A short video projected on a huge screen on center stage introduced the night's performance, giving the audience an idea about what to expect for the next couple of hours. The performers enter one by one as the video played before segueing to the opening number: Masquerade from The Phantom of the Opera. Just a few moments before the first line, feedback was heard and the sound technician, with beads of sweat filling up his forehead, couldn't find where it was coming from. They could only come from the nine wireless microphones being used on stage, so with some seconds to spare, he muted all the mics, and the feedback was gone. But when they were turned on again in time for the first line of the first song, something inside that console triggered something that sent some signal that sent full reverb effect to each of the microphone which made that first line sound like it was coming from some empty gymnasium buried deep underground. It took a whole stanza before the sound was normalized.
That's the risk one takes with tech-heavy performances - if you haven't totally enslaved those hi-tech gizmos, they take over, with their mindless minds, and you become the slave, totally helpless and the only thing you can do is turn it on and turn it back on and take it from the top.
We didn't take it from the top, and with all those channels on that impressive sound console connected to some sound gadget on stage: a full microphone set-up for the drumset, an amplifier for each of the five instruments onstage, about a dozen vocal microphones... no, this isn't going to be an article about sound-engineering for dummies, this is more about turning it off and getting rid of all those things we add to the fourth wall between the actors on stage and the people in the audience, and not remembering what it's all about - a conversation between the artist and the audience.
In today's age of wireless fidelity and phones that take pictures with higher resolutions than most dedicated digital cameras and computerized lighting and sound consoles, art has become more virtual and less actual. Photos are rarely printed on paper are more often viewed on an LCD screen, music is downloaded on to a digital player that can hold practically all music that was ever composed, recorded, uploaded and listened to on expensive signature earphones... nobody misses anything, not even live performances as shown by the comments of those who couldn't make it to the one-night-only performance ("hope you guys can upload the video so we too can watch it"). The job of transporting reels of film between theaters is almost obsolete - the material is now played from a hard drive. And as if the divide between the actors and the audience that is created by celluloid isn't enough, we even put on 3D glasses to experience artworks on film. More and more people read e-books.
And as if we've totally lost the ability to experience reality without a go-between, you see people in the audience viewing what's going on onstage on an LCD screen via a phone, a tablet, etc.
We're missing the point of live theater - a conversation between human beings, first and foremost. And the less we put in between, the better we can hear each other.
And that's what we intend to do here in the coming weeks - turn things off for better conversation.
That's the risk one takes with tech-heavy performances - if you haven't totally enslaved those hi-tech gizmos, they take over, with their mindless minds, and you become the slave, totally helpless and the only thing you can do is turn it on and turn it back on and take it from the top.
We didn't take it from the top, and with all those channels on that impressive sound console connected to some sound gadget on stage: a full microphone set-up for the drumset, an amplifier for each of the five instruments onstage, about a dozen vocal microphones... no, this isn't going to be an article about sound-engineering for dummies, this is more about turning it off and getting rid of all those things we add to the fourth wall between the actors on stage and the people in the audience, and not remembering what it's all about - a conversation between the artist and the audience.
In today's age of wireless fidelity and phones that take pictures with higher resolutions than most dedicated digital cameras and computerized lighting and sound consoles, art has become more virtual and less actual. Photos are rarely printed on paper are more often viewed on an LCD screen, music is downloaded on to a digital player that can hold practically all music that was ever composed, recorded, uploaded and listened to on expensive signature earphones... nobody misses anything, not even live performances as shown by the comments of those who couldn't make it to the one-night-only performance ("hope you guys can upload the video so we too can watch it"). The job of transporting reels of film between theaters is almost obsolete - the material is now played from a hard drive. And as if the divide between the actors and the audience that is created by celluloid isn't enough, we even put on 3D glasses to experience artworks on film. More and more people read e-books.
And as if we've totally lost the ability to experience reality without a go-between, you see people in the audience viewing what's going on onstage on an LCD screen via a phone, a tablet, etc.
We're missing the point of live theater - a conversation between human beings, first and foremost. And the less we put in between, the better we can hear each other.
And that's what we intend to do here in the coming weeks - turn things off for better conversation.
No comments:
Post a Comment