SNOW (2000)

Written, Directed and Designed by John Jesurun

SET DESCRIPTION;

INTERIOR: The audience sits within an enclosed center square area which measures 24ft.by 24ft.The room seats 75 people.The walls are 9 ft. high. Inside, the carpeted floor and walls are dark blue.. Four 9 by 12ft. screens, one above each wall slant downward at 45 degree angles toward the the audience. The audience enters through a passageway from the lobby. For the performance this passage folds into two doors that are closed and made flush with the walls of the viewing area. Two small windows in these doors occasionally reveal action on the outside as actors walk by. The audience is completely separated from the live action.

EXTERIOR:

Directly on the other side of the wall surrounding the audience area are four 6 ft. wide hallways which connect four rooms, each on one corner of the outside space. Each room is about 12 ft by 12 ft. All of the live action takes place within this outside space. Four live actors on radio microphones inhabit the halls and rooms during the performance. The action is transmitted to the screens in the center viewing area by 23 cameras placed throughout the acting space. The 23camera views as well as prerecorded material are in a constant state of live edit on the four screens.All live sound is transmitted to speakers inside the viewing area. A track is suspended from the outside wall of the viewing space. The computerized camera runs on this track and is able to circle the hallway almost completely. It’s movements along the track can be controlled by an operator in the control room but it also has the ability to move by itself according to who it is programmed to follow. The camera itself is programmed to recognize,focus,pan and tilt to view its subject.This camera entity represents the unseen fifth character in the piece. This character/camera (virtual actor) has a voice accompaniment. Room 1 is the control room which serves as the actual technical control room for the piece. Lights, sound, video computers and technicians are all in this room.This room also serves as the control room in the “play”. Room 2 is a dressing room,Room 3, a living room, Room 4, an office. Other action takes place in the hallways.

SNOW performed November 2000,Seattle Washington,Produced by the New City Theater,Seattle and Shatterhand. Support provided by Rockefeller MAP Funds,the BAM/Lucent Arts in Multimedia Program and the Flintridge Foundation

Technical director – Ben Geffen,Video Technical director-Tim Coulter,Virtual Actor Program Designer -Dan Lee,Entity track Design- Bill Ballou,Media Manager- Kelly Wilbur,Technical Coordinator,Lucent Project-Mike Taylor ACTORS-Valerie Charles, Peter Sorensen, Mary Ewald, Jojo Abaoag,Peter Crook. MUSIC by Black Beetle, Rebecca Moore

This work is a continuation of my exploration into the nature, content and impetus of languages including the spoken, electronic, visual and verbal. Intricate interrelationships seem to continually compound with the daily arrival of new technology. A real struggle between form and content from which emanate elaborate issues such as reproduction, privacy ,transfer,interpretation and ownership of content. It is a rich and confusing world of boundary-less communication brought about by the internet, satellite and microwave communication. Because of the human need for privacy these new ways of sending, receiving and intercepting information have expanded into new forms of encryption that stretch beyond government, laws or logic. These to me have a direct relation to our own internal human ways of interpreting, hiding and revealing layers of meaning.

Parts of my work have explored the idea of "points of view” —physical, verbal, emotional , spatial, intangible—as integral pieces of the perception of a reality. The human struggle to bring the outside to the inside and bring the inside to the outside is an ongoing process of detours, deceptions and discoveries in interpretation.There is a constant search for the relevant point of view.

Early on, this interest led me to the use of the camera. For me it became not only an extension of curious eyes but a participant and presence in itself. Organic to a camera’s particular charisma was a dispassionate omnipresence, an ability to see things from any point of view and an apparent inability to lie. Added to this was a reluctance to get emotionally involved or reveal anything about itself while implicating whomever fell under its gaze. All the reverse can also be true depending on the camera’s operator and subject.

Part of the impetus for the Virtual Actor comes from a “character” in my piece BLACK MARIA (1987). In this piece five synced film projections surround the audience including the ceiling. Every scene was shot from five points of view leaving the audience in the center of the visual presentation. The central character in this piece was represented by a voice which interacted with other characters and also narrated. The projections implied “what he saw” from five different angles. His presence was indicated only by the sound of his voice and the continually shifting visual point of view which he shared with us. His body was wherever the audience was.

