Voice of Session House 2020 — Michitaka Ueda

Michitaka Ueda: “‘Infinity Within Limits’: Online Performances as a New Way of Reaching Out”

Until now, I had taken it for granted that I would operate sound and lighting by following the intensity of dancers responding in real time to the audience’s atmosphere and reactions. But in the recent online performances without an audience—performances given for an audience (viewers) on the other side of cameras and microphones—we cannot see that atmosphere and those reactions, which offer a kind of solace, in real time. Honestly, I never imagined that this situation would become so commonplace.

 

Until now, relying on our own eyes and ears, we have controlled sound and lighting instantaneously, even as we tried things out in the moment. The difficulty of operating with things that replace our eyes with the filming camera and our ears with the recording microphone is, if I had to put it into words, like controlling lighting while wearing tinted sunglasses, or operating sound while wearing earplugs and listening to the faint sound that leaks through. We continue to experiment with just how much of Session House’s space and the atmosphere of the dance we can convey in this state. While exploring the camera frame and its relationship to the dancers being filmed, the staff is pursuing, as one, how to face and convey “infinity within limits.”
Even if the audience returns someday, I cannot help feeling that this form of online performance will continue. Precisely in the coming era, when forms of expression will become even more diverse, I feel keenly that we must deepen our knowledge and experience still further in our staff work, so that nothing in the expression goes uncommunicated.

 

Michitaka Ueda, Technical Director
Excerpt from Voice of Session House 2020