カメラが演じる／語るとき

ジョン・ジェスランの『スノウ』

抄録

This paper investigates Snow, a theatre piece written and directed by John Jesurun, which premiered in 2000. The piece has three unique features. The first is its theatrical space. It lacks a conventional auditorium but features a walled central area. The audience first enters the area and then watches the performance from there. This is linked to the second feature: the hiding, if not excluding, of the live performance. The central area is equipped with four screens above each wall, on which the audience watches the performance. Thus, although the actual performances are conducted just outside the walled area, it is not directly presented to the audience. The last feature is the “Virtual Actor.” This is, in fact, a camera, but due to its preset program, it can move as if of its own free will. This camera is not shown on the screens; however, the audience can sense its presence through a set of shots taken from the camera’s viewpoint.
This paper derives two main arguments from Snow by focusing on this Virtual Actor. The first is the displacement of the relation between human and machine. The quasi-autonomously operating camera, prompting a revision of the concept of the subject, questions the way in which we have separated the human, as a self-evidently autonomous being, from the machine, which is conceived as a non-autonomous being. Turning from a technical device such as the Virtual Actor to the story of Snow, which depicts the background of the contemporary media industry, we can find a similar question concerning the human-machine boundary. In one episode, people try to utilize “the tone and inflection of [one’s] voice” as material for encryption. In treating allegedly natural elements, such as “tone and inflection,” as a medium for the highly cultural operation of encryption, this episode suggests a cybernetic vision similar to the one discussed by Donna Haraway. In her view, through the reconception of organisms as coded texts, biology transforms into cryptology. We can thereby consider the living organism to be a communication device that has no fundamental difference from a machine.
The piece’s second argument lies in its metafictional inquiry. Narratology is based on the assumption that story space and discourse space are two distinct domains that must not be confused. This assumption, however, is challenged by the Virtual Actor. On the one hand, the Virtual Actor resides in discourse space, as it is a recording device designed for narration. At the same time, it is a character that naturally belongs to story space. The Virtual Actor’s double identity destabilizes the division between these two spaces.