• 1 The Rosetta Theatre Project, November 2–3, 2018, Dancz Center, Hugh Hodgson School of Music, Univer (...)

1The Rosetta Theatre Project, a collaborative, immersive, multimedia, multilingual installation at the University of Georgia (UGA) in 2018, combined the digital language of pixels, the visual language of historical illustration and costume design, the spoken languages of present-day demotic English and French, and the literary languages of Shakespeare and Molière. Two live actors in motion-capture (“mo-cap”) suits and recorded voice actors presented continuously (with short breaks), two short scenes from Molière and Shakespeare in a “black box” theatre, scenes that were simultaneously remediated into four different computer environments with present-day and historical backgrounds and shown on four large display screens behind the live actors themselves. The two scenes performed – radically cut for just two actors – were the lovers’ deaths in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (v.iii) and the so-called seduction scene (Scene v) in Molière’s Tartuffe. Recorded, native English and French speakers voiced both Shakespeare’s and Molière’s early texts and “translations” of Shakespeare’s and Molière’s words to twenty-first-century, idiomatic speech. Additional recording offered “Fakespeare”: Molière translated into a pastiche of Shakespearean blank verse, and Victor Hugo’s classical translation of Romeo and Juliet.1

• 2 Both conferences seeded issues of the journal Arrêt sur Scène/Scene Focus: Arrêt sur scène / Scene (...)
• 3 These conferences seeded both the current issue of Arrêt sur Scène / Scene Focus and the online, op (...)

4The collaboration began with a joint conference-festival in Montpellier in Fall 2016 on the topic of “Balcony Scenes”, especially the archetypal encounter between Shakespeare’s lovers Romeo and Juliet on stage and in screen, and in Year 2, a conference-festival at UGA on “Bedchamber Scenes”.2 There followed a series of study days in Montpellier and Athens, Georgia, USA on multi-lingual scenes in French and English drama from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, in preparation for a November 2018 international conference on “Scenes in the Other’s Language” at the University of Georgia.3 We defined such “scenes” as sequences of dialogue in which a noticeable proportion of lines appears in a language that is not the dominant language of the rest of the play or in which on-stage characters identify a particular sequence as belonging to another language or as constituting jargon or an argot. Such scenes appear in, for example: Thomas Kyd and others’ The Spanish Tragedy (1592); Thomas Lodge’s Wounds of Civil War (1594); Robert Greene’s James IV (1598); Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV (1598), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), Henry V (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), The Taming of the Shrew (1623), and All’s Well That Ends Well (1623); Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600); John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge (1602); Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1602) and The Case is Altered (1609); Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 (1605); William Haughton’s Englishmen for my Money (1616); François Bonnet’s Le Jugement de Paris (1628); Baudeau de Somize’s Les Véritables Précieuses (1660); Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669); Guillaume Marcoureau de Brécourt’s L’Ombre de Molière (1673); and many more.

• 4 David Saltz and Sujata Iyengar, NEA grant proposal, 2017, unpublished mss., quoted with permission. (...)

6Our original NEA proposal was extremely ambitious. We called for “two visiting artists with an international reputation for physical performance … [to] be on site for two weeks to develop visually based performances of two scenes from the late 16^th / early 17^th centuries, one an English scene by Shakespeare and another a French scene most likely by Molière” to be performed at an “off campus arts venue” within an “interactive and immersive” environment with “four different animations in real-time […] projected onto one of the four walls of the performance space.” We planned for each animation to “map the performers’ motions onto different character models representing radically different cultures and artistic styles, with entirely different costumes and virtual scenery”. Inspired by the 2013 “David Bowie…Is” exhibition in London and its five-year world tour, we imagined that every audience member could wear a “wireless headphone with location sensor”, so that as they “move through the space, they […] hear an audio track that corresponds with the animation in the quadrant of the room where they are standing”.4 We hoped that each version of the audio could “consist of dialogue performed in real-time by UGA voice actors, and a culturally specific music track”. Finally, we hoped that the project would have an afterlife on digital video and that we could combine “videotape of the live performance along with the four animations to create an online app that allows viewers to switch between versions much as they could do in the live event”, and even “allow viewers to create their own audio track”.

