In Dixon’s passage on performance and media, he contrasts the diametric views of Phelan and Auslander – Phelan who says that the “performance’s life is in the present” and Auslander who says that there are no clear-cut distinctions between live and mediatized performance and that the two can blend together to create the performance space. As the reader, Phelan’s view at first seemed too conservative. I thought – why does media have to interfere with the presence of live performance? Why can the two not coexist? But after viewing House/Divided at BAM yesterday, I better understand how the nuance of “liveness” can be lost with the integration of media, which detracts from the real and confrontational presence of simply thinking, breathing, responsive humans.
The show, which overlays John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath over the story of the modern day foreclosure crisis, attempts to blend live performance with digitized forms to show the intersection of the past and present and find a common theme. The financial disparities of both times create helplessness for those who are forced to give up their homes and sense of security. The Joads are a family in post-depression Oklahoma who are forced to abandon their home after the disaster of the Dust Bowl leaves them poverty-stricken. The “modern-day” characters represent wall-street brokers and foreclosure agents dealing with today’s mortgage crisis behind the scenes.
Props and media, however, were heavily integrated to create a complicated, at times overwhelming, experience. A house served as both a setting for Joad family in the early 1930s and the backdrop for an overlay of images: imitating the façade of a house, a billow of storm clouds, and magnified faces and ominous-looking scenes. Meanwhile, in the “present-time” storyline, large overhanging screens flash conveyor belts of numbers and display images of faces, and occasionally documentary-like footage of interviews with real people personally involved/affected someway by foreclosure. Meanwhile, media in the form of sounds was present throughout, as telephone calls blared throughout the auditorium and digit
