Chapter2 Truth-seeker's Allowance

Chapter2 Truth-seeker's Allowance: Digitising Artaud -Steve DixonSteve Dixon's multimedia theatre practice fuses digitally manipulated video projections with live theatre to follow Artaudian and surrealist ideas, and to update their notion of truth for an audience. Truth underlies comedy, the expletive insult or some men's guilt as much as sublime aesthetic image.Artaud‘s truths were centred on ideas such double, cruelty and the body and his vision of truth was a theatre of cruelty. So The Chameleons Group attempts to embrace and update this vision. The Chameleons Group, is interested in using multimedia in live performance to explore and expose serious existence issues, altered mental states and metaphysical notion. The use of technology in creating the projector enables each actor (in video recording) to reach a point of acting truth through focussed preparation. Like the language of surrealism the tension between the stage and the screen is in constant play during performances and in many ways defines the essential ontology of multimedia theatre. Within multimedia theatre the screen spaces and their images tend to explore notion of reality and truth far more than the live performers within the stage attempt. Filmic 'complexities' are doubly extended through digital manipulations and metamorphoses. On the other hand opponents contest that there is a mismatch of media and a corruption of theatre's purity as a live form. Also media projections do not enhance the intellectual power or visual spectacle of theatre. In 1929 Robert Edward Jones argued that the fusion of theatre and cinema prompted a unique and potent new for new art form. In multimedia theatre live actor would represent the character's outer self and the screen imagery the inner world of imagination, subconscious and dream. The two worlds that together make up the world we live in.Derrida's destruction of language parallels Artaud‘s celebration of theatre as a plague. The plague analogy highlights a subversion of morality and society where barriers become fluid, order disappears and anarchy prevails. While Derrida's linguistic plague darkens, divides and undermines notions of meaning and the truth by contrast, Artuad's plague is bright and blinding in its revelation, seeks transcendant, unifying meanings. Derrida's poststructualist thought is descended from Nietzche. For Nietzsche the distinctions between appearance and reality expounded by Platonium and science constituted a false whereas in his view there was only one world. Today that world is filled with new technologies and their incorporation into theatrical practice brings into being the potential for a synthesis where the two elements stage and screen make up a new world capable of expressing truth.