Live Art in the Digital Age, a Keynote Address delivered by Des McAnuff (Artistic Director, Stratford Shakespeare Festival) at Groundbreaking, ISPA's 25th June Congress, in Toronto, Canada on June 15, 2011. View Des McAnuff's biography.
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The world’s first use of film to tell a dramatic story—as opposed to documentary shots of trains pulling into railway stations or workers pouring out of factories at closing time—is generally agreed to be a twelve-minute western called The Great Train Robbery, made in 1903.

There are, however, other contenders from that same year, including, from Britain, A Daring Daylight Burglary, performed by members of the Sheffield Fire Brigade, and a three-minute chase film entitled Desperate Poaching Affray.

So never mind the Golden Age of Comedy: it seems that the defining genre of the early popular cinema was the heist movie.

The cinema was still relatively young—not in its infancy or perhaps even its adolescence, but certainly in its young adulthood—when the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin published his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Many of us read that essay as undergraduates or even in highschool.

In that visionary and hugely influential piece of writing, Benjamin argued that the technologies of the early twentieth century had wrought a radical change in how we experience and respond to the visual and performing arts.

For centuries, physical works of art such as paintings and sculptures had been created for kings, dukes and other wealthy and powerful patrons, and methods of giving those works wider exposure were extremely limited.

The ancient Greeks, for instance, had only two ways of reproducing art by technical means: founding and stamping. This meant that bronzes, terracottas and coins were the only kinds of works they could reproduce in quantity.

As a result, for much of human history, what Benjamin described as an “aura” of tradition, authority and exclusivity surrounded physical works of art. In his view, the value of such art was largely associated with its cult status, its function as a key element of ritual.

All this, of course, applied to art objects: material things like paintings, sculptures and even books, which for many centuries could be reproduced only by hand. The kinds of strictures Benjamin described have never applied in quite the same way to the performing arts, because those arts are embodied not in things but in experiences.

Unlike works in marble, bronze or paint, performances exist only while they are being shared between artists and audiences in the living moment.

That fact makes the performing arts inherently democratic, at least in theory.

Theatre, for instance (even though it originated in ritual and has often depended on private patronage), couldn’t have too great an aura of exclusivity, because it requires the presence of people in order to exist.

The work of the ancient Greek dramatists was seen by thousands at a sitting. Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences crammed into the public playhouses of their time. On any given afternoon in the age of Marlow, Shakespeare and Jonson, perhaps a tenth of the population of London might be at the theatre.

Thanks to such technological innovations as the woodcut, the printing press and lithography, material forms of art eventually became more widely accessible too. But in Benjamin’s analysis, it was the rise of photography, sound recording and cinematography—not just as technical novelties but as media for the creative imagination—that truly revolutionized our perceptions of the artist’s work.

The reproducible art photograph democratized an experience of seeing that had previously been limited to those who could, for instance, go to the Louvre and look at the Mona Lisa. And the photograph had none of that aura of history, authenticity and uniqueness that had traditionally surrounded an original painting or sculpture.

Meanwhile, the new medium of cinema demanded a hitherto unprecedented kind of performance: one that is given (not necessarily in narrative sequence) to a camera rather than to a human spectator. And with its close-ups and jump cuts, and its ability to render action in slow motion, film introduced audiences to a new kind of experience, vastly different from the ones they were accustomed to having in a theatre.

The reason I’m musing on all this at such length is that we are currently in the young adulthood of another transformative age: the age of digital reproduction. And it seems to me that this digital age is shaping a generation’s attitudes to art, just as the mechanical age did before it.

Digital technology has brought us a wealth of entertainment options undreamed of just a few decades ago. It enables us, for example, to reproduce sounds and images ad infinitum, without loss of quality (though audiophiles may grumble that vinyl on a turntable is still the only way to go) and to share them with vast numbers of people instantly.

