Swimmer (68) is a one-man theatre performance which recently premiered here in Toronto earlier this month at the Studio Theatre. Created by writer/performer Ker Wells and director Bruce Barton — with video design by Cameron Davis and dramaturgy by Pil Hansen – this project was an opportunity to try and push at the use of digital media in performance and begin to formulate a deeper kind of conversation between an actor and the digital media – one in which a vocabulary of inter-medial gesture could be developed and tested. Imitative/mimetic exchange, video as light source and or as a character, experimental application of in-ear monitors and back-of-house video monitoring for actors.
The ‘holy trinity’ of theatre may always be the writer-actor-director collaboration. yet as time passes and ‘digital natives’ inherit theatrical traditions it may begin to seem ever more natural for digital media to exist in the theatre.
Richard C. Windeyer 