In Caridad Svich’s Minotaur, a piece for performance that was broadcast and performed live from CultureHub on May 2nd, Ari and Pen search for the Minotaur to destroy him. The Minotaur’s “last song,” Ari says, must be sung, the planet’s life depends on it. Through a series of the Minotaur’s monologues and interactions with Pen and Ari, the piece explores the nature of empire, sometimes reflecting back or openly critiquing common themes in the American zeitgeist, like trauma, apathy, and the nature of reality.

Do you know the original legend? The Minotaur was an abomination, the result of a cursed union designed by Poseidon between a bull and a human queen because of the disobedience of her king. For years, the king used the Minotaur, his step-son, to inspire fear in the Athenians, like a nuclear weapon. Theseus, ends up killing the Minotaur in his labyrinth with the help of Ariadne, the Minotaur’s half sibling. A true family affair.

For the duration of Svich's piece, which is told in 12 “tracks,” of which we saw 4, Ari (Joshua William Gelb) and Pen (Rory Willats) search in and around the set for the Minotaur (Scott Shepherd) by mostly recording from the peripheries, and interrogating the body in front of them who is named the Minotaur, but identifies as many other people and things. Often they sit with the Minotaur, sometimes playing stick figures or having a glass of wine. In their exchanges, we get the sense that Svich’s Minotaur is torn between times - he opens with “we’ll soon be gone” referencing , it seems, his own end. Then, in Track 3, he delivers a moving monologue about his past, including a time he saw himself as a child in a photo and almost cried. The Minotaur is both nostalgic and resigned to his own disappearance, demise. He might not even be convinced he exists at all.

From Where I Sat…

I sat in the room while the live broadcast was being created. What the cameras captured echoed throughout the room on innumerable screens - Joshua William Gelb’s program feed, the cameras’ viewfinders, Rory Willats’ phone – just as they echoed in rooms across the city and the wider world. I felt privileged in a sense, to be viewing directly, something designed only to be seen through mediums. Like a peephole into heaven.

The set is a gray carpet, lit and cornered by four cameras in the black, that seems to float in the black like a lonely island in space. The online viewers caught what the lights and cameras did, which tended to obey the perimeters of the carpet itself. In the room, seating for a live audience lingered behind a scrim emitting one of the camera’s feeds.

Watching the Minotaur, what struck me most was the recurrence of their self- assertion. At different points in each track he declares "I am ____" or “I was____.” The blank is filled differently each time, sometimes with the name of a particular legend or icon, sometimes with a concept; “a noun for eternity”/ “an island”. The Minotaur, in turn, asks who they're looking for repeatedly. It is an endless search with no relief of finding.

The Minotaur itches the bridge of his nose at times. He caresses Ari’s hands. When Ari remembers a kiss he smirks. Sometimes the Minotaur passes his palm through his hair. Despite his skepticism, the breadth of his being, and his legendary status, under the cameras he became minuscule, subject to the same emotions, human like us. I found it interesting that neither the script nor the direction pushed the actor toward acting like a beast like the original Minotaur myth or like any of the legends the Minotaur used to be. His nondescript appearance and approach was compelling.

The Labyrinth

During their five-day lab at CultureHub, the artists settled on a multiple-camera feed which was broadcast to a live, digital audience of about 90 people using CultureHub’s very own Broadcaster, a free open-source software developed by CultureHub specifically for artists, nonprofits and educators to experiment with hybrid performances that blend in-person audiences with audiences online. One of the Broadcaster’s features designed for this production allowed online audiences to toggle between camera feeds. This feature became central to the artists behind the Minotaur. They wanted to recreate the experience of the labyrinth for viewers by giving audiences the agency to “search” the performance in real-time. They had some idea they would use multiple cameras at the beginning of the process, but the number of cameras and toggling option emerged through trial and error, supported by CultureHub’s equipment and signature broadcasting software. The artists maintain that the intention behind employing multiple-camera and the Broadcaster was about “making legible and sensible the labyrinth in which the Minotaur is both conjured and contained” as Rory Willats articulated in the project’s talk-back.

