Avatar Body Collision: enactments in distributed performance practices

Abstract

This article is an account and analysis of the work of Avatar Body Collision, a globally distributed, collaborative performance group who use free Internet chat room technologies to perform live across multiple stages and screens. The company’s organising metaphors refer to the distributed performance practices of cyberformance, a form of virtual theatre, in an attempt to encapsulate a phenomenon whose ontological, aesthetic and epistemological condition is contentious, and the hybrid offspring of at least two disciplines: the performing arts and computer technology. The author—a member of the company—locates this undisciplined subject within what Roland Barthes has termed an ‘epistemological slide’, as an emergent performance form. Attention focuses on the process and outcomes of the cyberscript, Screen save her, performed in May 2002 at the 12-12 Time Based Festival, Cardiff School of Arts, and at Riverside Studios, London. Comparison is made between avatar, cyborg and character enactments within the context of distributed performance practices. The primary conceptual framework for this production draws on the work of Murray Gell-Mann and complex adaptive theory. Analysis of spectator feedback from Screen save her ascribes key areas where spectator competencies were misjudged and where spectator expectations remediated the performance event. Additionally, the author speculates about the necessary conditions for developing new performance languages and wonders if a theatre stage is a malleable enough context for such endeavours.