Maria Lantin and I, with the help of some amazingly hardworking and talented students, gave an unusual performance this evening. It was, perhaps, an historical first: The first untethered virtual reality pas de deux dance performance for a live audience.
Our team had set out to do something a bit different, but high technology being what it is, we ended up revising our plans at the very last minute. In short, we improvised.
What astonished me was how good it felt to take the script off its rails, and thereby journey in real time into uncharted territory. Even as I was within the performance, enjoying the moment, somewhere in the back of my mind I was taking notes.
And now, as a result, I am feeling a whole new vocabulary. It is a vocabulary not based on creating a linear script and then enacting it, but rather on creating a sort of interactive “story creation” instrument, one that can be steered in real time, in the heat of performance, much as a jazz pianist steers the direction of a musical piece during the performance of the work itself.
Maybe we need to have these sorts of fortunate accidents more often. After all, the most important thing in art may very well be whatever manages to shake us out of our complacency, and thereby forces us to enter a new world of possibility.