• 5 Michael Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, 2017, pp. 21–22 et passim(...)

10Michael Betancourt and others classify some kinds of electronic glitches as “hardware failures”.5 Our first glitches, however, were not electronic or hardware malfunctions as much as wetware (human) disasters and infraware (financial) failures. The biggest human glitch or disaster for the PUF was the unexpected death of a co-investigator, my colleague and close friend Shakespearean Christy Desmet, in July 2018, which in the manner of all glitches precipitated further glitches or distortions to the schedule and the project. My bouleversement restricted my subsequent involvement to a minimal amount of dramaturgy, namely the translation of our Tartuffe scene into Shakespearean pastiche, and to participation in a roundtable about the creation of the project.

• 6 Amy Cole, “UGA presents the collaborative, high-tech, multidisciplinary Rosetta Theatre Project”, U (...)
• 7 Ibid.

11The biggest glitch for the UGA Theatre Department was that we did not win our NEA award and had to fund the project through internal research funds and some help from a2ru, so we could neither hire professional actors, nor: rent an off-campus arts venue; purchase wireless headsets and location sensors; install multiple projectors; commission multiple composers and app developers; host a long-term web installation to serve as a teaching resource. Instead, we held the event on campus in UGA’s Dancz Center for Performing Arts, a “black box” theatre amid three interconnected electronic music studios, and we used UGA Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) acting students as gesture and voice performers and as set designers and programmers.6 We could not keep live voice actors on set the whole time, so we used eight soundtracks recorded by our voice actors that our actors heard continuously and to which they mimed their motion-captured gestures. We were successful, however, in generating “four different animations in real-time, each projected onto one of the four walls of the performance space”, each animation presenting both the performers’ movements and different time periods (denoted by costume and setting). In fact, the experiment became a funded project for several students earning MFA degrees in not only in voice or stage acting but also in Media Production, Set Design, and Costume Design.7

• 8 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London, Bloomsbury, 1999.
• 9 “The Rosetta Theatre Showreel”, directed by David Saltz, media director Anna Helen Courbould, recor (...)

13We did have to give up completely on the idea of a website and an app that would have allowed remote viewers to mix and match scenes and soundtracks or to make up their own. We realised, however, that, as, Philip Auslander observes, the very notion of liveness itself is predicated upon an often imaginary, authentic, idealised performance.8 There was thus an inherent tension between the idea of archiving an ephemeral motion-capture technology in this way and the impact of “liveness”; the remote viewer and the recorded or remixed performances would have threatened to make static something that relied upon change and playful interaction. The photographs and the short video below illustrate both the strengths and the glitches of the performance.9

• 11 The forthcoming “ABBA Voyage” concert in London, planned to mix de-aged “avatars” of the now-elderl (...)

16Dailey goes on to explore the rich possibilities of glitch theory in the context of representations of the dead throughout history, in a timely intervention that ranges from relics and chronicle plays through selfies, x-ray imagery, glitch art, cloning, and zombies. I would argue that Dailey’s work also anticipates other interactions among the living/present and the dead/absent, such as the quasi-immortal younger avatars of performers on stage.11

• 12 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota (...)
• 13 Ibid.
• 14 Ibid., p. 75.
• 15 Menkman, op. cit., “Celebrate the critical trans-media aesthetics of glitch artifacts”, n.p.

