Amir Yatziv, Glass Widow, live animation theater, 2022
I have seen the future of theatre. His name is Amir Yatziv.
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Israeli artist Amir Yatziv’s ongoing experimentation with video game technologies to reinvent theater is breaking new grounds with Grass Widow, “a play for three digital characters and one actress” which debuted at ArtPort in Tel Aviv on June 16 2022. It is also one of the most elaborate productions so far by Yatziv, whose stunning project The Kingdom of Shadows, was featured on VRAL S02 in 2021. An actress, Neta Spiegelman, is standing on an almost bare stage. Behind her, the interior of an apartment consisting of five separate rooms is projected onto a large screen. Often the scene is represented from above, blueprint-style, evoking the aesthetics of video game maps.
As in previous performances, Spiegelman is wearing a motion capture suit that records her body and facial movements, transferring them to three digital avatars inside the apartment, so that they can act and perform live. There’s no delay or lag of any kind. Yatziv, the director, is synchronizing the character played by the actress with her virtual figures on screen in real time, using an Xbox One game controller. He is also acting in the play. Everyone is multi tasking, pardon, multi performing.
Grass Widow reinterprets Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, which incidentally was the point of departure of Kara Güt’s Welcome to my Nexus (VRAL #30), another bold experiment in media convergence, an hybrid of gaming and theater before a live audience…
Matteo Bittanti
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