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Production History

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SYNOPSIS:

This performance research project - Passion, Pulse, and Power - investigates ways of creating theatre experiences that combine the latest interactive technology with body, voice and music. Passion Pulse, and Power has been designed explicitly as a first stage towards the production I Sing the Body Electric (scheduled for public performance in June 2012). The objective of this production is to create a contemporary theatrical experience of the Don Juan myth in a collage of musical, literary, poetic and filmic sources, exploring seduction in all its modern forms. And what, today, is more seductive than the latest technology?

The Don Juan legend is a fellow myth to the Faust legend, which has been the font for three recent Free Theatre productions – including the highly acclaimed Doctor Faustus (Platform Festival, Christchurch 2010) and the award-winning Faust Chroma (Christchurch, Paulmerston North, Dunedin and Wellington 2008-2009). At the centre of the Don Juan legend (as it was also with Faust) is the concept of "seduction." This current strand of exploration considers what seduction meant in the past in relation to what it means now.

Jean Baudrillard argues (in Fatal Strategies) that postmodern consumer society is based on the idea of seduction and, as in the old myths, this could lead to our doom. According to Baudrillard, our seduction (or what he calls "our perversion"): "lies in this, that we never desire the real event, but its spectacle, never things, but their sign" (76). We may be like Don Juan, who is only interested in the process of seduction, never in the actual possession or love of the women he pursues. But Baudrillard also includes the desire for change into this argument: "change must also seduce us" or "in order for the revolution to come it has to seduce us" (76).

This is the irony in which we find ourselves: we have "made irony a Mephistophelian form," as Baudrillard says: "The necessity of irony, like that of pleasure, is part of the necessity of Evil" (81). In this light, Don Juan cannot only be seen as a "revolutionist" (as Shaw put it), but also as a thoroughly postmodern character whose singular pursuit of pleasure must by necessity end in the hell of his own making. The questions we are asking in the pursuit of our own spectacle making are philosophical, moral, aesthetic and at the same time self-referential. We explore the idea of theatre and spectacle making through making the theatre and spectacle in question, and we make our world of simulation into the object of our artistic simulation and our creative inquiry.

Passion, Pulse, and Power represents Free Theatre's ongoing investment in integrating technology into our creative explorations – in particular expanding on the idea of performance in an intermedial environment and furthering the reconfiguration of actor training for the new media: "digital acting."

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