Page 129 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014SUCCESSFUL CASE ANALYSIS AND GOOD PRACTICE1. The use of the new technologies in performing arts worksThe performing arts’ adoption of the new digital and communication technologies has kept pace with the possibilities offered by those technologies and they have been incorporated in two ways: as a kind of mise-en-scène of previous works, or as an integral part of new works of creation. First it was illumination and then it was the adoption of large format images made possible by high definition projectors. The control of these resources by computer has led to the development of software tools specially conceived for the management of all stage elements.These innovations have been shared by opera, theatre and dance since they incorporate other disciplines that feed directly from technological advances for their creative possibilities, such as videoart and sound performance. All the examples mentioned here do not form an exhaustive list of all the possibilities that might exist, but rather of the ones that exist at present and they show a growing and unstoppable wave of evolution in the performing arts that is broaching the question of their own limitations, in the sense of how we have understood them since the 19th century.The 20th century was more contemplative about the performing arts and the 21st century is going to be more interactive with the public. Since the apparition of the performance, the role of the audience has been changing, knocking at the barrier between the stalls and the stage in order to form part of the show. In the new mise-en-scène the scenery overflows the stage and nobody knows exactly where it stops. Within the same space, fiction and reality become confused to become one with each other.AC/EThe same can be said of the artistic disciplines, which have been merging to the point where the boundaries between them have become diluted. By the mid-20th century we had already started talking about dance-theatre, or musical theatre, in imitation somehow of opera, the true multidisciplinary exponent of the performing arts. New narrative forms are emerging as Carlos A. Scolari describes in his article for this Annual Report, “Transmedia storytelling, new ways of communicating in the digital age”.The revolution in stage setting brought the best theatre stage designers to the most important opera houses. In a way, opera recovered its theatrical dimension, one that had been stifled by music and singing during the preceding centuries. The adoption of videoart and audiovisual sets sprang from this revolution. Proposals such as the recent The Ring of the Nibelung by La Fura dels Baus theatre group, designed between 2006 and 2009, find structural building blocks for constructing their ideas for stage sets in the videos made by Franc Aleu. It is the same with Bill Viola, one of the most important videoart artists, who embarked on a common project with theatre director, Peter Sellars, to design a videoart series for use in a production of Tristan and Isolde at the Paris National Opera in 2005.As can be seen from the analysis of the cases chosen so far, videoart has progressed a step further with the technique of video mapping, which suggests the possibility of not even using props for stage sets. Dance has also explored this possibility and has gone a step further by integrating projected images with the movement of the body. In these new theatrical proposals it is the body that creates the space, as has been pointed out by one of the mostFOCUS 2014: THE USE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE PERFORMING ARTS1. THE USE OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN PERFORMING ARTS WORKS CURRENT PAGE...129