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China Shanghai International Arts Festival 2002
Symposium
Art, technology and the new performer: the use of digital technology
in live performance
Monday 11 November to Saturday 16 November, 2003
Shanghai Theatre Academy
As part of Celebrate Australia, a showcase of Australia performing
arts presented at the China Shanghai International Arts Festival,
South Australia’s Flinders University Drama Centre convened
a week long symposium at the Shanghai Theatre Academy.
The symposium introduced Chinese performing arts practitioners, academics,
critics and students to Australian artists who were integrating live
performance with real-time digital technology.
The idea for the symposium built on the contacts made in 2000 when
Mary Moore’s Exile project, produced by Barry Plews and
Reckless Moments and featuring Japanese butoh artist Tomiko
Takai, performed in Shanghai.
The interest expressed by Professor Gu Yi’an and other members
of the Shanghai Theatre Academy led to a formal agreement for collaboration
between their staff and students and the staff and students of the
Flinders University Drama Centre.
The focus of this collaboration is new technologies in live performance,
especially those which enhance the expressive power of the performer.
At a series of meetings held in Shanghai between Professor Rong Guangrun,
Head of the Theatre Academy and Professor Julie Holledge, Director
of the Flinders University Drama Centre a detailed outline of the
symposium program was devised.
The Symposium Program
The program was divided into two parts: the open afternoon sessions
in which artists presented their research, and closed workshop sessions
held each morning for staff and students of the Shanghai Academy
and student participants from the Drama Centre at Flinders University.
The program provided an opportunity for students from the Shanghai
Theatre Academy to have direct contact with Australian artists and
students in a context of genuine intercultural exchange.
Artists Participating in the Symposium
Stelarc, a performance artist well known in Europe, the
US and Japan, showed how prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality
systems and the Internet can be used to explore alternate, intimate
and involuntary interfaces with the body.
Mary Moore, one of Australia’s leading theatre designers
presented aspects of her research into the framing of the performing
body in video and computer generated imagery. She referred to works
she has created for international performing arts festivals, in
particular Exile and
Masterkey. Together with video artist Richard Back she convened
a workshop with design staff and students from the Academy.
Wojciech Pisarek, a puppet
theatre director and digital artist demonstrated the results of
his research into the real-time performance of digital characters
with a Chinese language performance of Samuel Beckett’s
Come and Go, incorporating digital masks. Acting students
from the Academy performed the onstage characters and animated digital
character masks.
Hellen Sky and John McCormick,
co-founders of Company in Space, focused on their latest work in
real time motion capture and the creation of shared performance
space for live bodies and computer generated avatars. They performed
excerpts from a work premiering at the Melbourne Festival.
William Yang, photographer
and performance artists presented extracts from his celebrated ‘slide-show’
monologues which combined personal journeys with photographic images
projected through a computer controlled system. He included sequences
from his work which referred to the history of his extended family
who migrated from China to Northern Australia in the 1880’s.
The symposium was sponsored by the Australia-China Council, an initiative
of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
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