Counter Magic
On the world premiere of Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s play «Sorcerer
By Thomas Oberender
After attending a performance of Ed Atkins’ poetry in New York two years ago and the accompanying exhibition «I like to spit now» with new CGI video works by the artist, the critic Emily Watlington wrote: «If you take the CGI out of Atkins’ work, you’re still left with the poetry - which may actually be Atkins’ true medium». This is a bittersweet compliment for a visual artist whose CGI video works, in particular, have been exhibited in the world’s most important museums. But there is a kernel of truth in the remark, for Atkins is also a brilliant writer. Alongside many of his film projects, he has produced experimental narrative works such as ‘Old Food’, ‘A Primer for Cadavers’, ‘A Seer Reader’ and the play ‘Sorcerer’, which was recently published in book form by London-based Prototype.
Atkins has lived in Copenhagen for several years, and «Sorcerer» premiered there in March last year at the Revolver Theatre. The three-person play is a collaboration between Atkins and American writer Steven Zultanski, with whom he also co-directed and designed the set. At first glance, the set looked like a classic set for a social realist play. A replica of a newly built apartment stands on a flat platform in the hall-like theatre hall. The studio looks sober and clear, like a showroom in a furniture store.
There is a kitchenette in the background, a kitchen table with a chair and a laptop in front of it, a sofa and armchairs around a coffee table in the foreground, two floor lamps next to it, a television on the floor and a large screen at the back. There is a coat rack by the front door, everything looks aseptic and functional, and it is hard to tell if things are old or new. There is a bunch of keys on the tabletop, but nothing else to suggest anything personal about the person who lives here. The only unusual features are the pipes and radiators that run along the outer edges of the plinth, forming a free-standing frame for the room, but at the same time reminding us that the walls in front of which they are normally mounted have been removed and the closed world of this apartment is open to the gaze of the outside world.
The one-hour premiere of «Sorcerer» was divided into two parts. The first depicts an encounter between three friends, the second a choreography without words. The actors Lotte Andersen, Peter Christoffersen and Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen play characters who, as in Handke’s «Ritt durch den Bodensee», bear the names of actors - in the case of «Sorcerer», they are their own. However, the piece is not the result of their improvisation or rehearsal work; the names merely indicate that these characters refer to a reality that is linked to the medium itself and, if you look for its source, always refers to people playing people.
Atkins and Zultanski recorded conversations with their friends in private meetings over many months during the lockdown period of the coronavirus pandemic. «Sorcerer is not a piece about the pandemic, but a composition of more intimate conversations between people who were locked up with themselves and their introspections. The subjects of their conversations include their habits of dressing and undressing, preparing a black fried egg or trying to take their own eyes out of their heads. They speak softly and their attention is focused not on the room but on themselves and each other.
In the classical sense, the piece has little action: three people meet, no conflict, they play a game of chain words, Lotte massages Peter’s neck, a second round of beer, abrupt departure. And the second part of the piece, in which Peter is left alone in his apartment, tidying up, turning on the television and engaging in various self-observations, is more a hallucination of normality than a study of everyday life. Choreographer Nønne Mai Svalholm has inserted moments of brief absence into the actor’s movements, such as when he suddenly lays his head, hands and upper body flat on the tabletop and lifts his bent legs off the floor, hanging as heavy as a cadaver.
The eeriness that pervades the dialogue and action on stage from the outset is reinforced by an unusual sound installation. Over thirty invisible contact microphones are placed on the floor, under the tables and on the actors’ bodies, making the sound of footsteps, the pouring of water into a glass or the chewing of a grape unusually loud. The radiators and pipes in the stage apartment are connected to the theatre’s central heating system, are warm, and when Peter later leans down to listen to them, you can hear them rustling. The large screen on the back wall acts like a shaving mirror, distorting the image of the person passing by, and Peter’s bed, which stands outside the platform between the stage and the audience gallery, is essentially a figure in itself. A hidden, unpredictable mechanism causes the bedspread to rise and fall as if it were breathing.
At one point, a printer cartridge floats vertically from the small table, as if the room, its inhabitants and objects were just a CGI animation in which a programmer changes the cartridge’s position without the rest of the system noticing or caring. From then on, it magically floats in the middle of the room, reminding us that this performance is called «Sorcerer». But none of the characters in this piece perform magic. There is another kind of magic at work, a discreet touch of obsession that haunts the characters as they reflect on themselves.
As they ponder how to explain a headache to someone who has never had one, they describe the compression of their bodies into a small cube, or the pain of hitting their collarbone with a brick. «It is like being possessed,» remarks Peter, and the images and states they fantasise about their bodies are indeed very vivid and affective. On the other hand, these moments are reminiscent of Atkins’ films and what his CGI characters experience. They can collide with a wall without braking, their bodies can segment, their heads can fall to the ground and the ground beneath their feet can dissolve, sending them plummeting into the depths. On the stage of the Revolver Theatre, real bodies are caught in a very similar vortex of unstable reality.