In a subsequent interview, Svich expressed her excitement at the idea that, by toggling through the multiple feeds, audiences essentially edit their own personal cut of the performance. This was one of the biggest incentives for online viewership. Svich also mentioned wanting to explore the concept of finality with this work. The script defines the play as the “final recording.” In a context like this, where the online audience can alter their view of the recording, what could “final” mean? By employing this functionality, the artists introduce the notion that something that’s final can also be multiple – an idea expanded upon by the Minotaur’s multiplicity. To add to that I ask, what does it mean that we, as viewers of this final recording, make our own recollections of the event, recollections we’ll re-earth in the tales we tell to friends. The reproductions? Endless. When will anyone forget?

The effect reminded me of 360 cameras covering a near-360 degree view of the subject. Unlike the 360 camera, the recording entity could still hide, which Ari and Pen often did during the show, sometimes speaking from the darkness, sometimes as a hollow imprint of a ghost behind the Minotaur on the screen.

At 12 minutes in, an online audience might be looking at the Minotaur’s folded script. I might be observing the back of the Minotaur's head leaned into Ari's shoulder. Rory's character behind the Minotaur, recording or the echo of the Minotaur's recording in green like the ghost of future past, the script rolling across the teleprompter. What might we hear beside words: echoes of iconic speeches, gunfire, western music, fingers. The thrust of the Minotaur holding Ari by the neck, the blatant potential of violence…

The effect in the room was different. Yet, in the logic of the show, we, the live audience, became witnesses to the making of this final recording. For us, the legend, the big Minotaur, Che, Gaga is before us, and sometimes not, slipping out of the body of the character elsewhere, this is it’s final message to the world. To be in the room as a witness carried with it an illicit sweetness of viewing something before anyone else does - like the crowd at the Beyoncé bowl, or the detectives behind the one-way mirror in a police interview recording.

Despite the privilege of direct witness, those of us watching from the room had limited agency – we could move in the room, yes, roam our eyes, but sometimes, we couldn’t see the detail of the face or elbow the online viewers could. We were relegated to the place of normal audiences in a regular theater or TV experience. I wonder whether the artists were intentionally exploring the phenomenon of agency in viewing. What does it mean for audiences so accustomed with receptive viewing to suddenly be given choice, in what they see or don’t see? What does it mean for some people to not have that choice, but know that other people have it? In an entertainment mainstream that outsources the work of feeling to the screen – “We have long since stopped being moved by anything,” the Minotaur says – what does it mean to implicate the audience in the portrayal of this feeling?

Empire

In this time, marked by the billionaire government and blatant oligarchy, anyone tuning in with any knowledge of American politics could easily infer the Minotaur might at times represent America, among other empires. The script is described by the playwright in the text as “a ghost story of empire.” The Minotaur himself admits it, “I was empire.” Even though he is being pursued and trapped in this kind of digital prison. And though we get to witness it too, directly, we the audience, especially the live audience, are also trapped in the recording, the shuffling of feet, the sound of our small shiftings in our seats the only evidence.

In this piece they want to sacrifice the Minotaur. And this seems to be the perpetual end - the Minotaur was Che after all, Beyoncé, all that is big and unending. Empire is dying. If empire is indeed America in our time, just like the Minotaur, like every legend, it will be reborn. And the Minotaur knows it. Just like the need for revolution and Che Guevaras. When reborn it will have another name – maybe Canada next time? Thailand? The artists succeed, I think, in tying us into this loop of nostalgia and decay and we, the audience, are the ones searching, searching for the evidence that empire, Minotaur, or America was ever even there at all in the first place. And just like the play, it’s not the body that matters; we’re looking for the soul of things.

final labyrinth(s)

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final labyrinth(s)

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