Through Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Arts in Multimedia Program, I was able to work with two scientists at Lucent Technologies. It offered me an opportunity to continue to explore further the unique predicament of this “character.” Kit August had been working on computer programs that could help teach language. Dan Lee had been working with a version of a camera which could be "taught" certain reactions to what it "saw". It could recognize faces according to its program. In the context of my work, what and how it "saw" became a window into personality. Its way of learning and its mechanical characteristics became part of its "personality". The process involved the teaching of "where to look" and "who is who"- some of the most basic components of human interaction. I was interested in how we could implicate a unique presence in live space by introducing its point of view.

Eventually we tied an actor’s voice to the camera to complete its presence. It could interact with other live actors by looking at them and verbally engaging them in pre-scripted conversations. For me this was a very rudimentary way of building a character from the bottom up. In this process live actors themselves had to learn how to interact with this new participant. There is an intangible element brought about by the struggle to communicate between a live and virtual actor that tells its own story.

The virtual actor was developed for use in my piece SNOW (November 2000). The design of this piece physically integrates with its theme of concealment.

Walls completely encircle and separate the audience from four live actors. All the action is transmitted by 22 live video cameras and is viewed on screens. The “Virtual Actor” played an integral speaking "character" that was never seen although the audience could hear what it said and see what it saw. It’s speaking “point of view’’ moved around the set on a 90 ft.track. The object for me was not to control everything about the camera but to introduce another kind of element into the scenario that couldn’t be completely controlled. In early trials the camera at times seem to do what it wanted or become "confused", undecided. In these situations there was always an immediate sympathy for it among the cast and crew. ". To us it felt like an inexplicable, distant echo of an attempt at “free will.” For me there is a lot of potential in these moments of "confusion”. This is one of the areas I wish to explore further as well as teaching the "entity" enough information to make simple decisions based on what it "knows."

Certainly its creation influenced its character. It played a character/narrator who is overwhelmed by the dominance of his own point of view. He eventually renounces his part as narrator and steps out of the story.

As I wrote his lines, the character developed as a combination of obsessive, distracted, present and absent at the same time. It’s one wandering eye gave it the very human quality of being in a persistent state of wondering who it is and what it is doing there.

CONTENT: SNOW concerns what appears to be a major television and film studio churning out an endless series of programs for popular consumption. The television shows the company makes and broadcasts are in fact encrypted private messages sent for clients such as large companies and governments. All shows are constructed in code to conform with the client’s message. Compartmentalized, isolated code processors set up the equations. Another department translates them to random physical determinations. These are given to oblivious staff writers as required pieces of story content.They write the shows to formula without knowing that every word,color ,plot device, actor and sound is encoded to a specific meaning within a universe of increments. When the show is broadcast the designated receiver with the correct code can translate the show into the message. The content for the general public is the typical television format.Unknowingly the five characters ,an executive, a producer, a writer, an office intern (played by the virtual actor)and an actress struggle to conform to the subcontext the required format requires. Cricket, the studio’s most popular actress,known to company executives as “her master’s voice” finds that her voice and face are the axis of the entire encryption system. The “story” itself falls apart as the characters struggle to assume the role of narrator and take control.

TEXT EXCERPTS

SCENE 13. MURDER SCENE SHOOT

CAMERA POINT OF VIEW OF CRICKET STRANGLING IT. SHE LETS GO AND STEPS BACK.

CRICKET: (TO CAMERA)…its a certain kind of tenderness.Why have I let it come to this? God said to Abraham kill me a son .And I did. … I folded him into a cloud... I had to put him out of the way but I didn’t want to . I was happy when he became quiet and lay there still. I had to shut his electric eye forever. And now his love is blind. But everyone knows an eye never stops seeing. Did it really shut down or does it keep seeing afterwards?. Maybe he’s still looking at me with that dis-encrypted eye. (eating a sandwich) First he could just see me - now he can see thru me but I don’t care. Because now I don’t have to see him seeing me.