The sound of swallowing, the sound of putting a glass down on the table, all these things that the Copenhagen performance heightens in the creaturely behaviour of the characters on stage are the artificial details added to the three-dimensional computer puppets and their digital environment on the CGI artist’s computer to make them seem more physically real.
Ed Atkins animates his characters in the studio by motion tracking the movements of his own face and body. Behind each of his characters, whether it’s a weeping monk, a whisky-swilling skinhead or a little prince at the piano, we see Ed Atkins in some way, even if we don’t see him directly. His CGI characters and worlds are state of the art, hyper-realistic in their brilliance, and yet they are the antithesis of the CGI worlds of the Pixar studios or classic, digitally perfected cinema. His hyper-realism does not make the world more real, but its reality into something unreal, reminding us of how the world we experience really is.
Atkins refuses to transfer what in aesthetic contexts is called «immersion» as an aesthetic process of earlier media to the field of CGI figures. In his essay «Daten-Verfall / Data Rot», he describes the suspension of disbelief that characterises our experience of cinema or television films as the essential «trick» of cinematic storytelling. And like any good trick, it works mainly because we generally don’t notice it. At least until the microphone accidentally enters the frame in a film scene, and some cinema films show these amusing «making of» scenes in the end credits to show the joy of creating this illusion and the laughter at the mishaps that cause the suspension of disbelief to briefly fail.
In the cinema or on stage, the reality of the image is as believable as the reality itself. In the cinema, and even more so in VR worlds, the viewer is «in the film», immersed in its world as in life itself, as if the medium in between did not exist. As a CGI artist and theatre maker, Atkins takes a different approach. For him, everything is a medium, including the physical body of the real person, which is played not only by people but also by pain, absence, dreams, nightmares, loneliness, drunkenness and music.
Technically, Atkins is able to brilliantly represent bodies, voices, spaces and movements in the CGI world, and yet he adds subtle breaks to this magic of virtuosity and the ability to place and manipulate digital bodies and things in any context, exaggerations that can only be achieved through the digital medium itself and are experienced by the characters as unquestionably real. What do these data figures inhale when they breathe smoke? Where does their head go when it rolls across the floor singing?
Atkins shows lint on the camera lens in his CGI shots, even though there is no physical camera or dust in the medium. He repeats and varies many of his scenes arbitrarily, spilling ketchup and mayonnaise on baby figures between slices of toast, opening walls and letting high-rise floors rush through the room as if they had entered a slot machine, and so Atkins mixes disbelief and wonder into the viewing experience. There is a queasy feeling of too much chaos and loneliness at the same time. Atkins constantly disturbs the consistency and reliability of the world he observes, and at the same time his images seduce us into empathy and enchant us with their beauty. Atkins lets his drunken male heroes smoke and philosophise, showing in Ribbons their faces scribbled over by drinking companions and the tinkling of ice cubes in their glasses. Details such as the dirt under their fingernails and the emotionally moving music by Bryan Adams or Jürg Frey draw the viewer into the solipsistic world of his heroes. The character disintegrates before our eyes, takes hold of his own face, peels the skin from the flesh and places it in the transport tray on the conveyor belt at the airport security checkpoint, along with his own watch, shoes, nose, computer and ears.
Eating, drinking, smoking, everything that happens to and in bodies is not natural to the descendants of our bodies, the CGI figures, because as data beings they are completely disembodied, just like the digital medium itself. And it is from this uncomfortable world of unreality that Atkins looks at real bodies and spaces, interested in immersive moments such as the squeak of a fingernail across a glass pane, or a moan, fart or whimper emanating from inside bodies, moments that Atkins describes with the word corpsing, the pause that occurs when someone suddenly burps in the middle of a speech at an awards ceremony.
It is what is usually avoided at all costs on the stage, in the theatre. Theatre, at least in the black box, is something that is repeated and requires a coherent understanding of reality that seeks to avoid the absence of actors or technical incidents at all costs. But it is precisely this medial construction of reality that Atkins dissolves, drawing attention to the repressed, beleaguered and feared states of the body when it momentarily escapes culture and control. To do this, Atkins exploits the infinitely manipulative nature of the digital medium. In one moment the human body appears hyper-real and in the next it appears alien, outside the norms and rules of society, an abject, as Atkins calls this phenomenon with reference to Julia Kristeva’s art theory of the uncanny and horror.
