kagablog

August 1st, 2006 by christo doherty

(photo christo doherty)

Sitting behind her Powerbook, with her back to the audience, Director Catherine Henegan’s Upgrade! presentation at this week’s Digital Soiree was an extension of the role that she plays in The Shooting Gallery, her controversial “digital ceremony” which is currently running at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg. The Shooting Gallery was Catherine’s debut as a theatre director in the Nederlands, where she studied at DASARTS (The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theatre Studies). During her performance in The Shooting Gallery, she communicates through her keyboard, dipping into archives of current news photographs, assembling in realtime an electronic meditation on the media world beyond the theatre. Projected onto a large screen in the theatre space, the mosaic of images, text, and video is also an interaction with the single performer, Aryan Kaganof, who improvises a primitivist counterpoint to the video stream on the screen above his head.

The form she has designed for The Shooting Gallery is an innovative attempt to incorporate physical energy with modern media technology. Kaganof, himself a digital filmmaker and a cult-figure on the Joburg underground scene, spends a significant part of the performance suspended upside down and naked, his body a cruciform screen onto which Catherine projects a spluttering collage of cut-up video and photographs. Lowered to the ground, Kaganof enacts a series of ritualistic sequences while Catherine assembles an electronic newspaper that progressively takes shape on the screen.

In her texted presentation she introduced the two works which were stepping stones to the creation of The Shooting Gallery. Her own short film, The Island (2004), a verite documentary about the life of a female beggar and her child who live on a traffic island in a busy Johannesburg traffic intersection; and and SMS, a mash-up of network news footage and South African struggle images. For her own video technique makes use of the Trivid software, designed by TeZ and Aart Muis of Sub Multimedia. The software generates random sequences from the actuality footage which she loads into it. This then becomes the raw material for her own edited sequences used in the context of the performance. Originally inspired by Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich’s book The Bang Bang Club about the group of young photographers who operated in the violence and turmoil of the South African black townships during the last years of Apartheid, the play goes beyond the immediate circumstances of that history to become a meditation on the construction of reality through contemporary global media.

this article originally published on http://atjoburg.net/