The Met goes tech again

Caught this New York Times article about the production of Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust," touted to be the Met's first "interactive opera." Interactive how? Well, imagine singers on stage controlling lighting, sets, and all kinds of special effects merely by their movement and/or voice.

A stage director's nightmare? Maybe... Consider how theater is staged today: Actors (I use "actors" as a generic term to include singers) act on stage; a stage manager in the wings observes the action and dialog and calls light cues, set movements and/or changes, cues for sound Foley (e.g., thunder), warns actors and chorus of their entrances, and a hundred other things. But there's an often perceptible delay between when she calls a cue and when the actual operation happens. Ideally, she tries to call the cues far enough in advance to account for the delay, but anytime you're dealing with human processes, there is variability.

Imagine, however, the stage of the future: An infrared sensor picks up an actor's movement--say, an arm in the air--and sends a signal to a central computer system with specialized software that interprets that signal to cue lighting (e.g., lightning), sound (thunder), or a set piece (a wind machine). Because the computer can "talk" to all the systems faster than any human every could, the actions are, for all intents and purposes, to our "slow" eyes and ears, simultaneous. Better yet, the sensors can interpret how the actor's arm is moving. Perhaps he lowers it, signaling the lightning and thunder to abate slightly so he can deliver a line, and then throws it back into the air, signaling another crescendo in the storm.

Don't get the idea that this technology will ever supplant the stage manager. There are still stupid actors who don't know their cues to push out on stage, choruses to call to the wings, and ten thousand other things that humans, so far, do better than computers. However, this kind of technology can do what technology is usually invented to do: take some of the drudgery out of a task. For predictable processes, the machine can handle them. This leaves the stage manager free to deal with things that are more problematic (e.g., wigs caught on epaulets). Of course, she also must ensure that the technology works as it should and be prepared to take over should anything go wrong.

Technology we take for granted geeks call "ubiquitous." We don't have to think about how much gas to put into the carburetor of our cars to faster, we just push on the gas pedal and electromechanical systems do the rest. We don't have to stand by the coffeemaker to switch it off at the end of a brew cycle, it knows when there's no water left in the reservoir. We don't have to tell the television to tune to 79.25 megahertz to get channel 6, it knows that already. Just as we don't think about these technologies working, we may someday take it for granted that an automated spotlight will follow an actor around the stage or that the gels will all turn red when the devil appears or that the curtain will fall at the end of an act. We won't have to think about it, it will just happen.