projects
Hamletmachine
(2000-2)
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This piece will be featured in the journal Müeller in America, published in December 2002 by the Castillo Theatre, New York.
An original audio performance of German playwright Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine is divided into segments and stored in fifteen pieces using straightforward digital editing. In an installation space, first created for the Fusion 2000 conference in Los Angeles, every shard is played back simultaneously, its continual loop in time unaffected by the movements of its visitors or the state of any other sound fragment. Several bright lamps at one end of the space cast their light on a long strip of sensors at waist height on the opposing wall. A visitor, who is by action or inaction part of the performance, reveals any or all of these dialogue fragments by casting a shadow on the sensors along the wall, as seen in Figure 4. [Wagmister.fig4.jpg, Fig. 4: A visitor to Hamletmachine experiments with the relationship between his body, shadow, and the piece's dialogue.] A simple relationship is constructed by a computer hidden from view: the less light on a sensor, the louder its dialogue fragment is played through the speakers in the space. The darkness of the shadow on a particular sensor controls the volume of its line at that moment without affecting the delivery itself: each sensor contains and reveals its segment of dialogue without quite allowing complete control. The different lengths of each loop ensure that the piece will almost never be the same twice.
Müller's play itself is Hamlet - the play, character, and the actor - ripped apart with German history and performed in pieces. This particular work further fragments it and presents the fragments simultaneously, with no one line or time privileged over another except by choice of the observer-participant. In some ways, it attempts what Jonathan Kalb describes about Robert Wilson's production of the same piece: "The text, in other words, was simultaneously obliterated and preserved as a monument, like the images in it of Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Marx, and like Hamlet, the Hamlet Actor and his drama." (Kalb 1998)
The text is both sheltered and shattered by the perfect preservation and repetition possible with digital technology, while its complementary capability for dynamic manipulation of media allows each experience to be a different collage of sound and meaning. Standing close to the strip of sensors and far from the lights, one observer-performer can only reveal a few shards of dialogue at a time, but the shadows are deep and therefore the volume of each segment is quite loud. If the person stands closer to the light, they cast a wide shadow across many sensors, revealing all fifteen fragments at once - a cacophony as if the entire play is being performed simultaneously. In between the extremes, ducking below the sensors and extending their hands into the space, or working with another person, the observer-participant can explore many other variations of the same text.
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