From movies to music albums to TV shows, a vast array of cultural products, new and old, popular and obscure, is now easily and immediately available to anyone with an Internet connection.

Besides reproduction, today’s technology also makes possible purely digital creation. Animation artists can generate, in a computer, photo-realistic dinosaurs and aliens that give every appearance of living and breathing. Those artist-technicians can fashion convincing performances—even in 3D—out of nothing material at all.

The innovations of our time are every bit as revolutionary as those of a century ago.

So in what ways are they changing our society’s attitudes and expectations? Does our cultural future lie purely in the digital universe? As purveyors of the ancient arts of live performance, are our days numbered?

Well, I’m no Walter Benjamin, but I will share with you what thoughts and observations I have. I do see significant implications for those of us who work in this field—but they are not necessarily, as some of us may be inclined to fear, negative implications.

I think it’s obvious to us all that massive changes are taking place among those creative industries that had their origins in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Film audiences, for example, are already down between fifteen and twenty per cent this year, and continuing, it would appear, to move in that direction. The industry is struggling—in part, I am sure, because film is more and more being perceived as a disposable art form.

The process started with the videocassette, but digital technology has accelerated it. You no longer need go out to a movie theatre and sit with an audience of strangers; you can simply download a film to your computer and watch it whenever you want.

So moviegoing, as an outing, an occasion, has largely been supplanted by a kind of desultory experience that is more akin to watching TV. And TV is a medium so passive that its makers actually expect you to get up and leave the room during it, and so they tailor their product accordingly.

I don’t mean that film is no longer a worthwhile art form—after all, I’ve made films myself. But I do think that the shift from the movie palace to the computer screen has in some sense diminished the value of the product in the eyes of its primary consumers, the younger generation.

This generational shift in attitude to film as a medium has been exacerbated by changes in the technology not just of viewing movies but also of making them.

High-definition camcorders cost a few hundred dollars; any amateur filmmaker can post their work on YouTube and potentially have it viewed around the world. And if your aspirations are higher, you can make a feature-length film for thousands of dollars rather than millions.

The popular music industry I grew up with is also being democratized. The days when maybe five bands a year would get attention and a deal with a major label are long gone. There are hundreds of bands out there, fabulous bands, each with its base of Internet fans.

In short, modes of creative expression that were born in the age of mechanical reproduction are struggling to find their place in this new digital age. The old hierarchy of record labels, movie studios and TV networks has crumbled. In terms of mass culture, ours is—for the time being, at any rate—an anarchical world.

Meanwhile, I think something has happened to our notion of posterity.

For centuries, artists strove to ensure that their work would last into the future, beyond the span of their own lifetimes, touching more and more souls through the decades and centuries to come.

But our attitude to posterity began to shift during the 1940s, when the advent of the atomic bomb first raised the prospect that there might not be such a thing as centuries to come. From that point on, a shadow of uncertainty has hung over human life that we hadn’t known before.

Living in that shadow—cast nowadays not only by the bomb but by more recent worries over human-induced climate change—I think we started to re-examine the value of life itself. We started to think more in the Eastern sense, about living in the now. Perhaps posterity no longer mattered as much as immediacy: the intensity of the moment.

So what does this mean for people in the performing arts?

Well, immediacy is a defining characteristic of our work. We practise our craft in the eternal present, on the advancing edge of time. This is what has always distinguished live performance from other art forms, and this is why—perhaps paradoxically—I see it enjoying a resurgence in an age dominated by digital technology.

In a curious kind of way, live performance is a very digital-age kind of art. By definition, the digital universe is based ultimately on information. It’s all done, not with mirrors, but with numbers, which are pure information.

Likewise, actors and directors can take the pure information contained in the four-hundred-year-old words of a Shakespeare text and use them to create an experience that unfolds in real time, here and now.

And that same information can be used to create endlessly different versions of that experience, just as you can manipulate the pixels of a digital photograph to create a variety of different effects.

