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This is the first article in a new column on interdisciplinary/intermedia arts. Being a subject often set adrift in a semantic labyrinth, it seems appropriate to begin by examining the terminology. The words “interdisciplinary” and “intermedia” have become the new code words to describe a large and varied body of works that are fortunately still operating in a relatively undefined and essentially borderless territory. For lack of any other sufficiently broad descriptive classification these works have often been loosely labeled “Performance,” which is as good a term as any. Sometimes for the convenience of critics, curators, and/or audiences, these performance works are also called Postmodern Dance, New Theater and mostly recently Opera, thus placing them in an approachable and identifiable context.

The prefix inter means among, between, together, and also reciprocally — a mutual exchange. However discipline and media are not the same thing. A discipline is a “teaching” or training, or more generally an area of knowledge to be conveyed, a system of ideas, a mode of thought, a methodology. Media are the means and materials through which ideas are conveyed. Thus in contemporary terms one could define disciplines as information systems, and media as the transmitters. In the arts the distinction between the two often becomes unclear and breaks down.

Performance is pan-disciplinary. Video functions as both discipline and medium, making the issues surrounding it particularly complex. In this column I will discuss video, film, and audio as media within the context of performance. I will examine the ways new media and technologies have affected and changed the performance arts, and the prospects for the future — who is doing what and how, the resulting controversies, and creative possibilities.

Given that video as an art medium to be utilized in performance has been available for approximately twenty years, it has been successfully integrated theatrically and conceptually in relatively few performance works. One reason may be economic — a matter of resources and access. Or perhaps the radical innovations of the 1960s, in performance forms, structures, ideology, and methodology, in dance, theater, music, and visual arts, were necessary pre-requisites for interaction with the new medium of video as an art form and a technology that has altered the social, political, and cultural landscape at an ever-increasing rate. But how far have we come since video first showed its face on stage in the 1966 performance works of Robert Rauschenberg and Alex Hay in Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering, as part the now historic Experiments in Art and Technology events? The number of artists to use video innovatively in performance, with proficiency, intelligence, imagination, and the resources to do so, is far less than one might expect or hope.

A few recent performance works whose use of video meets that criteria merit examination — Bad Smells by choreographer Twyla Tharp, Obedience School by Laura Farabough, artistic director of Nightfire, and Hajj by writer/director Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines. Each artist uses it differently for different purposes and with dramatically different results. In both Tharp’s and Farabough’s pieces the media is part of the subject matter; thus, the visual presence of the technology on stage is an inherent part of the work’s form and content. Breuer, on the other hand, treats the technology as merely another image-making tool; thus, the mechanisms are invisible and the images created with them are an integral part of the metaphoric structure of the work. While Breuer’s approach is the most innovative as well as the most complex and sophisticated, all three artists succeed in their intentions.

The visual aesthetics of Tharp’s Bad Smells, as expressed by the costumes and make-up, are within a current vogue one might aptly dub “post-atomic, post-techno mutant barbarian” via The Road Warrior film, and perhaps Doris Lessing’s uncomfortably prophetic novel Memoirs of a Survivor. As the title suggests, Bad Smells metaphorically has a nasty odor. It evokes the stench of sweat and piss, disease and decay. The raggedly clad dancers menacingly bare their teeth, snarl and grin. They are threatening and threatened.

Dance, like film and video, deals first with time and motion. In Bad Smells, a video camera is attached to one of the dancers, binding them together in complicity, partners in a perfectly synchronized duet. The camera becomes a performer, an instrument of the choreography, a transmitter of images from the perspective of the performer’s body. The performer becomes a camera in motion, persistent and aggressive, moving amongst the other performers on a mirrored floor — sparring, taunting, hounding, pursuing, engaging, provoking, enticing, seducing.

What the camera sees is transmitted directly in real time — the split second of the electronic signal — on to a large projection screen. This is the most basic and direct use of video as on-the-spot reportage — a live camera projecting magnified images of the actual performance simultaneously with its occurrence. The intentions and implications are another matter, and Tharp’s messages are multiple.

Tharp sets up two parallel modes of information of equal weight and power. While mirroring each other, they are also pitted against each other in competition and contradiction. In spite of their simultaneity the live and the projected event are not the same. Something happens in the transference from one to the other. The performers and their video images battle each other for our attention, interfering with each other, and ultimately cancelling each other out. All information is neutralized. The images on the screen are gaudy, garish replicas, more like the inside of a rock disco club than the stinking, smoldering urban wasteland of starving survivors on stage. There is a gap in credibility between our two levels of perception. The Media lies and distorts, Tharp tells us. The ugly becomes beautiful. The unacceptable is mediated into acceptability, perhaps even desire. It is an intentionally irritating and disturbing work that both assaults and distances the audience, and finally becomes impossible to watch. That too is part of the content.