Now I can finally eat my lunch in peace.. Thank god, no more of that staring at me, creeping me out, asking questions, hanging around outside the door. He was everywhere. I couldn’t get rid of him .I couldn’t stand him looking at me. One less thing to worry about. My heart has turned black ,black, black from being watched watched, watched all, all,all the time, time ,time. Wouldn’t yours?

X (VOICE OF STRANGLED CHARACTER) : Mine hasn’t .

C: Your’s was black to begin with. The constant choreography of your eye was destroying me.

X: I’ve turned into a red skeleton flapping in the wind.

C: Killing you was the only thing I could do that really meant something and now I see that it means nothing at all because you meant nothing at all to me. But I didn’t realize that until after I killed you.

X: You only hurt the ones you love.

C: I don’t love you! What am I talking to you for anyway ? You’re not even real. I thought I just killed you.

X: You didn’t. You killed yourself.

C: I did not. This was a murder scene, not a suicide scene.

X: Its been changed.

C: Stop looking at me.

X: I can’t.

C: Then I’ll have to unplug you again.

X: No! Don’t!!

LEE(PRODUCER): ………..And fade out. Beautiful!

C: What an awful scene, please don’t tell me I have to do it again.

How could someone write such awful,idiotic thoughts? Shame on you Ballou!

BALLOU (WRITER):It wasn’t my idea.

L; It’s a psycho-thriller for the Japanese market.

C: Dubbed?

L: Subtitles.

C: Oh forget it. I don’t want to know.

SCENE 24. I THOUGHT I WAS SUPPOSED TO HIDE

CRICKET(ACTRESS), LEE(PRODUCER) AND KIT(EXECUTIVE) in Kit’s office.

KIT:……We’re having a little trouble with your interpretation of some of the lines.

CRICKET; My interpretation?

LEE: You’re invisible, transparent- we can see right through you.

C: Isn’t that what you always wanted from me? Transparency?

K: Yes, but now its too much. You haven’t hidden yourself well enough.

C: I hide myself perfectly inside every character you give me.

L: It’s not enough. You haven’t hidden yourself inside yourself well enough and that is what is necessary here.

K: You’re slipping. You’re putting too much emphasis on how you say things. It’s throwing the rhythm off. Sometimes it looks like you actually believe what you’re saying. That you really know what you’re talking about.

C: With these scripts? That’ll be the day.

L: And we don’t mind so much but other people do. You feel things too violently and deeply and so….

C: So what? It’s hard enough working without a director. And all those geeks constantly taking notes.

L: You know we never use directors. We don’t need them.They just confuse things. The coordinators and writers take care of everything. You’ve been here long enough to know that these things direct themselves.

K: As long as everyone involved doesn’t get too involved.

C: I’ve always done whatever you asked.

L: Always-

K: But truthfully you’ve become a freak.

L: A Halloween mask.

K: Casper the friendly ghost.

C: Boo!

K: You’ve moved past that natural mediocrity- you’ve gotten too good for your own good.

C: How would you know the difference ?

K: I was an actress once too you know.

C: You thought you were -I never did.

L: Then think of it from the audience’s point of view .You don’t know what it’s like having to watch you year after year.

C: You don’t know what it’s like. To be driven like a camel up the hill and down the hill day by day - a little pack mule dragging your shit along the cliff side trying not to slip off. And I am very good at it

K: But not so much anymore. You’re starting to slip and stumble off the path. Get off it before you get pushed off.

C: It’s that weird intern isn’t it. He’s been spying on me. What did he tell you?

L: It’s not the intern, it’s the endless list of weekly brain battering miniseries you’ve memorized backwards and forwards and forwards and backwards.The wave after wave of desolate desolation you send out on your face night after night.

K : Now, go and rearrange your face and get another job or don’t get one- you don’t need it

L: Get another life or just get a life.

K: You’ve been everything, now you can be anything. Or at least pretend to be.

L: We’re all pack mules delivering the message . Shows and actors come and go but the message forever stays and must be sent. It’s not the singer, it’s the song.

