by Kevin Kerr
Playwright, Co-artistic Director – Electric Company Theatre

Many years ago when working on the first Electric Company play, I stumbled upon a video where an animator had assembled a large number of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study photographs into short looping animations. These were not unlike what Muybridge himself would have shown with his clumsily named “zoöpraxiscope”: a souped up magic lantern that would project photographs in rapid succession and create the illusion of movement.

And then in the middle of it all appears the man himself: Muybridge, naked and walking

Muybridge’s images on the video were haunting. As they played out in complete silence I was privy to living moments of time that predated the advent of cinema. His cameras examined the movement of horses, livestock, dogs and cats, birds, wild animals, and most compellingly, humans. Women and men, usually nude, were presented performing “everyday” actions alongside movements that were ritualistic, comic, sensual, absurd, and even diseased and pathological. The variations seemed endless. There was a tension in the collected images: scientific, classical, elegant, erotic, startling, disturbing, and grotesque. And all were undeniably compelling especially as they were in fact short film clips that were one hundred and twenty years old. And then in the middle of it all appears the man himself: Muybridge, naked and walking. He’s in stark contrast to the predominantely young and beautiful bodies surrounding him: a shock of white bushy hair, enormous beard, muscular but still with the body of a man nearing sixty. In the video he’s walking up an inclined plane and down again. And up... and down. Over and over like Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology doomed for all eternity to roll a stone to the top of a hill only to have it roll down the other side where he would follow it to begin the task all over again. Who was this guy?

But as they accumulated in front of me like the individual scenes of a longer movie I began to ask questions. I started to look for meaning, for story. I asked again, “Who was this guy?”

These little one second movies were deliberately designed to be without narrative. The backdrop was a mathematical grid, an abstract non-space with no defining feature to give a sense of “setting”. The actors were anonymous models, identified in the records only by a number so that there was nothing to indicate “character”. In fact most of the time the models appear nude so that there isn’t even “costume” to help us understand their social status or the period in which they live. The actions are limited to a single gesture or movement phrase – so short and isolated that they couldn’t be imbued with a specific “intention” or “goal” – there was no context to give the actions meaning - no place, no time, no costume, no character, no intention or goals. As these elements of narrative were missing, it must be assumed that narrative was not intended. But as they accumulated in front of me like the individual scenes of a longer movie I began to ask questions. I started to look for meaning, for story. I asked again, “Who was this guy?”

On the surface, the photos indicate a person committed to the emerging culture of modern science: understanding through controlled observation and rational analysis of our world, using the potential of technology to surpass the limits of our own senses to enhance our powers of perception. But stacked together they seemed to say something else.

This search for meaning not through the content, but through the context, defines our modern viewing culture. I began to think about our contemporary obsession with the image, our mediated culture where our information comes to us in isolated fragments that are arbitrarily juxtaposed with more isolated fragments. What was the missing narrative?