PRE-PANDEMIA: RESEARCH AS LIVED EXPERIENCE

My collaborateur, Lisa Naugle of UCI Irvine, had heard of a virus that was beginning to insinuate itself in people's lives in early March (2020), and had been planning to visit me so that we might use a couple of days to research venues to stimulate our thinking and discussions about future collaborative work. We have worked together, collaborating for many years as we toured Europe each spring with Maestro Dinu Ghezzo, the mentor of us all.

Lisa called to ask if I was uncomfortable with her coming since there were these rumors of a serious outbreak of a new virus. Yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC had recently commented it was not something to be too concerned about---"not a major threat"--- and Nancy Pelosi was encouraging everyone to go to China Town. I remember several viruses from the past, including the Pandemic of 1968 which peaked in 1969 during the Woodstock Festival, so I was not worried that things were so serious that Lisa should change her plans to visit.

On the day she was scheduled to arrive, March 9th, the NYU School of Psychology was hosting Ted Coons' 90 Year Festschrift and I was scheduled to present. As I entered NYU's King Juan Carlos Center, the venue that was hosting Dr. Coons' Festschrift, I detected an air of concern among those who had traveled to be present to honor this great scholar, researcher, and educator.  Participants declined to shake hands and bumped elbows instead, although Ted, unfazed, continue to shake hands and hug former students and colleagues.

West Side Story (Spring 2020) Projection Amplifies Dramatic Tension

Lisa arrived during the evening of the Festchrift celebration, and we talked about our plans for using New York City as the backdrop for our researching performance resources to uncover new  ideas for collaboration. Of particular interest was the new multimedia production of West Side Story that had just opened. The production utilized techniques that we had explored ten years earlier, using media and projections to create an array of theatre effects in the NYU multimedia workshop IMPACT.  As a researcher pursuing phenomenology as my major mode of inquiry, I had proposed to Lisa that her visit would model Researching Lived Experience, the epic text by Max van Manen. My thought was that we might use her time in New York as a canvas to sketch ideas from our explorations that could lead to collaborative projects.

IMPACT Production: Image Echoes stretch sense of space

We were curious that techniques we had been exploring for more than ten years since 2007 were now finding their way to Broadway, including live video projection to intensify dramatic action and amplify the performance presence, adding a dimension of immediacy.  I had invented a term, "MoviOp" describing an opera using technology spontaneously to combine live and prepared projections, increasing the immediacy of the performance. This idea reaches back to Richard Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk.
Were Wagner alive today, he would undoubtedly be a film director in order to exert strict control over every artistic element.

ROTATION, multimedia opera

IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) was a summer workshop at NYU from 2007-2017 that along with collaborators Tom Beyer, Youngmi Ha, Chianan Yen, and Deborah Damast, I founded to initiate college level students to the emerging technologies that were revolutionizing the arts in ways that underscored collaboration, spontaneity and immediacy. Indeed, I often referred to this new sensibility as the theatre of immediacy. We utilized the concept of Arts Collectives from the 60s-70s to congregate students into collective groups utilizing different disciplines and backgrounds to collaborate by bringing together their unique talents and skills to create and share new work.

Dr. Lisa Naugle became a part of IMPACT as the Director of Dance and Movement not long after the workshop came into being. I had the honor of chairing her dissertation research committee at NYU, and we had begun collaborative projects with other colleagues as early as 1995, when we were using dial-up modems to connect with the Internet.

Tom Beyer, Media and Technical Collaborator

Projection of different angles enhance presence

IF TIME REMEMBERS, prepared video with live projections

A crucial figure in development of projection and sound techniques for this new Theatre of Immediacy and Distance Collaboration was Tom Beyer, Systems Engineer for Music and Performing Arts in NYU's Steinhardt School.  Tom served as one of the founders of IMPACT, but we had been collaborating on projects and productions for a number of years before IMPACT. He has collaborated with many artists over the years, and was one of Dinu Ghezzo's major collaborators on the many tours throughout Europe. I played a role in bringing Dinu Ghezzo to NYU, and when I became the Chair of the Department, I appointed Dinu as the Director of Music Composition. I give this background, because it was this milieu of extraordinary artists that led to many collaborations that were constantly breaking ground and exploring new frontiers, attracting new collaborators that eventually grew into an impressive informal network of individuals coming together to create new expressive forms. Perhaps our greatest weakness was that we were always in the moment, and the pressure of production prevented our pausing to take note of what we had created. My philosophy was to document everything we did to excess. We created so much data that the task of retrieving it and attempt to reflect on our journey was utterly over-whelming. We were always on to the next production, the next experiment.

As artists, we were internalizing and processing our experience: we were the embodiment of our research. Thus each successive year and collaboration built upon the previous experiments and provided the means to leap forward by continually adding to and evolving the previous concepts and techniques into new experiments. Every season of IMPACT was a new experiment,

ROTATION, multimedia opera multiple screens

evolving from the previous year as we discussed the structure and process for the new workshop.

We experimented with the simultaneous running of two independent videos while incorporating live projections of performances, multiple screens, enhanced directional sound, connecting independent spaces in simultaneous distance performances.

During these years, we introduced so many young students from around the world, that we discovered (during our debriefing of their experiences on the final day) that perhaps the most important outcome for the participants in this collaborative process was they had sustained a transformative life-changing experience.

Our creative research as lived experience project of March 7-9 concluded with attending the preview of a stunning new production of Sondheim's classic, COMPANY, that starred Patti Lupone, who brought down the house with "Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch." The production reversed the genders of the original production so that the major premise was of a woman in her 30s who couldn't commit to marriage.  I found this production more exciting and inspiring than the original 1970 production. This new production never happened. Shortly after Lisa returned to California on March 10th, Broadway went dark and the COV-19 PANDEMIC pummeled New York City into a lockdown.