February 19, 2001
ARTS ONLINE

The Staging of Multisite Arts Performances Online
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

In the musical "1776," John Adams attends the Continental Congress while his wife, Abigail, stays home in Braintree, Mass. Although these characters are separated by a great distance, the actors portraying them share the stage as they sing "Yours, Yours, Yours." But what if the Internet allowed them to perform their duet from afar, with one really in Philadelphia, the other really in Massachusetts and an audience looking on from virtually anywhere?

Since the dawn of the telecommunications era, artists have explored how technology might revolutionize theater, music, dance and other stage presentations. A frequent technique has been to place people in different locations and unite them in performance electronically. Television does this daily of course, but access to studios and broadcast equipment is limited and expensive.

With its promise of cheap, readily available bandwidth, the Internet has become the medium of choice for such multisite performance experiments. The curtain rises on the next one tomorrow night at 8, when New York University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., jointly present "The Technophobe and the Madman," a 40-minute theater piece that its producers are billing as "the first Internet2-distributed musical."

Yes, there have been musicals on the commonly accessible Internet. This time, though, technical concerns will prevent online viewers from seeing the show at academy.rpi .edu/projects/technophobe until Thursday.

What is new here is the use of Internet2, a high-speed network under development by a consortium of 180 universities. It is thousands of times faster than the standard Internet, capable of transmitting high-quality audio and video with almost no delay.

Speedy delivery of sound and images is essential to tomorrow's performers. Some will be onstage in Troy and others in Manhattan. At Rensselaer an actress and two musicians will present "The Technophobe" section; at N.Y.U. an actor and two more musicians will simultaneously present "The Madman" portion, but the performance is meant to be seamless, and at the moment Internet2 comes closest to accomplishing that.

There will still be a small delay — about one-third of a second — as the action bounces between locations. Pauses work better for Pinter plays than for musicals, so the composers had to accommodate them to sustain the flow as the notes travel 162 miles from one stage to another.

"From one chord change to the next, we'll write in the score which city goes first," said Robert Rowe, the show's N.Y.U. producer. Mr. Rowe and his two co-composers, Neil Rolnick and Nick Didkovsky, also give the actors plenty of space for vocal improvisation, which will make the tiny, unavoidable delays part of the performance.

Although each site will have a different set (the N.Y.U. crew will use the same backdrop as its current production of "Guys and Dolls"), onstage video screens and speakers will help blend the performances for live audiences at each location.

For a musical this is admittedly way-off Broadway. Technology may create special effects onstage, but for most ticket buyers, the magic of the theater depends on actors performing for a live audience.

"For lots of theatrical experiences, that's the case," Mr. Rowe said. "But what is available to you artistically if you look at it the other way?"

Artists have been seeking answers to this question for decades. As early as the late 1970's, electronic artists like Douglas Davis used satellite feeds to create multisite video art performances. At the opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Olympics, Seiji Ozawa was able to conduct Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" with choruses on five continents. Choreographers have also staged multisite works, with dancers in different cities pirouetting on the same video screen.