Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
Touching Space
• PaR (DVD and portfolio)
A transnational piece, virtually linking London and Mumbai, and exploring theatre and mathematics. The Outcomes is a video installation, using holographic video technology, exhibited at Royal Academy of Arts at GSK Contemporary.
300 word statement - Information about the research process and/ or content
This PaR project extended a collaboration (on Complicité’s A Disappearing Number) between Catherine Alexander (theatre deviser-director) and Victoria Gould (mathematician) which explored possible relations between theatre and maths. However, this project also involved situating in the same (virtual) space, students separated in geographical (actual) space, by means of a new holographic video technology. The research inquiry was thus both dramaturgical - exploring consonances between maths and theatre - and logistical - in respect of making a piece of theatre within the capacities and constraints of the technologies.
A primary research question is: ‘what are the resonances between theatre and mathematics in respect of both imaginative and logical thinking in a structured process?’. But in using holographic video technology to bring international collaborators together to perform in virtual space, an additional question arises: ‘can a mathematical-dramaturgical formula for devising be created which leaves space for other unknown participants to fill, such that an equation might be (virtually) completed?’.
Isolated from each other, the parallel student groups (respectively at St Xavier’s college, Mumbai, and the Ashmole School, London) worked from identical devising and mathematical propositions. Using green screen technology, their work was filmed and the results were edited at Ealing Studios to create a seamless virtual performance. This was the first non-commercial use of the holopod / video hologram technology.
Touching Space’was co-produced by Complicite and the Royal Academy of Arts, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline (£K100) and supported by Activ8-3D and Metfilm in Ealing. The outcome, presented in the form of a video installation at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2009 as part of the GSK Contemporaries exhibition, was viewed by 15,000 people. It is submitted here as a DVD record (inadequate in that it flattens the space of this attempt at holographic 3-dimensionality) and related documentation.
