Theatres of Trajectory
We are decades deep into a new millennium. It has become clear that Earth was never truly global, only globally fragmented. Supply chains stutter on the sharp edges of new nationalisms, new wars, and a new genocide, which shun the dream (not mine) of seamless circulation. The solution? To digitize everything: commodities, infrastructures, bodies-minds. An anthropology without geography, bodies without weight, and memory without dust.
Machine learning is becoming the animating breath of new realities. Avatars are blossoming in virtual shogekijyo (little theatres), growing in complexity of movement. AR overlays not only bring new objects into the world, but also produce as Lucy Thornett points out, “affective, speculative space(s) […] through the particular relations of body and technology that AR constructs” (p.339) .
As everything solid is rendered into streamable abstraction, I find myself circling an old question: where does performance go when presence is no longer local? And by performance, I don’t mean only theatre, but that porous act of sensing, encountering, becoming. A “being-with” world. Or more precisely: being as trajectory, not only subject or object.
The “traject” or “trajectory” (in relation to subject and object) is a concept developed by Paul Virilio. In the July-September 1991 issue of the journal Flux, Virilio states that “Object, subject and trajectory are one single being, in the philosophical sense of the term. Through my work, I am militating so that trajectoriness, or trajectivity, can exist” (pp.48-49). Why is trajectory important, necessary, or relevant to performance today? A longer quote from Virilio is needed here:
Alongside geography, we have perhaps too quickly done away with what Ptolemy called Chorography, or choreography, if you will. That is, the written form of gesture: the infrastructures, which continue the tracks of movement, and this is perhaps why the trajectory has been forgotten, left out, in geography. For me, the essential thing is “geo-path-ography”. You cannot separate a moving object from a ground reference or a horizontal reference. To the extent that these trajectories are immaterial, that these are trajectories which are from now subject to absolute speed, we are faced here with one of the enigmas of the relationship to one another, of the relationship to the other, to distance, to tele. Tele, in a manner of speaking, leads us to reinterpret the being of the trajectory, in real time. I think that this is an element which is going to change perspective (p.49).
Trajectory seems to me to be the modus operandi of theatre today. When I think of theatre, I don’t think of plot. I think of intensities across time and space. Of door handles and distances. I think of walking through a service tunnel near Waterloo Station toward the glow of Shunt’s Amato Saltone. I think of stage lights drifting upward at Toga Village, vanishing into the forest. I think of a train ride to a disused school in Nara to see Twilight, and finding the ghosts of Ishinha somewhere between tarpaulin and the dust at the site of the Heijo Palace. I think of descending diaphanous blue steps into the depths of “Deep Sea Aria“, a horrific VR city in which the entire existence of the protagonist Ao is compressed into a singular moment of being. I think of Zeng Chen’s “Tracing the Shadow” in the Virtual Museum of Virtual Art’s provocative exhibition “What is Virtual Art Volume 1,” in which Chen takes apart the tradition of Chinese shadow puppets piece by piece in a VR autopsy of analogue culture.
These are not memories of story, but of pathways; intimate choreographies of proximity, discomfort, friction, arrival. A theatre of atmosphere, of pilgrimage, of trajectory. Not dogmatic, but binding. Not sacred, but charged. Not answers, but movements. The desire to approach something ineffable by moving closer to it.
Immersive theatre. A term both useful and too tidy. It names a shift from looking to sensing, from chair to labyrinth, from stage to site. But immersion didn’t begin with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total-work-of-art) or with the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, which was an attempt at creating a Gesamtkunstraum (total-world-of-art), or wherever you want to place the origin point of this genre. The rhythms of immersion surely go further back, to forgotten rituals, to undocumented ecstasies, to Zeami’s jo-ha-kyū—”From the twittering of the birds to the cries of the insects, each sings with that principle with which it is provided, and that is jo, ha, and kyu” (p.4).
In the preface to his translation of Zeami’s Fūshikaden, William Scott Wilson explains the concept of jo, ha, kyu as “jo (序), a beginning or introduction, necessarily slow, simple and straightforward, and leading to further stages; ha (破), a breakdown of the previous action into more development and complexity; and kyu (急), a quickening of the rhythm leading to the climax” (p.4).
Immersion, is not a technique. It is attunement to being on a trajectory.
Theatrical events resemble algorithms. Not the corporate kind, but the anarchic, unstable kind. Actors offer input. The site intervenes. The audience parses. The result: a representational fugue that resolves only by dissolving its own logic. This fragile structure, sensory, social, and poetic, gives shape to the ideological tectonics beneath more stable forms: the document, the archive, the law.
So what becomes of immersion when the site is a virtual one? What happens to being there when “there” is distributed, pixelated, interpolated? What is the new pilgrimage across cloud servers and headsets? Is it still driven by desire?
My project, Ethereal Materials, doesn’t offer answers. It begins, humbly, in unknowing. I confess: I don’t know where the virtuality of the trajectory of performance leads us. I don’t know if performance survives the jump to the synthetic. But I want to follow the question. I want to test the floor beneath us.
Maybe that’s what performance is: a temporary floor. It appears beneath your feet just long enough to let you leap. Or stumble. Or listen.
If there is a purpose to these fragments that I am tentatively calling “shards” (reflective pieces of a broken mirror), it is to rebind experience. To find meaning and insight into the ontology of performance through the jo, ha, kyū in virtual architectures. To move. To see more. To be, fleetingly, together.
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References
Thornett, Lucy. “The Scenographic Space(s) of Augmented Reality.” Dramatic Architectures: Theatre and Performing Arts in Motion, CEAA, 2021, pp. 327–344.
Offner, Jean-Marc, Agnès Sander, and Paul Virilio. “For a Geography of Trajectories: An Interview with Paul Virilio.” Flux, no. 5, 1991, pp. 48–54.
Zeami. The Spirit of Noh. Translated by William Scott Wilson, Shambhala, 2013.