17Michael Betancourt, who has both written extensively about and created glitch art, builds on Adorno’s suggestion in Aesthetic Theory that the “interruptive” qualities immanent to art activate an audience into critique.12 High modernism, argues Betancourt, would argue that the interruption, or “stoppage” enabled by the glitch, provides a space to reflect upon and critique the supposedly seamless or transparent interface of digital technologies.13 Betancourt suggests that such critique must originate with an active, engaged audience, with the reception of the glitch rather than with the generation of the glitch, otherwise the audience is once more cast as the passive receptacle for the glitch. Moreover, Betancourt suggests that such critique must disrupt a system of semiosis, rather than an individual experience or isolated sign, and that this critique can happen only “when an audience chooses” to engage within such a semiotic system.14 Rosa Menkman likewise argues in the Glitch Studies Manifesto (2006-2011) that glitch art is a “procedural activity demonstrating against and within multiple technologies”, one that can uncover “the inherent politics of any kind of medium” or signifying system.15

• 16 Gina Bloom, Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2019, quoted with permissio (...)
• 17 Gina Bloom, Play the Knave, game for Kinect system, https://www.playtheknave.org/download.html; for (...)

18Gina Bloom has called the RSC’s 2016 sophisticated and much-mooted motion-capture Tempest “an ethical failure” because of the way the production interfered with the audience’s active engagement.16 She suggests that the RSC’s attempts to smooth out the crude animated glitches that seem inevitable with this complex technology try vainly to prevent the irruption or interruption of critique, which is for her one of the most valuable aspects of this technology. “[I]t’s the riskiness of mo[-]cap and the tensions that it creates between the bodies of the human player and the digital avatar that make it such a fascinating technology”, she argues, setting as counter-example her own interactive mo-cap performance game, Play the Knave, glitches and all.17

• 18 Betancourt, op. cit., p. 105.
• 19 Ibid., p. 17.

19“[E]very digital work is produced live”, Betancourt reminds us, before pointing out that glitches and our interpretation of them are both performative.18 In this way, he suggests, glitches break the seeming bodilessness or immateriality of “digital capitalism”.19 They remind us of the hardware (and in mo-cap situations, the wetware, the human bodies and voices) required to create these supposedly ephemeral or virtual simulacra. Glitches manifest labour – failed labour and superfluous labour and well-compensated and under-compensated labour – as, Betancourt suggests, brushstrokes evoke the hand of the artist within the Arts and Crafts movement or just as (a Shakespearean might suggest) printer’s errors allow us to touch the hand of the compositor across time and space.

• 21 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006, rev. ed. with Siobhan O’Flynn, Routledge, London, 201 (...)

21Akin to the pleasure that Linda Hutcheon identifies as a mark of adaptation’s “repetition with difference”, the humour of adaptations, the tension that they may become “ridiculous”, is amplified when such transformations surprise us in multiple ways, as did the Rosetta Theatre Project.21

• 22 Horace, De Arte Poetica Liber, The Works of Horace, translated and edited by C. Smart, Philadelphia (...)
• 23 On women as players of computer games, see Shira Chess, Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed (...)

22Shakespeare and Molière as presented in the Rosetta Theatre Project created a tension between these literary luminaries and the crude graphics of the representation. Jarring, too, was the silent, black-clad presence of the actors in the centre of the room, on and around the podium, in contrast to the competing, multi-lingual soundtracks and the vividly-coloured, brightly illuminated screens that would remind viewers of the earliest animated computer games. Computer games have a poor academic reputation, despite ongoing attempts to incorporate “gamification” into education, probably because we all know that the primary purpose of a game is to entertain and that, as Horace wrote centuries ago, poems or creative works need to mix the useful with the pleasurable, miscuit utile dulci.22 We have also tended to link computer games and the associated technology with children and in particular with young adolescent men, although this assumption has changed somewhat over the past twenty years.23

• 24 Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart E. Nacke, “Gamification: Toward a Definit (...)

23At the same time, we now use gaming technologies and styles for applications beyond game-playing, a process that has been called “gamification”. Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart E. Nacke helpfully define gamification as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” and then further distinguish among “serious games” (the use of game elements, such as rules, competition, and a defined set of goals, for non-game situations), “serious gaming” (“the (educational) utilization of the broader ecology of technologies and practices of games, including machinima, reviewing games, and others”), “playful interaction” (“design for playfulness”, distinct from games), and “game-based technologies” (the use of particular technologies associated with games in non-game contexts).24 Theatre is closer than education to the idea of game or playfulness, but most present-day theatregoers, whether in the United States, the United Kingdom, or in France, are going to imagine a performance of Shakespeare or Molière as educational, to some extent.