You can produce a classic text in countless different ways, each of which will have its own nuances of meaning, its own set of correspondences to the world in which we live.

This gives live performance an immediacy that far outstrips even the greatest products of mechanical reproduction. A film, for instance, is essentially a frozen art form: however many times you run it through the projector, it’s not going to change.

And the art of film is now old enough that we can see how many of its products must eventually become dated, so removed from us in time that we no longer feel the immediacy they once possessed.

Yes, there are some films that we rightly regard as classics, but are they necessarily timeless classics? Might not even Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz one day seem so remote from us that they become of interest more as artefacts than as art?

Many actors still look on the theatre as a stepping stone on their way to the real goal: the silver screen. This isn’t just because of the money: it’s also because of the notion that when you make a movie your art becomes immortal. But in all but a handful of cases, I think that’s an illusion. How many teenagers today have heard of such one-time stars as John Gilbert or Clara Bow? Posterity these days isn’t what it used to be.

It might make more sense for film actors to aspire to the theatre, because it is in that magic crucible that information contained in a long-dead playwright’s words can suddenly turn into dazzling life. Real life.

Film, for all its vaunted verisimilitude, can never be real in the way a live performance is real. A movie consists of shifting patterns of coloured light on a screen. The people who caused those patterns to appear are nowhere present, and have long since moved on to other things.

Even the greatest of movies is, by its nature, pure illusion, pure imitation. It’s Plato’s cave of shadows, with popcorn.  Film is dream.

Live theatre, though, is real. Yes, it’s a game of pretence, but the players are there, in the same room with us. The game will work only if we collude with them, if we agree to play our parts as they play theirs.

And while it makes not a whit of difference to the images of actors on a screen whether we’re there to watch them or not, our presence at a live performance affects the work being created; we quite literally help to shape its course.

However vigilant your stage manager, no two performances of the same play, the same ballet, the same opera can ever be exactly identical, because no collaboration between living actors and a living audience can ever be reproduced with mechanical fidelity. Every live performance is, and must be, a unique and original work of art.

Unlike the relatively anonymous act of going to the movies, theatregoing is a communal experience. When you enter a theatre auditorium, the house lights are bright enough for you to read your program and look around you at the rest of the audience.

In a thrust-stage configuration, such as we have in three of our four venues at Stratford, you’re actually facing many of your fellow patrons. There are intermissions, during which you might chat with people around you.

At the very least, it’s a social experience. At its most exalted, it becomes a sacred communion between artist and audience.

Nothing can compare to the sensation of sharing a real experience, a passage in your life, with an artist who is present in the flesh, and going through that same passage with you. Together, you experience the human soul in flight.

I realize that I don’t really need to tell you this; it should be an article of faith for those of us who work in the performing arts. But the point I’m coming to is that there is now an entire generation for whom the digital age is the only one they’ve ever known.

And for them, the experience of live performance can come as a revelation. It can make them gasp the way early movie audiences gasped when they saw a train apparently rushing toward them from the screen.

My experiences in recent years, not just at Stratford but also in New York and London and Toronto, and recently in Australia as well, have led me to conclude that, with a world’s worth of digital distraction available at our fingertips, live performance is becoming more desirable than ever before.

I sense among young people today a growing hunger for transcendent experience, for communion, that the products of technology by themselves aren’t able to satisfy.  Still, the reactions of young people to a performance are inevitably shaped by the aesthetics they’ve absorbed from film and electronic media, both of which are highly visual.

At Stratford, I always make a point of sitting in on our first student matinée performances so I can see for myself how they’re being received. What I’ve noticed is that the level of the students’ enthusiasm for a Shakespeare play has much to do with how the production looks.

Four-hundred-year-old language doesn’t seem to faze them, provided there is something contemporary or edgy about the visuals. If it doesn’t look stuffy, they can connect to it. For example, students just loved David Grindley’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream a couple of years ago, with the fairies as punks in leather and tattoos.

