Tarik Abdel-Gawad, director of the award-winning projection-mapping spectacular, Box, has finally released his pre-Box masterpiece, a robot-aided update of Tchaikovsky's ballet fantasia, Francesca da Rimini, a piece as revered for its heartwrenching subject matter as for its incredibly precise choreography. Abdel-Gawad took the piece one step further, employing a massive, robot-controlled camera to capture the deftness of the dance.
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Although the article does make mention of how incredibly well the robot and the dancers are in sync with one another, there is no way to describe its genius until witnessing it. This is a beautiful example of how art and technology are rapidly coming together, building off of elements of the other in order to create something better. For a large period of time, forms of art were kept where they were intended. If the author’s intention was for it to be a play, it would be a play. Nowadays, that is not necessarily the case. Audiences are being opened up to several different interpretations of the same original piece. For example, musicals are rapidly growing in the film industry, television networks are producing plays, entertainment once intended for live theater is now being shifted to an area where it can be watched as many times as a viewer pleases to. While some may think the awe of witnessing live performance is lost, this can easily be argued. Even though someone in a film setting can call cut and choose to redo the scene, and live music has a significantly different vibe compared to something recorded and edited in a studio, the raw emotion felt in an actor’s performance is not lost, it is in fact improved. The audience sees every detail in a way that cannot be mimicked by a stage setting. This new technology of piecing together the grace of art and the mechanics of technology allows an up-close and personal experience for audiences. The element of live performance is still very much present and the one-cut attitude the director adopts only solidifies why this is an excellent direction to take in the world of theater.
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