🫥Glitch Theatre
Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Remix Theatre > Glitch Theatre
The concept of glitch relies on the ‘failures’ in media, like record scratches or digital blips, : ‘The glitch is a point of intersection between the digital machine and its human user; a fringe at which technologies become more human and humans become more technological’. The point of failure can create interesting soundscapes, : ‘In this new music, the tools themselves have become the instruments, and the resulting sound is born of their use in ways unintended by their designers’. Similarly, software designers and social media companies do not intend their products to be used for the performance art that has been created from them, including the incorporation of points of failure as aesthetic choices.
Glitch Theatre as a form uses the dramaturgy of media failures, mistakes, or errors. Errors or failures in a medium are ‘glitches’ that become the signatures of that medium – video lag and audio drop-out are two stereotypical components of the experience of using Zoom, . ‘Digital stoppages and glitches have the capacity to rupture this [self-productive, infinite] aura and expose the medium’s constructedness and the labour that is habitually obscured by the aura of the digital’. Typically, constructing a performance means working to reduce the number of errors, but intentional placement of these errors situates the show in a specific medial setting, becoming a reference to an experience from the past.
Nosferatu: A 3-D Symphony of Horror combines techniques across a 100-year history of performance including digital glitches not only to reference horror genres as they have evolved alongside stage and screen, but to create a sense of vertigo in the audience. Theater in Quarantine famously started in Joshua William Gelb’s tiny NYC apartment closet, producing shows that require a skewed perspective from the flatness of digital video alongside challenging, creative choreography for a physically confined area. For Nosferatu, the team leaned on black and white silent movies which also used film’s flatness for their special effects, especially in movies like Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in which stage lighting could create unease with their rapidly changing shapes and shadows in relationship to the placement of people or set pieces. Added to this was the three-dimensional viewing option using red-blue lensed plastic glasses, popular first in the 1950s and 1960s for movies like The Blob. The false dimensionality on top of an enhanced video flatness simultaneously causes sensory unease while commenting on digital film’s malleability. Later in the show, TV static, stuttering from lost image frames, and warping like a poor video upload reference more eras of media and the failures that are their signature; this is a clever tour of media’s evolution, but more than that, it creates a sense of the vampire, a notoriously long-lived evil, being outside of time and creeping into human reality through any metaphysical tear, trapping its victims inside a tiny room in a tiny screen watched while the audience member is, preferably, wrapped up and alone in the dark.
Nosferatu used several glitches that are now, as Cascone suggested in his article on music, signatures of their forms: the tiny size of the closet leading to forced perspective, the filmic flatness allowing trompe l’oeil effects with set pieces, the intimacy of the small smartphone screen held close to the face increasing tension, the stuttering and shaking of cameras indicating something just out of sight, the digital static suggesting something breaking the story’s reality. These glitches are woven together with dramaturgical purpose in the narrative, conveying the horrors of an imperfect world that can become monstrous.
Last updated