🎨Collage Theatre

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Remix Theatre > Collage Theatre

Remixed music traditionally takes similar riffs, lyrics, and chord progressions and combines them into a new song that references, and updates, the prior music. This is a process similar to a collage in visual art, as ‘the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface’. In collage, there is a unification of intention, colour, and theme; the combined symbolism changes the audience perspective on each element in the work, with each element commenting on the placement of the others, leading to a unified interpretation from the viewer. In digital theatre, integrating virtual production tools not only expresses new, fantastical locations – these tools also help collage several layers of images and video on top of each other for specific effects.

Jared Mezzocchi’s Section 230 remixes live(streamed) actors over Zoom into an internet-based, internet-inspired children’s parable about an important US online speech law. At the time of the show’s livestream in 2022, Section 230 (the law) was up for renewal, reigniting a debate about radically uncensored freedom of speech versus algorithmically oppressive censorship from corporations. The performance of Section 230 was only 30 minutes and involved two child actors alongside one adult actor, commenting on the speed, innocence and unsophisticatedness of online communication in general. Across several fable-like scenes, the actors dealt with personal attacks and censorship issues on a public square message board.

Figure 17: A screenshot from Jared Mezzocchi’s Section 230 which feature livestreamed video, composited images, glimpses of the Zoom audience, and references to internet spaces.

Figure 18: A screenshot from Jared Mezzocchi’s Section 230 which feature livestreamed video, composited images, glimpses of the Zoom audience, and references to internet spaces.

The Zoom streams of the actors were framed with an image reminiscent of Web 1.0 media players, they changed costumes through face filters, and they sang songs. as: ‘both human and non-human agents in contemporary performance can be said to possess a dramatic potency that is readable in terms of human experience’. Non-human agents, in the case of Section 230, include the digital animations of items (like the aforementioned public square message board), costumes, and masks that were not physically present with the performers, but still informed the audience of the nature of their ‘location’ and ‘character’. ‘Both theatrical design and interface design are aimed at creating representations of worlds that are like reality, only different’, . By both designing the UX and referencing UX designs of old through a collage of images, Mezzocchi created a stage space that was both solidly the internet and simultaneously no specific online space. The layering of a range of internet-native media into a show about the internet showed the audience the world that we have collectively created, is a ‘non-place’, but which feels very much like a real performance space for the angels and devils of our conscience.