Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On (Notable Productions)

While many Shakespearean productions are measured by the star actor (in our case, who played Prospero), we were more interested in focusing on productions that engaged with the script in a new or interesting way. While we couldn't find reviews or videos of the production, a Montreal theater company called 4D staged a bilingual mixed-media adaptation in 2005 called La Tempête, "whose cast was divided between islanders, who were played by normal actors, and shipwrecked Italians, who appeared on stage as ingenious holograms. These ‘virtual characters’ appeared sometimes as life-sized images, sometimes as towering close-ups, their taped voices perfectly synchronized with the live action. The staging presented the wayfarers as mere projections of Prospero’s imagination, with one exception: when the virtual Ferdinand touched the hand of Miranda, he miraculously assumed corporeal form. Swirling light and sound effects (including chanting in indecipherable languages) permeated the auditorium, and above the French dialogue an edited version of Shakespeare’s script appeared as supertitles. Lost in an electronic cloud of text, video, music and theatre, the audience at La Tempête experienced the post-digital condition that performance theorists have termed ‘intermediality.’" (Bosman, 296)

Pictures found at: http://4dart.com/en/creation/2005/the-tempest/

The most important thing about this production is that it, also, presented Aether self-reflexively, using not just the stage magic, but also the cognitive dissonance of multiple languages at once, and the audience's upbringing with virtual reality, all in coordination to comment on the text. Our production is less interested in technology (or in the 'post-digital condition'), but it is interested in building an active relationship with its audience, in the way that La Tempête asks its audience to be active meaning-makers instead of passive receivers. Of particular interest to us is the way Ferdinand was able to move from Aethereal to real. We are definitely interested in exploring the boundaries between Aether and reality by transgressing them where we can.