Live arts correspondent Bella Todd on the hottest happenings in the global cultural calendar this week, including Punchdrunk bringing video gaming to the stage in their collaboration with Playstation3, Brighton Digital Festival and the Amsterdam Fringe.
THE MAIN EVENT: And Darkness Descended
Would Shakespeare have been a Sonic or a Mario man? Fusing theatre and video gaming in a visceral ‘survival experiment’ that should raise as many pulses as it is does cultural posers, this week the darlings of the immersive theatre world, Punchdrunk, are collaborating with console kings PlayStation in a show called … And Darkness Descended.
It’s all about bigging up the launch of the third in PlayStation®3’s Resistance franchise, the sci-fi horror shooter series in which Earth has been invaded by an alien civilization known as the Chimera. Applying game mechanics to the real world, the show at Waterloo Station Arches will cast each audience member as part of the ‘resistance’, who must work together to send a message to US survivors who appear in the beginning sequences of Resistance 3. Lights, sound and smell will evoke the world of the game, and the immediate threat is, we’re assured, ‘very real’.
At a cursory glance, theatre and video gaming are the chalk and cheese of entertainment. One’s traditionally seen as high culture, the other the lowest of the low. And while we’ve got no truck with such snobbery, you could definitely argue that the problem-solving element of video gaming is psychological anathema to the more contemplative state that we assume is needed to get the most out of great theatre.
On the other hand, the sharper technology gets, the more video gaming can aim at verisimilitude of the kind that has always been open to the flesh, blood and physical reality of theatre. Actors have been lending their voices to games for decades. More recently, detective game L.A. Noire used facial-recognition software to track facial expressions, while Monkey: Journey To The East saw Andy Serkis playing the lead physically as well as vocally via motion capture.
But what can the world of video gaming offer theatre? Theatre’s developing interest in the world of video gaming (click here to read about five landmark productions) has run parallel to its burgeoning obsession with interactivity. Whether you’re talking promenade performances, site-specific shows or one-on-one encounters, one of the biggest theatrical trends over the last ten years has been towards making audience members active, physically-engaged participants rather than bums-on-seats observers.
And Punchdrunk – whose previous theatrical coups include the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired Masque Of The Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre and, most recently, live Doctor Who adventure The Crash Of The Elysium are masters in all these arts. As Artistic Director Felix Barrett has said of the PlayStation collab, what fascinates Punchdrunk is ‘the level of immersion that is inherent within video games and the possible interface with the real world’ and ‘the role of the audience as player, participant and potentially character’.
Judging by the success of Game Play, an entire festival of video game-inspired performance art which recently took place at Brooklyn’s The Brick theatre for the third year running (and included shows such as Sneaky Snake Productions’ Adventure Quest, based on old Sierra/LucasArts adventure games, and Brain Explode, in which the audience had to help a video game designer trapped in a text RPG with an hour to finish before a chip in his brain exploded), they’re not alone.
BREAKING NEW GROUND
© Red Bull Content Pool
Four times breakdancing world champions
Flying Steps took to the streets of Copenhagen, Denmark, to give a first taste of their award-winning Bach & Breakdance show. Here the crew pull a few dance move outside the famous Tivoli Gardens.
The first performance of the sold out Red Bull Flying Bach European tour will be on September 1 at the Royal Danish Academy of Music Concert Hall. The
Red Bull Flying Bach European Tourincludes more than 50 shows with dates in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Turkey.
BEST OF THE REST
- Have you ever wanted to rob a bank? You can do (sort of) as part of Blast Theory’s A Machine To See With, which arrives in Brighton this week following a sell-out season at Sundance Film Festival. A new theatre piece for pedestrians and their mobile phones that allows you to play the lead in an interactive heist movie, it’s one of the highlights of the inaugural Brighton Digital Festival, an international celebration of digital culture running from September 1-30 and including Wayne McGregor’s dance piece FAR, choreographed using something called ‘neuropsychology’.
- As the programme image demonstrates (let’s just say it features a freaky cat in a yellow jerkin), the Amsterdam Fringe Festival has the propensity to out-surreal other international fringe festivals – edgy, hard to categorise shows taking place in clubs with start times of 4am are par for the course. Eighty arts companies will perform over ten days from Sep 1, including Amanda Palmer of Brechtian punks the Dresden Dolls, who was apparently arrested last time she was in Amsterdam…
- While Joanna Newsom, Midlake and Mogwai head up the predictably wonderful music line-up, End Of The Road festival (which takes place in Dorset from September 2-4) continues to expand its other arts offerings, with the suitably alternative Simon Munnery, Robin Ince, Jo Neary and Pappy’s among the acts playing the Comedy Stage, and the utterly beguiling Paper Cinema (whole puppet worlds cut from cereal packets and painstakingly animated in perfect mimicry of filmic conventions) doing two stints on the Tipi Stage.
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