But I don’t necessarily just mean modern dress: young people can accept pumpkin pants the same way they can accept Lady Gaga’s armadillo shoes.

It has more to do with staging the piece in a way that’s somehow au courant and pertinent to their experience, a way that somehow acknowledges the fact that the performance is taking place in the present moment.

When people ask me what period I’m setting a production in, I always want to give the same answer: “I’m setting it now.” Because really, when else can this be taking place?

So whatever the actors happen to be wearing, the key for me is to make the event they’re taking part in—the performance—as immediate and up-to-date as possible. Our production of The Tempest last year was costumed in Jacobean styles, but it also used a lot of modern effects, both mechanical and digital.

Young people are accustomed to all the visual spectacle the modern cinema can provide—and in the case of The Tempest, they responded ecstatically to our use of technology to create magical effects on stage.

Those effects were perhaps somewhat humbler than the ones you’d get in a sci-fi movie today—but they were happening there and then, in real life, before the kids’ very eyes. And that gave them a massive impact.

For most of those students, attending that production would have been unlike anything they’d experienced before—and yet they reacted as if they’d come upon something they’d been yearning for. And without question they recognized the hypnotic wonder of a brilliant actor in the great Christopher Plummer.

I saw the same thing this year at a student matinée of Jesus Christ Superstar. This is a show that’s now more than forty years old—based on a story that’s nearly two thousand years old.

But the music of Superstar is at least somewhat akin to the music young people are used to hearing: it’s electric music. And our staging uses video projection and LED displays: elements that are familiar to anyone who has attended a rock concert or watched a music video.

I sat there and looked around me, and saw that the kids were riveted. There was a real recognition of the work: it wasn’t an alien experience to them. Yet at the same time, this was clearly not an experience they could get through their usual channels—sitting at home with the television or the computer, or even going to the cinema. And as I sat and watched them, I felt as if I were in the midst of a generation of people who had found their way home.

We are entering the age after mechanical reproduction, an age in which life itself is celebrated. This is certainly happening in the world of rock-and-roll, where increasingly the record album is seen not so much as an end in itself but as a means of promoting a band’s new music so that people will come to their live concerts.

I’m working on an theatre project called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, inspired by the album of that title by The Flaming Lips, an independent psychedelic band whose members I first met back in 2006.

In the five years I’ve known them, The Flaming Lips have been placing more and more emphasis on live concerts. As their manager explained to me, they can make more money by giving ten concerts than they can from an album—and this is now quite typical for rock bands across the board.

When I gave a presentation on the project to Warner Brothers, everybody from the head of A&R to the head of business affairs to the president of the label was in attendance. Ten years ago, that would never have happened. But record companies are looking at their business differently these days: they’re looking for new income streams, and they understand that the future to a great extent lies in live performance.

And as we advance further into that future, I’d be prepared to bet that the nature of live performance itself will change—though it would be reckless of me to attempt to prophesy exactly how.

Let me emphasize that: no one can predict the art of tomorrow. There’s no creative equivalent of a corporate strategic plan; ground-breaking developments in art are conceived not by focus groups or market surveys but by artists making things up as they go along.

Having said that, I just have to share an anecdote with you.

A certain theatre in the American Midwest was planning its season’s playbill. They decided to conduct a marketing survey, to find out what their audiences might like to see. They listed in the survey the plays they were considering, one of which was Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

When the survey results came in, the theatre staff were taken aback to find that a good sixty per cent of their audience had a hankering to see Happy Days—which normally doesn’t have quite as hot a box-office appeal as Waiting for Godot.

I don’t know how long it took for the penny to drop that the big drawing cards in their audiences’ minds weren’t Winnie and Willie but Richie and the Fonz.

That pretty well sums up what I think of marketing surveys. Marketing surveys can only tell you what audiences liked yesterday. And even then they don’t necessarily get it right.

