meatS P A C E Theatre Company

Devisers' Note

MeatSPACE Theatre presents Mind The Lag, a multisensory performance piece that explores (dis)connection in the digital age, welcoming the dawning of a new era in theatre-making and performance techniques by blurring the origin of the live event.

Utilising international performance spaces and mediated images, a digital avatar is born out of cyberspace and into the meatspace. Can an ‘avatar’ achieve agency outside the computerised world? As the audience watches these avatars acquire ever more human processing power, will they escape the productivity the matrix demands, or will they discover agency to escape to the unknown?

New skin, new muscles, new limbs, a spine and a semi-functional digestive system are not the only things our avatars will discover as they explore captivity, consciousness, and connection.

Remember, stay true and be free. Meet you in the meatspace.

Above Video: a note on Composition from the Director

DOCUMENTATION of live encounter

Mind The Lag is a multisensory performance piece that explores (dis)connection in the digital age, welcoming the dawn of a new era in theatre-making and performance techniques by blurring the origin of the live event.  

Utilising international performance spaces and mediated images, a digital avatar is born out of cyberspace and into the meatspace. Can a digital avatar achieve agency outside the computerised world? As these avatars acquire ever more human processing power, are they able escape the productivity the matrix demands? Or can they acquire agency to escape to the unknown? 

I miss you.

I’ll meet you in the meat space.

In this fragment I explore the liveness of performance and lean into scenographic tools that arise from theatre’s liveness. We are in a time when a simulated reality dominates, and the blurred boundary of ‘what is theatre?’ moves drastically to the digital. In I miss you. I examine the elements of scenography that cannot be captured in playback. Eye contact. Physical Touch. Visual Noise. Movement. Olfactory. Aurality. The present moment.

I miss you.

by Laura Lounge

a fragment as part of the ScenoGANG: Spectacular! Spectacular! Festival

Interdisciplinary Practices, Scenography cluster

MFA Advanced Theatre Practice

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

Tutors: Dan Scott and Andreas Skourtis

Collaborators: Peiyu Huang and Antonietta Mazzei

Audience Reflection Contributors: Sophia Utria, Antonietta Mazzei, Lauren Stone-Symes, Kendra Miller, Dan Scott, Dana McMillian, Billie Harrison, Peiyu Huang, Gaurav Singh

Video Reflection

This is a compilation of unedited audio audience reflections. The video is an unedited excerpt from the performance. The video is not meant to capture the piece, but as documentation for the artist.

Audience Prompt: Because the main focus of this fragment is its ‘liveness’, please take a moment to video journal a reflection of any one of the meatspace elements.

Here are some reflections.

Olfactory

Scent and Memory.

Olfactory is the largest memory receptor for the brain. In my research in trying to match a scent with emotion, the only constant was that it took each person on a journey to an emotion. I then used it as part of my scenographic toolbox as an abstract tool for narrative.

GROUNDING BLEND

Lemon
Frankincense
Vetiver
Spanish Rosemary
Neroli

Strawberry

I am interested in scent as a storytelling tool, and also as a punchline. I was curious if I could create a common vocabulary for my audience with scent, to the extent that it was a punchline of a joke. I realized our cluster had already made our own classroom culture around the term “strawberry”. It is our safe word for proximity, so I chose to close I miss you. with that scent.

Artists in Space.

Performing Research

Royal Central School of Speech and Drama MA Advanced Theatre Practice2021

Linda van Egmond, Laura Lounge, Antonietta Mazzei

Puppetry Exploration

by Jock Maitland and Laura Lounge

A practice as research query. Not a performance.

What is the moment of puppet inception? When the puppeteer imagines it? When the score is written? When the audience witnesses it? What is the audience’s role in this creative forming and world building of the puppet? How can score writing help enhance this audience engagement? Who’s manipulating whom? How can puppetry be used as an extension of the self, and a metaphor for collective consciousness?

Below, a series of two minute puppets.

Prototype. Prototype. Prototype.

Above, a score drawn by Jock and devised by Jock and Laura. Interpretative puppetry exploration by Dominic Weatherby and Mari Katsuno.

Score collage by Jock Maitland, with collaborations listed (right). We invite you to pick one, and perhaps make a puppetry exploration of your own. Then invite others to interpret it through scoring the performance. Thus the creative chain moves on…