Aktin’s CGI films are not about filming the gruesome, but about the shudder of a reality that seems perfectly realistic and gets out of hand. Something takes on a life of its own and is recognised as something alien. The arbitrary existence of our carnal body in the midst of a smooth and clean world is flooded with tears, piss and slime. In Atkin’s digital reality, the body and space appear as what they are in real life - a shell, a host, often disobedient to the spirit that inhabits it, toying with everything we hold to be stable and permanent. This is the horror that «Sorcerer» is also about.
In his exhibition ‘Old Food’ at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Atkins placed thousands of costumes from the collection of the Deutsche Oper alongside his CGI videos and wooden wall panels. These are clothes that the singers slip into, just as Atkins slips into the digital skin of his characters. As Emily Watlington rightly points out, poetry is not a secondary aspect of Atkins’ work, but a unique mode of expression that underpins all his films and live performances. But writing and text play an even more fundamental role in his work, for his digital characters are also written on the keyboard, as code that becomes image. His CGI films are therefore in many ways text-based, and if everything in them is ultimately text, the question arises: who is speaking?
In Atkin’s artistic world, everything is animated. Everything is a «display» in the world of CGI - the things, bodies, sound systems here are witchboards, those ancient devices that display the message of the spirits in spiritualist sessions, «Recent Quijas» in modern form, as Atkins called an exhibition in Amsterdam. And ‘Sorcerer’ is characterised by this witchcraft. In this piece, everything is a witch’s board and on ‘reception’ - the heating pipes, the technical devices, the duvet, everything is transmitting, and the three friends talk about observations that they don’t know exactly what they’re receiving. When they talk about how they can’t hammer a nail into the wall without making a big hole, or how they’re not good gardeners, it sounds like they’re talking about a missing piece of software or a hardware problem. The dialogue comes across as nerdy introspection, but as the play progresses it becomes clear that this ‘self’ is an ongoing task for the characters, something they model and which in turn influences them. Like the dreaded corpse on the open stage, it confronts them with a stranger on whom much remains to be done and of whom much remains to be discovered. When a performer’s body hangs from the kitchen table for no reason, or a printer cartridge floats up from the table, these are events for which neither the characters nor the audience have a language or understanding.
But there is a different take on this effort to make everything nice, to tidy up, to wipe the tables clean, and to maintain form and composure in social situations. Atkins’ fragile male figures in his CGI films are characterised by their struggle for form and the cadaverous nature of their bodies. Their psychological and physical drift, which results in the decomposition of their lucid minds and bodies, uses the limitless possibilities of a disembodied, digital medium to describe something fundamental about the limits of our corporeal lives. This is an essential issue for theatre and actors. The performers’ bodies cannot disintegrate into parts on stage as they can in digital space, and yet «Sorcerer» as a dramatic text and performance finds a way to bring a different perspective to our understanding of naturalness in this medium and in life in general. The hyper-detailed dissolution of their appearance in the CGI film can be understood in the double sense of ‘dissolution’, and on stage Atkins and Zultanski find forms of expression for this in the real world.
The magician’s software, which enters the physical space of the Copenhagen performance and turns things and people into recipients of processes that follow an unknown script, makes these characters marvel at themselves and their everyday lives when they meet in this evening. Their self-observation calibrates a construct of personality and reality that is meant to appear normal, but unfortunately, for some unfathomable reason, Peter very slowly spills water from his glass onto the kitchen floor. The piece has a light-hearted tone, but it’s just a gloss on a dark situation.
«Sorcerer» makes no mention of the Corona lockdown, which, like many people at the time, left Atkins, Zultanski and their friends alone with themselves for perhaps a little too long. In this exceptional situation, when private meetings between friends were forbidden for several weeks, normal encounters were combined with a touch of disobedience and a quiet wonder at ‘reality’ and our relationship to it. The Corona situation exacerbated and in some ways generalised an experience that Atkins has been exploring in his work for many years, and which he has made into a fascinating piece with Steven Zultanski. It brings that experience back into the world of real bodies and a very old medium that they use in an unusual way.
On stage, «Sorcerer» is a counter-magic to the virtuosity and immersion in belief that usually characterises theatre or film. Anyone waiting for the story to unfold at this performance will probably be wondering when the play will finally begin. But if you don’t ask yourself that question, you will discover a situation that grows more sinister by the minute. Atkins and Zultanski’s piece is a new way of looking at the body and the reality of the represented in the digital age, using the ancient ritual of theatre to show how the mind enters and leaves real bodies and objects for moments, disrupting their order and then re-establishing something like the ‘familiar’. Atkins and Zultanski both fulfil and subvert the conventions of the medium by taking the drama to another level. It is that of the medium itself. They are interested in the reality of the situation itself, not in the course of a social conflict. Everything is good for the characters and at the same time a silent horror. You have to be a little inclined to want to understand the performance in this way, but then a completely different idea of reality and theatre leans towards you.