On April 30, Contra Mundum Press published Richard Foreman's first book in seven years.
Plays With Films collects the three plays with which Foreman concluded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater's residence at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in New York. Having added projected images into his theater, Classicalite thought it would be nearly impossible to produce any kind of text that would convey the spectacular aesthetic range of these extra-sensory works.
In a feat of uniquely dedicated publishing, all thanks be to Contra Mundum for putting out a stunning book that re-evokes the synesthetic majesty of Richard Foreman's complex theater-machines.
Extending the model of theater as a "reverberating machine," Foreman's use of film in this trio of plays is intimately integrated into the complex network of impulse generators, creating a multi-dimensional experience of scriptural space--a new kind of theatre totale that recharges and redirects the issues of consciousness he's been exploring with indefatigable intensity since 1968. The bodied reality of theatrical experience (and the recognition of unconsciousness within that experience) becomes more fraught with peril in today's screened world.
These plays, originally conceived as his final theater works, will prove transformative in regards to the individual's ability to interpret the threats of conforming to our new digital culture. Employing an innovative typographical presentation, Plays With Films demonstrates how America's most daring theater artist alchemizes reality into a unique contemplation on the project of self-construction here in the 21st century.
To wit, here's but a few select words from the introduction to Plays With Films, penned by George Hunka--a venerable dramatist/theorist, himself:
INTRODUCTION
A Face That's Always the Same Face: Richard Foreman & the Projected Image
The three texts collected in this volume, Zomboid! (Film/Performance Project No. 1), Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! and Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (A Richard Foreman Theater Machine), constitute a body of formal experimentation with which Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater concluded its residence at the St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in New York. Largely eschewing the projected image in most of his past plays, Foreman integrated the projected digital image into these unique works, described by their creator as "film/performance projects" or "theater machines" instead of plays. So far as this integration constituted a response to new theater technologies then at hand, it also constituted Foreman's attempt to come to terms with the image-world of the 21st century, and the challenges to traditional consciousness and subjectivity that it presented.
Foreman had worked with projected images in the past--in the theater with Film is Evil, Radio is Good (1987), and in the film medium itself with his feature Strong Medicine (1979)--but had resisted the temptation to work with it again until digital technology added a further dimension to the projected image. The imperfections introduced into the filmic image by the mechanics of film itself--the scratches and dirt that collect on the celluloid print of the projected image over time, for example, a frequent subject of the American avant-garde filmmakers among whom Foreman had begun his theatrical career in the 1960s--were now eliminated from the experience of visual spectatorship. The two-dimensionality of the projected digital video image, pristine and clear, undamaged through countless repetitions through the mechanical device of the projector, elicited a number of other aesthetic questions. It is impossible, for example, to tell whether these images are recorded or live, whether or not the personae of the projected image were operating in the same real time as the experience of the spectator, however far away they might be in geographical distance (on other continents entirely, in the case of these three works); the ability of these images to call attention to themselves constituted a challenge not only to the aura of the reproduced artwork that Benjamin had investigated but also to the aura of the reproduced body as presented to the distant spectator, and by extension our own bodies in this arena of projected images.
The nameless live performer/characters who mediated the experience of these projections for the spectator of these works presented an often comic meditation on our own desire to become a part of this projected world--to become two-dimensional ourselves. They also demonstrated the extent to which we give up perceptual freedom as we chain ourselves to the unswerving rigidity of the digitally recorded image: both director and performers respond to the recorded image as to a click-track, an unerring and unforgiving metronome of recorded experience which does not care whether we are there or not. Whether this image-world constitutes a means of a new perceptual, social and political autonomy or a new, unforgiving barrier to this autonomy, remains an issue that is central to the reception of all three of these works.
Click HERE to read the rest of Hunka's virtuosic intro, as well as sixty-something more pages of Richard Foreman's own way with words (i.e. playing with film in the theater).
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