by Ralph Bingham


It’s a sunny Spring evening. I’m in the ware­house that houses the office and work space of the Elec­tric Com­pany in East Van to inter­view its Artis­tic Direc­tor, Kevin Kerr. I’m here mostly to talk about Kerr’s 2006 play, Stud­ies in Motion, based on the life and work of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary photographer-scientist Ead­weard Muy­bridge, whose pho­to­graphic stud­ies of human and ani­mal loco­mo­tion stand at the divid­ing line between still pho­tog­ra­phy and film. The con­ver­sa­tion ends up rov­ing far and wide across the­atre, art and truth.

While he speaks, though, my eye keeps being drawn to two items on the over­stuffed shelves behind his head: a book enti­tled Lucid Dream­ing, and a box for the game Twister. There’s some­thing about these two arti­facts that sum up what Elec­tric Com­pany is. Dreams. Mem­ory. Pure phys­i­cal energy.

Muy­bridge was, as Kerr puts it, ‘an enig­matic character’—landscape pho­tog­ra­pher turned sci­en­tist, his pho­tographs were pro­duced using a series of cam­eras shoot­ing in sequence. He pro­duced approx­i­mately 100,000 images between 1883 and 1886. This body of work (of which 20,000 images were pub­lished in plates avail­able to sub­scribers) rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way that phys­i­cal loco­mo­tion was understood.

But, though this was what Kerr stum­bled upon originally—in the form of a series of VHS cas­settes con­tain­ing strung-together ani­ma­tions of the plates—it was Ead­weard Muy­bridge the man that drew his atten­tion to the ‘the­atri­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties’ of his story. As Kerr watched the cas­settes, he felt that ‘a sense of obses­sion began to emanate from’ them, which he ini­tially put down to some kind of Walt Whitman-esque fas­ci­na­tion with the human body. What he found couldn’t have been fur­ther from that impres­sion. He dis­cov­ered an awk­ward, intensely seri­ous man with a failed mar­riage who had mur­dered his wife’s lover (an act fol­lowed by an acquit­tal on the basis of jus­ti­fi­able homicide)—‘It just felt like melo­drama,’ says Kerr.

He goes on to describe his fas­ci­na­tion with ‘this inter­est­ing dual­ity between these motion stud­ies which seemed to be very clinical…everything stripped away from the actions. Everything’s sort of— All sorts of indi­ca­tors of inten­tion are stripped away… They seemed to be very anti-narrative. They were just actions, raw.’

At this point Kerr seems lost in the world of the ideas for a moment. ”There’s this curi­ous sort of choice of actions’—action that, in the human stud­ies, con­tain sub­stan­tial themes of ‘sen­su­al­ity, eroti­cism, humor, and vio­lence’. Kerr real­ized that the ‘pho­tos felt like a metaphoric attempt to atom­ize life’—actions that weren’t ‘cor­rupted by emo­tions’. An attempt to get to some kind of unadul­ter­ated truth about the vio­lence in Muybridge’s past by frag­ment­ing the com­plex­i­ties of sim­i­lar motions until each moment could be stud­ied indi­vid­u­ally: ‘rearranged and assem­bled to suit yourself’.

What does all this say to a mod­ern the­atre audi­ence look­ing for a mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ence? Kerr observes this moment in his­tory as ‘a point in the ongo­ing birth of a really visu­ally ori­ented cul­ture… We’re pretty skep­ti­cal about our phys­i­cal per­cep­tion of the world as being a source for our under­stand­ing of our total truth. Or the idea of truth being out­side of us, I guess—it’s the con­tem­po­rary kind of thing—you sep­a­rate the human sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence from the notion of truth. And Muybridge’s work was one big part of an ongo­ing series of events that con­vinced us that truth was not avail­able to us except through sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. So that there are things that we can’t—we’re not afforded the abil­ity to see with­out some sort of mech­a­nism or medium that will lift the veil off of nature and give us insight, and so today we are all about the things that we use to nego­ti­ate our world and that we turn to, to give us truth, like MRIs or some Google algo­rithm.’ Or a pho­to­graph. Evidence.

I ask him, ‘As an artist, are you cre­at­ing some­thing that replaces people’s ways of pro­cess­ing events for them­selves?’ This is not a new ques­tion for Kevin Kerr, or for Elec­tric Com­pany. He coun­ters: ‘Art can be one of those agents that installs itself into your being’—‘art that sedates us and assures us… On the other hand, the other ver­sion of art is the art that shocks and stim­u­lates us; that tears that mem­brane open and allows us to see the world in a new way…’

Kerr artic­u­lates for him­self and for us that ‘art is expe­ri­en­tial at its core’. The vibrant, image-rich, site-specific the­atre for which Elec­tric Com­pany is well-known demon­strates this con­cept to its fullest. The upcom­ing ‘You are Very Star’ at the H.R. MacMil­lan Plan­e­tar­ium, fol­low­ing last year’s (now tour­ing) ‘Tear the Cur­tain’ devised around Vancouver’s his­toric Stan­ley The­atre, promises an oppor­tu­nity to enter a lucid dream with Elec­tric Com­pany. Let’s just hope that Twister stays up on the shelf behind Kevin Kerr’s head.


This piece first appeared on Sad Mag (online) on June 23, 2012.