Only artists can lead us to the art of tomorrow. As institutional and company leaders all we can do is to create forums and possibilities by giving artists freedom and resources.

But to get back to the future: without attempting to gaze into any crystal balls, I think it’s safe to say that if you want to attract young audiences and convince them of the pertinence of what you’re presenting, it helps to use the kinds of visual idioms with which they’re already familiar.

Visual storytelling is becoming more and more the norm, even in classical theatre, and it makes sense to use today’s technology to enhance that part of our power. My Flaming Lips project, for example, will use various forms of digital technology, such as computer-generated imagery and LED, just as our current production of Superstar does.

I don’t mean to say that live theatre should necessarily try to compete with Avatar, just that it shouldn’t shy away from stimulating all the senses. Shakespeare himself moved in just such a direction late in his career. Spectacle was very much a part of the equation when he wrote The Tempest, and we shouldn’t be afraid to follow his suit.

Talking of visual storytelling, those of you who have been following events at Stratford will know that in the last couple of years two of our productions, Caesar and Cleopatra and The Tempest, both starring Christopher Plummer, have been captured in high definition and screened in movie theatres across the country, as well as being shown on TV.

This is something we hadn’t done for quite a long time, and I’m proud and delighted that we now have enduring records of those great performances. So how does this square with what I’ve just been saying about movies in the digital age, and about posterity?

My answer is partly that these aren’t movies in the same sense that Avatar is a movie. They don’t try to create purely cinematic worlds; they’re quite clearly recordings of performances given on stage. And perhaps more importantly, I see them as an immensely valuable means to an important end.

They are, if you like, samplers of what we can do in Stratford. I said earlier that theatre used to be a stepping stone to film. To turn that around, a large part of the purpose of our movies is to create in people who see them the desire to come our theatres and experience the real thing: the unique thrill of live performance.

Far from being a threat to the continued existence of live performance, high-definition movies and other digital media can be our greatest ally, provided we are sufficiently innovative and imaginative in our thinking.

It is primarily on digital means that we must rely in order to connect with the generation that represents our future, and turn those young audiences on to the kind of work we do.

The speed with which information now travels has transformed our world even in the last decade. With Twitter, you can get vast numbers of people to congregate at short notice, whether it be for a flash mob or to start a revolution. The social and political implications are enormous, as are the opportunities for innovative marketing of the arts.

A great example is England’s theatre company, The Factory, which has mounted site-specific productions of Shakespeare and Chekhov directed by Tim Carroll, who did a production of Peter Pan for us last year. The company uses no newspapers, flyers or posters to advertise; in a stunning reversal of normal marketing wisdom, they actually keep the performance venue secret until shortly beforehand. They then use social media to announce where and when it will take place, and the audience follows.

Tim told us that thousands of people showed up for their final performance of Hamlet, at midnight outside Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

It’s essential to make imaginative use of today’s technology to propagate a passion for the performing arts—and to stimulate the kind of debate that’s rooted in that passion.

At Stratford, it was initially a little disconcerting for us when we began to realize that the first reviews of our work were no longer coming out in the morning papers the day after the official opening; they were being tweeted by kids during the intermission of the first preview.

But we soon realized that social media offered us an incredible opportunity. By facilitating exchanges among a community of interested parties, encouraging them to share their opinions, we could get young people to discover live theatre as a significant forum for ideas.

There’s always a danger, of course, that we won’t get thoughtful criticism, but the important thing is to create the conditions where it can arise.

In every era, artists have been the vanguard for change, raising the hard questions that a society must always ask itself if it is to pursue such goals of civilization as freedom, truth and justice.

The great Tyrone Guthrie once said that the theatre is the oldest social, moral and political platform in the Western world, and I firmly believe that live performance, and the debate that surrounds it, is one of our primary tools for change.

