The New Old Rush

Abstract

The Ne w Old RushBerlin's Bonanza "A Theatr ic al Path"What does it mean to disappear the actor entirely from a performance in the theater -and still to insist on the status of the performance as a live theater event? This question, among others clarifying the stakes of what tends to be called "new media's" 1 uses in theater, is posed pressingly and provocatively by Bonanza, a 2006 work by the Antwerp-based multimedia collective Berlin (Caroline Rochlitz, Bart Baele, and Yves Degryse) that has been presented at a wide variety of international theater festivals over the past five years. Described as a "documentary for five screens" in the program for the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, 2 where Bonanza appeared in January 2011, the piece chronicles the lives of the small handful of permanent residents in Bonanza, Colorado, a nineteenth-century gold-rush boomtown almost wholly abandoned by the late twentieth century and inhabited, at the time of Berlin's documentary shooting, by only seven people across five households. Each of those five households and its subjects are represented more or less respectively (though not consistently or singularly) by one of Bonanza's five juxtaposed, sandblasted aluminum screens, on which "competing" -but elaborately edited and carefully synchronized -pieces of documentary footage are simultaneously projected from five digital multimedia projectors. To achieve this simultaneity, each projector is connected to a Mac Mini that works as a standalone player of a compressed high-definition video, and the five players' synchronization with one another is coordinated by original software devised specifically for presentations of Bonanza and based on QuickTime components. 3 Though none of this information about Bonanza's devising is likely to be transparently evident to spectators of the piece, the projectors, sitting on metal tables in front of the first row of a given theater's chairs or benches, are immediately visible to audience members and thus call attention to the apparatus of production. Yet the arguably Brechtian appearance of the projectors is hardly the most conspicuous visual element of the piece; the five screens are arrayed under an impressively large, metalliTheater 42:2