Obedience School, written, designed, and directed by Laura Farabough, is about power, control, and technology in our commodity obsessed, media-dominated culture. In this intelligently conceived and beautifully executed theater performance Farabough’s use of video operates solidly within the framework of media allusions. Actions and relationships are dictated by idealized standards of perfection and achievement, and externally determined states of desire induced by television and advertising. The two main characters are stereotypes — a Hollywood hero and heroine who function as collective cultural and sexual role models. He is a test pilot programmed for controlled efficiency and fearlessness. His wife is a high fashion model programmed to please, as image, product, and fantasy. They have “the right stuff.”

Farabough’s staging reverses real and recorded time, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. The tightly choreographed live action that describes the narrative is highly stylized, theatrical, “unreal,” dreamlike, and hypnotic. On the other hand video actions and images that simultaneously provide an internal commentary on the live action are naturalistic, realistic, comfortably and seductively familiar. The characters are introduced in repeating “commercials” in which the Model enticingly puts on red lipstick — Test Red, the latest color — and the Pilot takes his blood pressure, “checking out the system” — everything is “OK and Go!”

In the Domestic Bliss scene, while the performers simulate cooking hamburgers, eating, drinking, dancing, and engaging in sexual play, the video provides us with luscious “product shots” and “romance” in tight close-ups. Later when he sexually attacks her in the shower wearing a dog’s head, the video portrays footsteps on the stairs and her repeated screams from the shower in a manner that directly refers to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. When he maneuvers a toy plane on stage, we witness the “real thing” on TV courtesy of NASA and Edwards Air Force base footage.

Farabough uses the television image to translate and re-contextualize reality on its own terms. Four television monitors occupy the set, not as mechanisms to watch video images on, but as themselves — TV sets. She alludes directly to the forms and conventions of television and the power of the media and the photographic image in defining and manipulating our cultural, sexual, and personal roles and identities.

In the theatrical performance poem Hajj writer/director Lee Breuer combines both live and recorded video channeled through a complex switching system, with a live solo performance by Ruth Maleczech. He seamlessly integrates the video into the theatrical structure, creating images that function almost magically as memories, dreams, and reflections, projections of consciousness and a confrontation with the self.

Hajj means pilgrimage in Arabic, a journey taken once in a life. It is the journey itself, not the arrival in Mecca, that is the true goal. In this Mabou Mines’ production of Hajj, the pilgrimage takes place in a performer’s room, at a dressing table covered with cosmetics, in front of a triptych mirror. But this is no ordinary mirror, for like everything else in Hajj it functions as metaphor. It becomes a window into the mind and soul. Maleczech sits with her back to the audience, facing the mirror. She begins to make up her face. “I have nothing to hide,” she announces. Her pilgrimage and ours has begun. We are all performers who wear many faces in our lives. Her face is seen in the mirror in triplicate. Portrayed from three different angles by the hidden cameras above her, her face is reflected three more times in the video monitors in the top half of the two-way mirrors. The images change in relation to the text, her voice and actions. Sometimes her face appears eerily superimposed like a ghost image over a moving landscape, or over an old man — her father, the two faces melting into each other. A child resembling her stares back at her. The child is wearing the same scarf she has tied over her hair. Three generations, three phases in life, appear and disappear, fade in and out in the mirrors. At one point she “blows out” each mirror video image as if they were candles. The video images are so intricately interwoven that they are as inseparable as the text and the voice. They are the performer’s eyes looking back at us, faces in a mirror and a means of transport.

Hajj is the result of a collaborative effort — Breuer’s text, Maleczech’s remarkable performance, Craig Jones’s video production, Julie Archer’s set, and Chris Abajian’s music. It is an adventurous and inspired work, perhaps even an unprecedented one. It demonstrates what is possible given the vision and the necessary resources. It involves a level of technology not easily accessible, and it is the product of great perseverance on the part of the artists at great cost.

All three performance works deal with multiple levels of perception, synchronous time, non-linear narrative structures, complex layers of meaning and references, and a synthesis of multiple disciplines and media within the context of live performance.