into the virtual theatre of live internet performance and cyberperformance. Such performance not only draws the performer increasingly into cyberspace; it leads the audience there too. From the RCTP
Image: Photo by Arian Andiel, Nina Herlitschka and Phillip Zarrilli