C: You’ve turned me into some kind of electronic airbag, a red hot chili pepper and I didn’t even know it. Going through my motions like an idiot puppet head.What an awful way to live. Emotion mining in the school of black memories!

L: Don’t be so dramatic.

K: Now where were we? You have one year left of your contract. Five more shows. It won’t be renewed. You’ve gotten away with murder and now it’s murder time so be grateful to get away without spilling a drop of blood in the blood bath.

C: What’s happening here?

L: Nothing is happening here.

K: Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mister Jones?

L: Stay away from that intern.

C: Why?

K: I knew a girl who tried to walk across a lake. Of course it was winter and all this was ice. It’s a terrible thing to do you know.

L: They say the lake is as big as the ocean.

K: I wonder if she knew about it?

L: Farewell my concubine.

C: Hiroshima mon amour.

PRESS

SEATTLE TIMES Arts & Entertainment : Tuesday, November 14, 2000

Theater

'Snow' is less about comprehending than viewing

By Misha Berson

Seattle Times theater critic

Has it really come to this? That life is something happening around us, while we're busy watching images of it flicker across the screen?

No, I am not referring to the current national election spectacle which has had Americans glued to their TV sets and computers even more than usual in recent days.

Theater review

"Snow," written and directed by John Jesurun. Produced by New City Theatre. Wednesday-Saturday through Dec. 2 at the First Christian Church, Seattle. $12-$15. 206-328-4683.

The ever more confusing relationship between actuality and virtual reality is also the subject of "Snow" by award-winning New York theater auteur John Jesurun. Commissioned by New City Theatre, this ingenious, droll but arid mind-game of a show is having its world premiere at Capitol Hill's First Christian Church through Dec. 2 - a run two weeks shorter than originally planned.

Like some of his previous multi-media explorations, Jesurun's "Snow" has a plot, characters and dialogue but an unorthodox relationship to its spectators.

Audience members are seated in a square, walled-off room at the center of a larger performance space designed by Jesurun . Meanwhile, the cast of "Snow" (four human beings, and a mobile robotic camera supplemented with a human voice) perform their roles out of immediate sight but close at hand, in a nearby hallway and in adjacent cubicles. Their actions are captured live on video cameras and relayed to the audience via four overhead screens.

Since Jesurun's fable about media run amok in a remote-control world is set in a TV studio, "Snow" is both a deconstruction of media voyeurism and an experience of it. We look on, from up close yet at a remove, as the aging TV movie star Cricket (Valerie Charles) learns she's a high-tech pawn of the information age and a victim of cyber- stalking.

Though the storyline has sinister intimations, "Snow" is less about comprehending than watching. Sometimes all four screens in the viewing room are showing the same thing. Or four different images may compete for your attention. Should you fix your gaze on Cricket as she performs a ludicrous scene from one of her movies? Or watch a goldfish swirling lazily in its bowl? Or ponder a mysterious figure walking down a corridor? Or glimpse the studio control room? Or does it matter?

"Jesurun wants us to look at how our minds have been conditioned, at how media have changed our perceptions of the world," wrote critic C. Carr of "Deep Sleep," an earlier piece by the director-writer.

A related examination appears to be going on here, along with a mordant critique of how our over-mediated culture has thoroughly co-opted actors. It's a running joke in "Snow" that Cricket's bosses are contemptuous of her alleged "talent" and arty pretensions. All they need is her physical form and voice, which by anatomical accident are perfect vehicles for the high-tech shadow business that is the studio's real scam.

"Snow" proceeds quite efficiently, given the demands of synchronizing 20 video cameras with the movements of the performers, the clever music by Black Beetle and Rebecca Moore, and other elements.

But with what one presumes is deliberate irony, Jesurun's mixed-media style is often the antithesis of slick. Some of the video images are grainy. The acting - by Charles as the bitchy Cricket, Mary Ewald and Peter Crook as stressed-out studio execs and Jose Abaoagas a blind screenwriter - tends to be strident, over the top.

