"Oil lamp to LCD" Leslie Weinberg  Adjunct Lecturer in Theater

by Dan Schnaidt

Dan Schnaidt talks with Leslie Weinberg about her use of new media for theater design

In your talk, “Oil lamp to LCD,” you showed recent examples of your use of digital technology as a theater designer. Did your acceptance of technology occur gradually, or was there a defining moment when computing became part of your practice?

Up to this point I was totally negative about computers because I thought they were for an elite and would increase class differences instead of bringing people together. My uncle convinced me otherwise. He argued that using computers should not be an isolated act, but should involve people as a group. He also convinced me that educators had a responsibility to involve people in the use of computers, especially through the public schools.

Was there a particular application that he showed you?

I don’t remember a particular application. He showed me an animation where objects morphed from one thing into another into another. When I came back to the States I became aware of new applications and it became a part of my own life, my own work.

Has using computers physically changed your work as a designer? For example, do you draw less?

Yes, I do draw less. But I slop paint around more than I used to. There are all kinds of technical things that I do on the computer that have to do with reproduction of existing materials that I used to do by hand. What I try to do is still incorporate the accidental effects of paint and gesture in my work in some manner.

This is a concern in relationship to my students because the one thing that I have always loved about drawing is that it forces me to see. And in teaching students to draw it forces them to see. My fear is that as they scan – and I am allowing them to do that – that they will stop seeing as well as they were forced to see in the past.

Do you think the ability to create compelling virtual environments will lead to productions that are less materially constructed? Or has it already done so?

It’s happening in theater. I saw a fabulous piece written by Susan Sontag last year. It was called Alice in Bed and was about Alice James. It involved a single actor doing a monologue surrounded by projection.

There were people who saw it with me who were not as excited as I was; they were missing the tactile experience of the object or the sense that they could have a tactile experience with the object. For me the light is tactile and the objects are the projection equipment. This kind of stuff is very exciting and has a tremendous amount of potential, but it happens slowly outside of New York.

At Wesleyan, you work primarily as a costume designer. In your recent professional work you became more deeply involved with problems of set and even lighting design. Is computer technology blurring traditional design boundaries, or has there always been this kind of overlap in the theater?

There is often that kind of overlap in the theater. My training is actually in puppet theater which has always been a kind of auteur world. One wants to have that kind of control in a puppet theater, of being involved in all aspects of the performance.

Your use digital puppets in the Edgar Allen Poe production was very forward-looking. What’s next?

Where I intend to go is to incorporate more video, and to bring the live performer [the puppeteer] out front more. The use of photographic materials is also something that I will explore more because of the direct [digital] relationship I can now have with the photograph. I used to do traditional photography, but it always felt extremely removed because I couldn’t muck around with the image in a way that felt completely satisfactory.

If it were easy to do, would you have any interest in creating computer-generated puppets that could interact on stage with human actors?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. One of my former students sent me information about Blue Sky Productions, a group that is doing digital puppetry that is performed in the moment – they can be manipulated in present time for an audience. Just as I like the wet paint look, I like what happens in the moment, I like the idea that these projections can be manipulated in present time for an audience.

Looking even farther ahead, can you see a Pinocchio-moment when digital puppets will become actors on stage as real as any other?

That’s a timely question since I’m working on a Pinocchio oratorio. I guess that for me the question really goes the other way. Is there a moment on stage when the actor is really present as the character she is portraying? And I have to say that that is very rare. It’s my experience that most actors on stage – and I’m sure there is a whole other school of theater that disagrees with me – but I experience the performer on stage to be just that, a performer acting a part. I don’t experience that character as necessarily real -- I experience that person, that actor, as an abstraction, so I am not entirely sure how to answer your question.

Well, can you see a digital puppet reaching the same level of abstraction as the actor?

Yes, I can see that happening, but it hasn’t happened yet. Actually I saw a puppet piece at the Henson Festival last Fall that approached this, video of an actor was projected onto a static puppet. It was a little as though video was given a third dimension.

I experience actors as information about something. That’s also how I experience puppets – as information about something. [In thinking about this issue I realized that I think puppets reach the same level of abstraction as actors all the time. These answers were really about a kind of virtual reality, and that, for some reason, causes me to think about prosaic reality.]

Alice In Bed is a good example of the intersection of theater and film. Are digital technologies accelerating this trend?

Yes, I think so. All of this stuff has been happening gradually. Since the 60s there has been all kinds of experimentation. Alice in Bed was one of the most overt piece I’ve seen in theater of technologically produced environment.

The projectors were in front of the performer – you saw the projectors and then you saw the performer. Instead of hiding the technology behind a screen, or in the fly, or the wings, it was all out front as part of what you are grappling with. Again, it’s the same relationship to the idea of performance I was just talking about where the virtual reality puppet is not necessarily real or perceived as real. It’s just a part of what we are experiencing, a carrier of information.

Do you have any anxiety about where this is leading, that theater might some day dissolve into a postmodern spray of pixels?

Yes, I think that I do. Part of the reason . . . let me talk about my teaching as an interesting way of getting at that. Costume design is in large part a research project. One does tremendous amounts of research and as the computer becomes the primary means of my students doing the research, I have come to incorporate a new kind of involvement with material. Design used to be a paper project – that’s the way I was taught – it was done on big old sheets of watercolor paper with gouache. And it didn’t happen in any kind of three-dimensional reality. Which is completely wrongheaded as far as I’m now concerned because the thing we are working toward, a costume of some sort, is a three dimensional thing.

So now I am having my students do a tremendous amount of three-dimensional work, learning how to use fabric and create three three-dimensional objects. As a response to whether it will all disintegrate into pixels, I have incorporated more three dimensional material manipulation into my coursework.

And the same thing has happened with my performance work. In the Edgar Allen Poe performance, I bring all the shadow people and puppets out in front of the screen so we see the material reality of the human being, as a performer, not as a character, but as a performer in a way we did not see before.

Do the students work back and forth between computer screen and materials?

No.

When will that happen?

I don’t know. I don’t know how to do that myself, actually. I suppose one does it with 3-D programs, which I don’t use in any of my work, in part out of resistance to the Hollywood aesthetic of trying to make it look real. My husband is working with a Hollywood designer who’s latest job is to remove the acne, frame-by-frame, from an unknown actor’s face . It seems so completely backward to me in terms of what’s real and what’s not real. We can’t see the acne, but we have to experience the 3-D object as completely real? You know, Toy Story.