From: Hal Muskat Subject: CULTURE: Review/Coates Virtual Sho Date: Fri, 14 Feb 92 15:10:43 PST Thought your readers may be interested in the following review of a new George Coates performance in San Francisco. ---------- "Invisible Site - A Virtual Sho" Written & Directed by George Coates Text by A. Rimbaud, Euripides, W. Shakespeare & the 14th Dalai Lama Score by Mark Ream Lyrics by George Coates By Hal Muskat (c) Institute for Global Communications "Invisible Site, A Virtual Sho" is a complex and subtle combination of theater of your mind, theater of dreams and dreams of theater in real time. It is opera, layered sounds and multi-media. Possessing the best (intentions) of Terminator II, Roger The Rabbit and Beauty and The Beast which skillfully combine animation, computer graphics and live actors - *on film* and other, earlier efforts PLUS, audience use of 3-D glasses, this is truly awesome entertainment. Soon, it will be available in your living room. You may use your touch tone phone to call up your reality for the evening. Just chose the right 900 number, press 3, 4, 5 or 6 and leave the rest to elec- tronic wizards. Make no mistake here, Rimbaud et all could be considered quite redundant - mere stage props whose role and text exist to provide imaginative vehicles for one of the most ambitious, exciting and beautiful theater pieces I've ever seen presented. To be sure, "Invisible Site - A Virtual Sho" could have been staged without their historic and illusionary ramblings, yet their words provide a wonderful place to begin real life musical play within virtual reality and the context for a very strange "game." The fact that Coates' presentation takes place in a neo-Gothic cathedral adds drama and texture. The basic story - the message if you will - is secondary to the medium. It involves a woman wired to a data bank consisting of virtual reality possibilities. Your perfect vacation complete with menus and submenus at 1200 baud projected on the screen above. Her choice is a "singles rendezvous" on (Shakespeare's) Prospero's Island where she hopes to meet up with her Caliban. According to Coates, "They'll do a master-slave thing. . .electronic sex." Problems develop early in the vacation experience (trip?) when Rimbaud as hacker logs on and invades the operating software. Now this is a virus! Rimbaud's fantasy is the woman protagonist for the trip who he has caused to become instead of her desired Prospero, Euripides' Medea. Thanks Rimbaud. All she wants is a sex-slave - but she gets a hacked up vacation instead. Archetypal anarchy is accessed online. Most of the human action takes place on raises and lifts operating behind a back lit and perforated scrim developed especially for this effort. Combined and interacting with dynamic lighting effects on and of the actors which make them seem to appear and disappear, grow and shrink, - dream/trance like in and out of our and their reality - were the computer developed and projected images output in real time onto a 60' high screen in front and above us. Constantly changing representations were breathtaking and spellbinding. Deserts, lush rain forests - with rain! Burnt-out East Bay Hills, SF street & alley scenes, a seemingly very real auto crash halfway into the audience. Fingers and eyeballs followed actors. A black & white plaid cornucopia spiral appears with actors inside. Floating things, people and other weirdly defined phantasms continually danced in brilliant, pulsating and permutated colors. In one memorable scene, a glass block in which the Dali Lama is standing turns into an ice cube while milk rains on him. In others, he walks through fire and runs in space. One wished for better 3-D glasses for the stereophonic photoimaging and headphones for the synthesized almost holographic surround sound. Very mobile actors play with the computer imaging manipulated by programmers (wizards) working from a booth in the back of the house. Through their keyboards, with identical images on their screens, these sorcerers have total control over graphics manipulation. It isn't that film can't accomplish this, we have seen it. This is the first time it has been presented live. This is true magic. This is theater. OK, so I've always been partial to experimental theater and what has been referred to as "Off-Broadway." I saw all of Julian Beck's Living Theater Co.'s Paris productions between 66 & 69. I was transformed by their brand of exciting *experimental* entertainment and have always enjoyed this more "real" theater. I've grown and learned from my proximity to the San Francisco Mime Troupe over the years and have a basic understanding of the intercourse and possibilities of audience and theater. At an "arty" Parisian 1968 New Years party, tripping on my first LSD, (a rather pure liquid delicately dripped onto a cube of sugar), and after making love to a devil- costumed woman, I had the sublime distinction of playing with the interplay and interconnectedness of reality & fiction; sanity & insanity. More frame of reference. But, still not enough for what I witnessed last night. I was 10 years old staring in horror at Japanese created mutants in crude but sophisticated (for the antiquated times) nightmare producing films. But "A Virtual Sho" is all very real, on stage with seven live actors and except for the above, there's little cultural frame of reference on which to base this experience. The theater itself is within an old neo-Gothic styled cathedral, recently uncovered beneath layers of plaster and a false ceiling. Its weirdness is sober and an appropriate setting for Coates' visionary efforts and effects. It will get a lot more use. If we are to be taught anything from this production it is not so much "what" the potential for virtual reality in our life & entertainment could become although this is considerable. Rather, how we individually manage the process (and thus the outcome) of resolving contradictions inherent in the theme of control. How do we maintain, and at the same time, permit control to diminish in order to be open to new experiences and realities? We will all have to better manage our "virtual realities" and become more aware and appreciative of the hacker inside us all. -------------- "Invisible Site" is a pilot project of SMARTS - The Science Meets ART Society - a division of George Coates Performance Works. The SMARTS mission is to provide a link between emerging technology professionals and multimedia artists, and to develop a new model for artist/industry collaboration. GCPW accepts proposals from information industry companies and individuals to participate in SMARTS. "I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers,new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller. I! I called myself a magician, an angel, free drom all moral constraint. . . .I am sent back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms!" Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) April/August 1873 For information regarding tickets and group ticket sales: George Coates Performance Works 110 McAllister Street San Francisco, CA 94102 415.863.8520 Admin 415.863.4130 Box Office Hardware/Software information: Hardware Silicon Graphics Iris 4D/320VGX Model 60 workstation & software Espirit 4000G graphics projector Mac IIfx Computer DEC Station 5000/120 Software Photoshop by Adobe Systems Swivel 3-D by Macromind/Paracomp nTITLE by Xaos Tools Life Forms for the Apple Macintosh Computer by Kinetic Effects, Inc Life Forms for the Silicon Grphics Iris Computers by Kinetic Effects, Inc. custom software by GCPW electri artists.