S h e l t e r

A Time-Based Installation/Multisensory Environment incorporating dance-theater performance

Rika Ohara

Introduction

Integrating time-based visual media and dance-movement theater, my interdisciplinary performance works create an environment in which the visual, textual, kinetic and aural elements are given equal weight, each capable of dominating or contradicting the others and stretching its traditional boundary.

Slide and video projections define temporality, as well as manipulate perceptions of the size and shape of the space. Ideas that are typically political are treated as psychological phenomena –– ultimately, the audience's own creativity and intelligence are trusted.

Shelter continues to explore the symbolic and psychological significance of nuclear annihilation. Parts of the project have been realized as a series of installations, performances and site-specific events in the L.A. area since 1989, including presentations in public plazas and on a downtown street.

"Like nuclear testing itself, its psychological effects have gone underground." –– Peter Schwenger, Letter Bomb, 1992

The Content

The "Nuclear Age" can no longer be contained in the past, but is now defined by the very absence of a decisive event, and marked by anxiety and denial. Today, images of The Bomb recur in the media, which has replaced myth as the predominant means to express and form the cultural subconsciousness. Beyond the iconographic mushroom cloud, apocalypse now exists somewhere between fantasy and reality, its appeal characterized by fascination and revulsion. As a mythical motif, it finds Judgment Day as its archetype –– nuclear annihilation "was, is and is coming." While end-of-the-world myths can be found worldwide, the Judeo-Christian variant supplies an explanation of the paradoxical appeal of nuclear annihilation: the Judgment is followed by the restoration of Paradise.

Before nuclear weapons became a reality, the Paradise Envy found expression as the Dark Continent of Tarzan or the monster-infested island of King Kong; their pleasures were heightened by fear and temporary surrender of control. The atomic bomb gave a new form to the catharsis required to reach this paradise.

During the early days of the Cold War, monsters in films (radiation-mutated this time) roamed American soil –– not a distant or fictional land –– as its inhabitants entertained for the first time the possibility of a "homeland attack" in the new type of warfare. 1 Yet in 1963, the partial test-ban treaty allowed the Americans to revert to their habitual insularity, afforded by their traditional military prominence in the Western Hemisphere. 2

When the nuclear subject resurfaced in the mass media -- beginning in the late '70s and culminating with the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings –– it was accompanied by yet another fantasy: the promise of survival. An example from this period is the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After. Although its negative psychological effects on young viewers were hotly debated (and gathered more press than the subject matter of the film), the vision of "hell" offered by the program was shockingly mild. 3

Survival manuals from this period polished the matter with a Boy Scout finesse ("How to build an easy-access canned food storage") and chillingly reveal the postwar-American idea of the "nuclear family" unit –– the self and the immediate family as its extension –– as the boundary of humanity acceptable in the Nuclear Age ("build barbed wire fences; carry firearms to protect the self and the family against intruders and wild animals"

Eden symbolizes innocence as well as the beginning of all life, Expulsion being the trauma of birth. The regressive impulse in the Nuclear Age myth encourages the infantile sense of omnipotence and ultimately a belief in the womblike Paradise, in which the ego is submerged in the M(aternal)/Other, relieved of all the stresses an organism experiences in order to maintain itself. This impulse –– what Gaston Bachelard calls the Jonah Complex –– apparently opposes what we call "progress," yet seems to have steered the course for our patriarchal civilization, which has defined itself primarily through the development of war technology and instruments of aggression. The direction of movement suggested here complements what Dr. Caldicott calls the "missile envy" 4 and reveals our notion of progress as having ceased to be a straight line and instead forming a figure zero.

The Form

The glass womb in Shelter –– the predominant and constant visual element –– is created by slide "animation" projected on the surrounding walls of the performance/gallery space. It is an illusory environment realized for the duration of the piece only, integrating a dance-theater performance with a time-based installation. The role of the slide animation extends beyond mere representation of scenery, defining both the visual environment and the temporality –– sequence, proportion, duration and rhythm –– of the piece. Density and absence of images and light, combined with the movements of the performers, cumulatively affect the perceived duration.

With a single image of an ordinary window as the starting point, a series of slides is produced through optical and photographic manipulation. These slides are programmed at a rate of 500 slides per hour, or 8.33 slides per minute per projection field. Projected to surround both the performers and the audience, the gridlike pattern of the glass panes distorts and alters the size of the space. The environment is animated in the original sense of the word, "portraying" the "character" of the glass shelter. Within these glass walls, there is no viewer-stage separation –– the viewer becomes a part of this environment.

In phases I - VII, analog dissolve-control unit's capacity for delicate handling of transitions and superimpositions results in an organic visual movement, and its use of audio tape for real-time programming helped heighten the programmer's temporal awareness. The process' inherent musicality is brought out, while the manipulation of the unit came to resemble the playing of a musical instrument.

The sequence of events is contiguous, the progression scrambled; some events approximate flashbacks and loops, aiming not so much at non-linearity but at baroque hyperlinearity –– to be perceived in parts but more fully understood as a whole. Placement of "the blast" in time remains ambiguous; ground zero becomes at once the point of origin and the point of finality. A recurring film-lead countdown punctuates this visual-temporal continuum, referring back to the piece's exploitation of conventions of cinema temporality, while serving, on a more literal level, as a simple reminder of our mortality.

Choreography, characterized by suspension –– central to our generation's nuclear experience –– is integrated into this visual environment. Its use of stillness and repetition redirects audience attention to other elements –– heightening participation on a subliminal level –– while creating a sense of dislocation similar to what one Hiroshima survivor described as "an instant dream." 5

In Phase IV-1/2 (The Los Angeles Open Festival, 1990) the central motif was a series of tableaux vivants from Da Vinci's Last Supper. Phase V (California Plaza, Los Angeles, June 1991) and Phase VI (Japanese-American Cultural Community Center Plaza, October 1991) included eight-minute segments during which the performers sat immobile.

Not a "high-tech" project (characterizing my work as such has often struck me as a Trade War stereotype), Shelter has made imaginative use of available media and technology. Creative rule-breaking and low-budget have been the guiding principles in the Shelter series.

"The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text." –– Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)." Diacritics 14 (1984)

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