VideoCabaret: Caught in the Crossfire Between Rock and TV

Deanne Taylor and Michael Hollingsworth are the heart of VideoCabaret, the pioneers who created a new form of performance that has the potential to educate as much as it entertains. With help from artists like Janet Burke, Chris Clifford, Bongo Kolycius, Keith Holding, and Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy, they created such classics as The Patty Rehearst Story (1976), Art vs. Art: Hummer for Mayor (1982), 2nd Nature (1990), 1984 (1979), and The History of the Village of Small Huts Parts I-VIII (1985-1994). They stacked television sets on top of each other long before anyone had ever heard of a video wall; they took hand-held cameras and choreographed them to music years before music videos came on the scene as the new saviour of the recording industry. They are, in short, part of a more experienced generation of media performance artists, whose wisdom and expertise is often ignored by the new, slick, cyberpunk artists who believe themselves to be inventing something new.

Listen to VideoCabaret.

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CyberStage: Where did the concept of a videocabaret come from?

Michael Hollingsworth: The term VideoCabaret was coined by Deanne. And one realized that the whole nature of theatre in Canada was so bereft that it was important to create form and probably the most intellectual theatre-form of the twenty-first century would be a videocabaret, so we named the company so it would become like the theatre-form. The whole concept of doing plays, unless the plays were outstanding, was phasing out. The purpose of theatre is to tap into the audience's central nervous system, and video is the greatest medium of all for doing that. It's an outstanding way of activating the whole theatrical medium.

CyberStage: Do you think this phasing out that you're talking about is part and parcel of the fact that things such as film and video and computer graphics are making us a more visual species?

MH: I find with a medium like television, that it does tap into your central nervous system -- not so much your eyes -- but that it changes the way you feel. After you change the way an audience feels, changing the way they think is quite easy, and there's not a more powerful medium that can do that than video.

CS: And it happens on a less than conscious level.

MH: Oh yes, it's quite subliminal. The person is not aware of it until it's made that point of transference. For the most part over the last 10 years, the videocabaret format has been developed almost exclusively by Deanne. But even with the plays like The History of the Village of Small Huts -- having worked thirty frames a second, we realized what we do in one second changes the whole nature of doing a play. The concept of doing a play in two acts is ridiculous. You can do it in a hundred and fifty scenes in two hours.

Deanne Taylor: The History Plays are quick, rapidly-edited, like film scenes or television. It came from Michael's work with integrating video and live actors.

MH: I find that [with] theatre artists, their fear of technology makes you sick. Actually technology is the essence of the extended senses that we all live in 24 hours a day -- whether we like it or not. When you get to the theatre, many theatre artists are barbaric. The sneering, the ultimate fear is something that's crazy. I find it's a very brown-rice 60s trip.

CS: Has the fear of technology in the arts community served to marginalize you?

MH: There are combinations that a manual operator cannot achieve no matter how many presets they have, that by activating a button on a keyboard you get lighting combinations. We do it now with a live operator, Mark Ryder, who runs the lights, an outstanding operator. But you can't get the combinations if you don't use a computerized lighting board. There are just things that could knock the eyes out that you can do only with a computer. For the most part, all the major theatres of 200 seats and up all use computerized systems. I don't think there's any fear of the technology with regard to that.

But once you get into the central nervous system you get a lot of paranoia because there's a level of manipulation, and we are not fully aware of what the real result of that manipulation is going to be, and there's a vulnerability that goes with that. The artists are on the line, in front of people, and only when it does [manipulate] do they realize what they've done. And the audience may perceive that, but it isn't where their intention looks. You get some real wild surprises about what you think is happening versus what is really happening. Fortunately, the young generation has been raised with video since day one and will actually not have any of that type of fear.

DT: Unfortunately, they are also raised with budgets for one-person shows. VideoCabaret started with a company of 20 people, not on the first night, but it grew to that rapidly. All of the shows required that many people; six, seven, eight on stage; many people on video; musicians; the video required one or two people; technicians backstage plus all the lights and a sound operator for the music. I mean, it was big. And that's something that we're having to remind the councils. That the forms of theatre that we invented were premised on an epic scale -- I don't mean compared to Miss Saigon.

Paradoxically, this is an aesthetic that is created out of a kind of hardship. I guess we were lucky to start in the days when there was more money than theatre groups. It was never an enormous amount of money, but it was enough to get us started in writing for large ideas, large forms. And we've never looked back on that, despite the way the salaries have shrunk over the 15 years. We had to drop the ensemble from eight to seven in the last show and that was very problematic.

