Narcissus in the Virtual Pond
Wayfinding: Spotlights > The Performers' Experience > Narcissus in the Virtual Pond
Seeing and hearing the other performers onstage can provide some emotional feedback to the performer. One group, Fake Friends, also used a filmic technique called a vanity monitor, which allows the performers to give themselves feedback on their performance, like using a mirror.
on her work with mediatised theatre company Fake Friends during 2020 and 2021, which involved the adoption of a ‘vanity monitor’ so the performers could modulate their acting to camera. The vanity monitor (or ‘confidence’ or ‘comfort’ monitor) as traditionally used in television and film prior to the pandemic; it can be any kind of monitor, and helps the performer navigate what they are doing in relation to the camera. This is something stage actors rarely, traditionally, worry about, as stage directors usually tell their cast where to stand and when to move. With a vanity monitor, though, ‘there’s this idea that you’re not supposed to create and edit simultaneously. It feels like a conflict, or that you’re in conflict with yourself, as an actor, you have the means to edit yourself’. Using this tool can act like biofeedback. , because of their work as a group with the vanity monitor, they had reshaped their approach to performing: ‘We’re present to each other when we make work that we share digitally, but it’s crucial for some of that the audience is absent, I think – that we’ve conceived of the work in conditions of absence’.
over the doubling or splitting of the performer through the use of video screens: ‘The mediated screens in live performance are both the opaque border of the representable object, and the site wherein and upon which the subject places its phantasmic projections, while seeing itself see itself. The televisual screen determines the split of the subject and becomes the trap for the gaze of the subject apprehending its doubling’. The extent of pandemic-era video conferencing, with it’s small self-video windows, has led to an increase in self-image difficulty among many, .
Some experimented with the option of turning the self-view in Zoom off –, who writes that ‘I cannot quite overcome the idea of what other participants might be seeing of me when I choose not to see myself. Zoom compromises, by its very nature and its technology, the spontaneity of the live encounter’. This doubling of the self and the self-consciousness it triggers require the ability to objectify yourself from a distance, which is a skill that performers can develop; it is in line with Stanislavsky’s , ‘in which “self-control” is deemed to be a prerequisite for crafting a performance’. , based on both their first wave digital theatre creations and pandemic-era experiments:
With the exception of looking in a mirror, we never observe ourselves interacting with others, but doing so on the Telepresence Stage reinforces our sense of self and responsibility for our actions. We directly witness ourselves interacting with others, making choices and acting upon them, while simultaneously seeing ourselves as others see us. Being doubled and witnessing ourselves outside ourselves provides both an uncanny and an existential experience.
In Stanislavsky’s method, and similar methods, the actor’s self-control mentioned above allows them to develop the character’s proprioception of physical and emotional self, of their scene partner, and of the narrative world; in this discussion, theatre makers have expressed some concern that the addition of a digital screen providing visual feedback of the Self would be too distracting to the performance, but Fake Friend’s vanity monitor practice demonstrates that the disembodied reflection of the self, inside the screen/narrative world, can be a similarly useful acting tool.
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