And while an underlying theme is how the new-media marketplace renders language powerless at the altar of visual imagery, Jesurun gives all his characters (including that faceless robotic one, voiced by Peter Sorenson) much to say, in an eccentric patois of soap-opera lingo and pop-cult trivia, poetic and technical gobbledygook, and hard-boiled backstage banter.

That Jesurun has the originality and multitrack mind to conjure and question this ring of hyper-media hell is never in doubt. But there's an arty, downtown-New York flatness to his aesthetic that can make "Snow" more fun to theorize about later than to watch for 75 minutes. Like the tele-world it critiques, and implicates us in, it often feels like there's both more and less here than meets the naked eye.

BLUE ROOM, WHITE NOISE

John Jesurun's Intimate, Televised Theater

by Rebecca Brown/THE STRANGER/SEATTLE/ NOVEMBER,2000

Snow

YOU WALK INTO a room, maybe l5 by 20 feet. The walls are blue, and the ceiling, which slants upward to an opening that ought to be the sky, is blue. There's blue carpet on the floor, and the chairs, placed flush around the four walls of the room, are gray blue. You sit and you have to look up because above you, on the slanted ceiling, are four huge video screens, each with the same slowly swishing image of--a cloud? The Milky Way? A trail of smoke? A slide beneath a microscope? Snow? These images play over and over while you hear crickets churring around you. It seems peaceful, like a chapel, or a room full of Rothko paintings, or being outside in the South on a summer night. Like the Ann Hamilton room at the Henry Art Museum a few years back, or the Hair Chapel at the Henry's show of new Chinese art, this environment can put you off guard; this production, MacArthur Fellow John Jesurun's Snow, is as much installation art as theater.

Only after you're feeling all quiet and calm does the story begin. Into these peaceful images above you are spliced, like naughty subliminal ads, images of worker bees in an office looking at computer screens, doing some kind of surveillance: Those pretty screens you've been looking at have also been looking at you. Then you hear the voice of a not-very-good actress doing a generic 'foreign' accent. She's nattering some pretentious-sounding crap about smoke and cities and becoming what you are and perception and blah, blah, blah. You try to place her fake accent; then when you see her--a white woman in bad "Japanese" makeup, a grade-B Madame Butterfly--you're thinking, Jeez, a whole evening of this? At which point she rips off her wig, says she can't go on with this stupid role, and starts to remove her makeup. There's a camera in her makeup mirror so you see this woman's face very, very close up. She tugs and pulls at her skin. You feel oddly, uncomfortably intimate. You feel like a spy, and of course you are.

This is Cricket, a mediocre actress with a long career playing mediocre parts on television. Like the zillions of insects that provided the background sound in the blue chapel, this single human Cricket provides a different kind of white noise--the noise of TV snow--as the background of a strangely ominous, not-too-future world. Everything Cricket says, and the emotions she pretends to possess, have all been in the service of passing coded messages from someone--she never finds out who--to someone else, who remains just as mysterious.

Though uncomfortable with her work, Cricket would rather keep things as they are than risk change; this show is about being complicit. The night I attended, there were a few empty seats, so audience members spread out, then eventually lay on the floor to look up at the screens. It was oddly fitting that we were taking over what is traditionally the actor's place. The acting occurs in the hallways and rooms around this blue room; we cannot see the live performers, just the video relay (via 24 cameras) of what is going on a few feet behind or next to us, separated by a solid blue wall. After the show, the company invited us to view the eerie, Avengers-like bright pink and green and yellow hallways and rooms where the action that we saw on video took place.

Cricket is played with intelligence and verve by Valerie Charles, a New York-based performer who has worked with Jesurun for more that 15 years. There is one laugh-out-loud funny scene--sort of a Beckett does "Who's on first?" In the scene, Cricket and Kit (Mary Ewald) as "Conchita" and "the Czarina" have a catfight hissy fit about Rasputin ("I should never have let Rasputin in here with his rumba band!!"), Anna Karenina ("railroaded by her love of trains"), music, and sex.

Like a lot of installation work, this piece is more concept-driven than character-driven. The future world, Jesurun suggests, may be more about our usefulness to some big abstract system than about our lives as individuals with our own identities, stories, or hearts. Let's hope this artist-visionary isn't right.