CS: And that was purely financial?

DT: Purely financial, and a real attack on the density of the show, the scale of the show. But it had to be done. When I think of things like VideoCab in '76, we're standing on stage with cameras in our hands and TV monitors behind us and rock music creating multiple images on the screen with the cameras and putting in material that we shot beforehand. We were moving rock videos, that's what we were. We were live performance rock videos. And 15 years later there are whole channels devoted to the industry. That was just such an odd, remarkable image for people to encounter, walking into the first VideoCabaret, and two minutes later they can't do a television program without sitting people in front of monitors. It's permeated the culture. The point is, though, that we're not staying ahead of it or anything. We write scripts that couldn't be done unless you had invented a form in which you could [do them].

CS: How does technology constrain the work that you do? Do you find yourselves tailoring what you write to the technology, or go all out with the writing and deal with the what-ifs after?

DT: It's a dove-tailed concept. Michael puts it succinctly, you have to invent the form in order to invent the content.

MH: That speaks to the heart of VideoCabaret, the form is content, the content is form. And the biggest problem still now in theatre is [that] a director in charge of form will hopefully marry form and content, and most times it doesn't work at all. What's ironic in fact is that you get playwrights who can't even spell the word playwright that write plays, whatever that's supposed to be, and directors who have no ideas whatsoever on any kind of content or statement they want to make, all they're concerned with is stunts, diversions. Issues like dramatic line, character development, dramatic action, they're not interested. It's crazy. In a true sense, these playwrights and directors deserve each other. And it's some god-awful mess that bores an audience. They can't make it through the first act and out of courtesy do stay for the second act. That's what is happening in theatre. The great irony of people who have been raised on American television from day one is that they're almost brain dead, so it's no surprise that it's happening. But you do get some good sparks who actually are able to stimulate their intellect and imagination, who actually do something. And I think video technology is, for some people, one of the greatest tools ever invented.

DT: But there has to be some real writing behind it.

MH: You gotta have a reason. Eye candy is great, but you gotta give them the goods. That's one of the biggest problems -- why are you doing this? If you're going to pose questions, you have to answer them. Doing an exploration, as opposed answering a question -- it doesn't matter what the question could be -- you've got to answer it or, if you can't answer it, at least make the attempt to answer it. And that pose of being a provocateur -- to throw this out, throw that out -- okay, but so what? And that's where you get your demarcation between posers and artists. Artists will always answer the question.

CS: When you write a play for video what sense-shifts do you go through that you do not require when writing for -- and I don't even want to say this -- straight drama?

DT: There are two kinds of variations on two basic types of video integration which we've used. In one, the video is live, in the other it's mostly pre-produced. With the live video cameras being operated during the performance, pushed into the camera lens offstage or onstage, you can treat the whole production schedule as a pure theatre "thing." The video technology means that you have to involve extra people, extra stuff, and that you have to deal with equipment going down and all those bugs. But you've got live theatre dynamics to deal with at all times. That means two minutes before you go on you can still be cutting video bits, live bits, be saying do this part faster. You're working with live theatre dynamics.

When you produce a two-hour videotape to go with a two-hour live show, and you edit it together non-digitally -- which is the only technology we've ever been able to afford -- you're stuck. You're stuck with a tape. Now you can -- three or four or five or six times -- go back to the editing room and fix up a pretape with a whole new edit, edit the entire 20 minutes of that tape or get A/B rolls of a shorter length. You can't really speed up a scene or cut a piece out of it, you really need to do a hard tape edit. And usually what you do is you compromise. You leave the tape the way it is and try and punch up in the way the tape is being used in the live [performance]. You cover it rather than edit it. You stop it sooner or something (laughs). But it adds production time, experimental time, to the process of making a great show.

In the early days, the company was in residence for months and months at a time, doing performances on a very odd schedule. We'd work on the same show twice in one year, or three times in two years, and just keep working on it and working on it. Re-shoot the tapes, and re-score the music, and re-divide the live action until these quite large realms unto themselves were perfect. A whole music score, a whole video score, a whole live show. It produced some classics like 1984. They were good shows the first time up, and they were great shows the third time up. If we were to actually budget for that now, we'd be hard pressed to afford it -- with artists who are no longer in their twenties for one thing -- and just the basic fact that we already push the basic limits of the average show, which is rehearsed in three weeks. We rehearse for five. And to do a full video production you could add four weeks to that. You could add two more weeks to the rehearsal for fine tuning. You could add 15 years.