• 25 Morreall, op. cit.; see also Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. (...)

24According to the definitions from Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, and Nacke, The Rosetta Theatre Project combined game-based technologies, namely the motion-capture technology associated with games and with cinema, and playful interaction, namely the audience members’ ability to interact with the different soundtracks and screens in real-time, and the electronically generated music that changed according to the gestures of the actors and the bodies in the space. A Shakespeare or Molière that partly looks like a computer game but that also incorporates many “difficult” or avant-garde artistic elements (foreign languages, classical literature, mime, black clothing, an intimate space) and playful interaction requires mental flexibility from its participants, including the audience, whose laughter might manifest contempt or a sense of superiority (as Plato feared) or nervous fear on one’s own behalf to mask those or other inopportune or embarrassing emotions (as Shaftesbury and Freud speculated); startled surprise (as Schopenhauer suggested); and pleasurable wonder (as Bergson hoped).25 My experience of the Rosetta Theatre Project suggested that audience laughter and engagement – certainly my own – followed this potted history of humour.

• 26 For recent (albeit pre- pandemic) data on the mental health and suicide prevalence of US college st (...)
• 27 Anne Ubersfeld, Lire le Théâtre, Volume 1, Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1977; I am also indebted to Jo (...)

26In the contemporary US, college professors have read such stories too many times: students dying from accidental or intentional overdoses from alcohol or opioids or a combination of the two, combined with their friends’ reluctance to call emergency services and their own inability or unwillingness to seek mental health care – the banal melodrama, if you like, of the twenty-first-century academic industrial complex.26 Where I might have felt exasperated at an entire Romeo and Juliet set in a student dormitory (and perhaps rightfully so), the combination of live actors feeling and breathing next to me and the double-alienation-effect of the animated avatars on screen made me feel that these events were really happening, somewhere. I thought of students of my own whose mental health concerned me and others whose relationship to drugs and alcohol seemed imbalanced. I thought about Anne Ubersfeld’s argument that theatre is always metatheatre, always Imaginary, and that the spectator co-produces the performance.27 In a bizarre way, this multiply mediated, highly abstracted installation had given me a kind of access to a real emotion, which is what we hope theatre will do.

• 28 On the background and history of the #MeToo movement, see in this volume Philip Gilreath, “Props an (...)

27My second brief case-study concerns a more obvious glitch in the scene from Tartuffe in its digital seventeenth-century French computer-generated setting. When I first translated what I have always called the seduction scene in Tartuffe, it did not occur to me that it could be called anything but a seduction scene. After the #MeToo movement, however, many of us have found in our classrooms that seduction is no longer available to us (if it ever was) as a mode of literary or dramatic eroticism. To our students, Marlowe’s Leander is as guilty of ignoring the issue of consent as is Shakespeare’s Angelo; the entire genre of epyllion or Ovidian imitation is suspect.28 Watching the movements of Elmire and Tartuffe – as she dodged him around the table – made me wonder whether there was room in this text for Elmire’s protestations to be sincere rather than hypocritical, her timely coughs to be part of an arsenal of women’s weak weapons against the “witnesses” she fears would not speak up for her. An absurd and obscene glitch forced me to think about this further: as Elmire retreated behind the table and Tartuffe followed her, his digital avatar in one of the four settings (seventeenth-century France) became fixed behind her, repeatedly goosing her in a flickering rape. Viewers laughed and looked away; a few people snorted or rolled their eyes. To me, the ongoing contrast between the nuanced, silent flirtation of the live, physically present mo-cap actors (clad in androgynous black mo-cap suits, devoid of makeup and with minimal marks of gender expression) and the violent, voiced, stylised, historically costumed glitching rape on screen seemed a fitting metaphor for the different ways that we can stage and re-stage the patterns of so-called seduction in early modern drama to work through the urgent problems of consent, agency, and power we encounter today.