It is daring to try to convey the emotions radiating from live theater into a Web site. It's a double dare for the Festival d'Automne, a Parisian performing-arts festival of international eminence since 1971, to unfold its newfound HTTPed frontier in a country where the presence of a French-tongued ad banner is considered a novelty at best, and an outrage to some. Despite Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's recent call for an increased national presence on the Web, URLs in the dailies are few and far between; and France Telecom itself only sneaks its link into the fine print of its impending privatization announcements.
The festival has no fixed location, and Alain Desnot, who conceived the Web site, says "the true site of the festival is its communication, and the Internet can become the site for its crystallization."
Though the Web site doesn't quite live up to the festival's excited hyperbole yet, a commitment to the medium and a long history of breaking new ground artistically promises an interesting future. Desnot says he intends to take time to learn more about the possibilities of the Web, and to "think about giving it some sense."
Since its launch early this month, the site has been in perpetual evolution, at first keeping much of the look and feel of the festival's official catalog, but quickly acquiring a spicy dose of Web savviness. The existing introductory notes to each of the shows are still somewhat burdened by a compulsory list of chi-chi sponsors, and next week a Java-based quiz yielding free tickets will be introduced. The site's content will be changing all year long, and a database of email addresses is being amassed for some flavor of push-media service.
The festival has an established tradition of uncanny delocalization - using the Saint-Louis Chapel of the Salpetriere Hospital for plastician installations, or transforming composer Pierre Henry's house into a homey concert venue - a situation which is right at the heart of the evanescent Web and its constant shifts in time and space.
Featured this year in the flesh - in addition to Robert Wilson, who has an open table here - will be more challenging artists (many of whom are already involved in Web projects of their own) like UK dance unit DV8 Physical Theatre, multimedia performers Dumb Type, and an unsettling rendition of House of the Sleeping Beauties, set in an apartment through which the spectator will meander like the old men of the novel, in awe of the young sleeping beauties freshly scooped from Paris streets.
Fabienne Regnaut, in charge of conception and development of the site, is determined to build "a metaphor for the place of spectacle, so that a unique multimedia representation corresponds to each show, more random and more playful." At the nexus of both worlds, she has a history of research into the integration of new technologies to the theater, a milieu that mostly thinks itself too literary for this kind of game.
Regnaut has worked in the past on software that mapped the movements of actors on the planks. Her most successful project to date is probably Paris Theatre, co-developed with Larry Friedlander of Stanford University, an interactive manipulation of the historical settings and characters in the pageant of theater that has taken place in the French capital.
It is a big step indeed, to try to fill the gap between technology and performing craftsmanship. By showing such riotous plays as Richard Foreman's Pearls for Pigs, a reflective turmoil in which the disturbed Maestro has set upon himself to "restore the purpose of the theater, which is to go up in flames," the Festival d'Automne has set a hard standard to live up to on the disparaged French region of the Web.
