Playing with space

My most recent foray into the Body, Space, Technology journal found me reading the article found by following this link:
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol04/index.html
to the article “Space Rules: Techno-Nomad Theatre” by Petra Kuppers (Performance Studies, Bryant College).
The article discusses an experimental performance the author attended in which the use of machinery, and the interaction of humans and machines, served to engage the audience is participants in a theatrical event. The use of machines and the unconventional use of the theatre space disoriented the audience at first, then ultimately created an overwhelming sense of curiosity in the crowd to explore their unusual surroundings.
This created a space in which the audience members experienced a “play,” or ludus, world. Here I am reminded of a class I took several years ago with Nan Smithner entitlted Creative Play and the Arts. What Kuppers called “nomadic”-“the playful mode of being in thought” we referred to as simply “play.” The performance experience detailed here plays upon audience expectations, and leads them to explore a totally new ritual of theatre (if we can agree that theatre in itself is a ritual act, just as the act of play, in whichever of its incarnations it is experienced, is also a ritual experience). Thus, this playing on audience expectations of a theatre world is in part successful because there are expectations of a theatre performance, and these are in part due to society’s acceptance of the ritual of theatre productions.
All that said, the performance here successfully used machinery to create an alternate world, a “play” world, in which the audience becomes lost in the “flow” of the experience. They, through their play, become active creators of the experience as they interact with the machinery, and through this, the human and mechanic parts of the experience extend toward each other. The performance experience becomes then, as Kuppers calls it “a non-divisionary relation between human, metal, and space.”
In response to Barbara Rose Haum’s comments, think the implications of this for our I2 project are very cool. The interaction of body and space (in our case, vast space) through technology has the potential to orient and disorient both performers and audience in new and unusual ways. The complications of this are only made difficult through the limits of our imaginations. The potential for us to create a space that is simultaneously both virtual and literal within which to play, and to invite the audience to suspend their disbelief long enough to join us is very exciting.