I saw this at first hand on a visit to the Soviet Union back in 1986. In one of the first stirrings of glasnost, a congress was being held in Moscow, attended by representatives of all six hundred and fifty state theatres from across the fifteen Soviet republics. Its aim was to wrest control of the theatres away from the Ministry of Culture and form a new creative union.

Theatre was consciously chosen as the focus for that initiative precisely because it is such an ephemeral art. Something similar had been tried once before, under Khrushchev, with the literary union. That initiative had failed, because it was relatively easy to suppress a movement focused on something as tangible as writing. It was a very dangerous thing to be caught with a forbidden manuscript—but it’s much more difficult to censor performing art. You have to arrest not only all the actors but also the whole audience.

That thrilling time led ultimately to the end of communism. And it was no accident that the theatre was at the forefront of that movement. One should never underestimate the power of live performance.

The aim of this congress is to explore the many meanings and implications of the phrase “ground-breaking.” As I said earlier, it would be foolish of me to try to guess—or worse, prescribe—ways in which the performing arts might break new ground in the years to come.

Much of the greatest and most potent art, in fact, springs from old ground, not new: the fertile soil of the classics that has simply been tilled in different ways and planted with fresh seeds of inspiration to see what new insights and ideas might spring up. The most daringly subversive theatre performance you could give in a repressive regime could well be of a play by Aeschylus or Shakespeare.

But whether it is reinventing an often-told tale or forging on into brand new territory, the art of performance is characterized above all by the unique power I have tried to describe: the power to bring together artists and audience in a communion of spirits, an intense experience shared in the present moment by people who are present together in the same place.

It is this communal, in-the-moment nature of live performance that made it so uniquely accessible in the age of purely manual reproduction.

It is this same quality that enabled it to survive the age of mechanical reproduction—though that age certainly took its toll as the new media of film, television and hi-fidelity sound recording drained audiences away from theatres and concert halls.

Now we live in a digital age, an age fast being inherited by a generation for whom unlimited access to the marvels of technology-based entertainment has always been merely a fact of life. And for that generation, in this revolutionary age, it is now the ancient art of live performance that seems truly ground-breaking.

One thing that has changed—and not for the better—since Walter Benjamin wrote his essay seventy-five years ago, is that the classics are now no longer routinely taught in our schools. Shakespeare, the greatest writer of any age, in any language, is no longer considered a fundamental part of a young person’s education, like learning how to read.

It is up to us, as people who have devoted our careers, and often our lives, to the performing arts, to ensure that the hunger that I have spoken of, the hunger among young people for the kind of profoundly meaningful experience that only live performance can provide, does not go unsatisfied because students have not been shown the way to the banquet.

We have a tendency in the theatre—and perhaps this is true of other performing arts as well—to move slowly. We like to digest new ideas before we rush to adopt them.

I’m talking here not just about our art, but about our promotion of it, our communication of it to the young people who are our future audiences.

We have to work harder as a community to get those people into our theatres, our opera houses, our concert halls, wherever live performance takes place.

Driven in large part by technology, the pace of change in our lives is accelerating, and there is a real danger that we will be too slow to awaken in young people the passion that in one way or another we all share in this room today.

I’ve seen kids today enraptured at sold-out rock concerts, the way many of us were in our own youth. The appetite for live performance is there—indeed, as I’ve tried to argue, it is perhaps greater than ever before. We simply have to get people turned on to what we do the same way they are turned on to contemporary music. We have to get them invested in what we’re doing, or what we are doing will be lost to time!

I believe to the bottom of my soul that the performing arts can become increasingly vital regardless of technological advances in the future that would numb our minds today. I believe that we hold in our hands art that is vital, exquisitely fragile and ultimately invaluable – actual life itself.

If there is any way in which I would challenge you to break new ground, it is this: seize every opportunity to stir up excitement about your work and the work of the artists you host, so that the generation for whom entertainment has always been digital may find its way home to the wondrous transforming world of live performance.

Thank you.