Category: Vertical City Performance

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.