Resonance (Physics): The reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a neighbouring object.[1]
We’re a performance company trying to find a model that’s an adjacent and alternative model to the live performance … Really what we mean is: non-live works, which can have many different forms … The one thing that binds them is that they’re not live performance. They can be enacted without the presence of live bodies in space.[2]
Investigating potential ‘digital resonances’ of live performance has been a primary aim of the Agile Opera Project. Over the course of the project this resonance has been rendered variously: in versions of live performance that possess transportability, tourability, lightness; as ‘digiworks’—‘stand-alone artwork(s) that align with the themes and content of the original performance, but can be viewed, consumed and understood independently of [it]’ [3]; and as future-performance—something more complex, non-binary, an inter-permeation of live and non-live performance in forms still-emerging.
Through bringing the live into conversation with the nonlive—that relationship increasingly mediated by technology and digital ways and means— a deeper understanding of the nature and character of this field of performance possibility develops.
[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/resonance
[2] Tamara Saulwick, interview with Margaret Trail and Louise Godwin, November 13, 2017, unpublished transcript.
[3] “Digiworks”, Chamber Made, accessed 8 March, 2019, http://chambermade.org/programs/digiworks/
Photo credit: Pier Carthew