MENE, TEKEL, PERES. W.
Staying in to play
My Voice in Your Head
My Voice in Your Head' by Edward Dorrian and Sally
Morfill, with Alex Schady, 07|07|02 20|09|02
'Like the pictures in a film, epic theatre moves
in spurts. Its basic form is that of the shock with which the single,
well-defined situations of the play collide. The songs, the captions,
the lifeless conventions set off one situation after another. This
brings about intervals which, if anything, impair the illusion of
the audience and paralyze its readiness for empathy. These intervals
are reserved for the spectators' critical reaction to the
actions of the players and to the way in which they are presented.
As to the manner of presentation, the actor's task in the epic theatre
is to demonstrate through his acting that he is cool and relaxed.
He too has hardly any use for empathy. For this kind of acting the
'player' of the dramatic theatre is not always fully prepared. Perhaps
the most open-minded approach to epic theatre is to think of it
in terms of 'putting on a show'.
Benjamin, What Is Epic Theatre?
My Voice in Your Head made
simple use of the architecture of a browser window. The user navigated
through a series of linked pages displaying a frame by frame video
sequence. This sequence showed an actor hearing and subsequently
reciting the lines of a story. Each web page contained a single
video frame and each page title displayed a full sentence from the
same story. Reviewing the full sequence of page titles via a browsers
History function made apparent the text of a whole episode.
This work was the second
collaboration between Edward Dorrian and Sally Morfill following
Valse, a video piece shown earlier in 2002 as part of Silence and
Darkness at Outline, Amsterdam.
For more information read
the My Voice
in Your Head press release.