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Section 2a - The Fifth Wall
doo-cot’s concept of the 5th wall (1) is driven by the term 4th wall which is used in theatre. The 4th wall is the style of Western naturalisic theatre, in which the stage is treated as a room with one wall missing. The term now applies to the ‘wall’ separating audience and performers on any type of stage, the audience is traditionally unacknowledged or addressed by the actors; the audience is supposedly seeing a ‘slice of life’.
The 5th wall is a term doo-cot uses which means breaking the 4th wall of performance – with the use of new technologies – technology itself captures time fragments and memories. By using technology within performance – the 5th wall is the concept of transporting to another space – hyperspace. In hyperspace audiences will be transported – eventually literally – onto the stage. This of course is not new - it was Brecht’s innovation (in the 1930s) to use new media like film, radio, and Neher’s back projections within productions. Breaking the 4th wall was also a method employed in Brechtian theatre with performers ‘slipping’ out of character and addressing the audience directly.
In his poem ‘Portrayal of Past and Present in One’ – Bertolt Brecht suggests a performance is 'Now' layered with the 'Previous' and 'Afterwards' – so a live event means the audience is:
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Being a constructivist – Brecht’s eye was always on the monitor – the overview not being lost in the cathartic process of Stanislavsky's Method Acting. Giving the audience analysis of a situation - rather than identification with the characters - to inspire critical thought about how what you just saw related to your reality. Making the everyday unfamiliar (Verfremdung) is not about alienation but rather denaturalisation - refreshing the eyes of the 4th wall. The Verfremdungseffekte was the 'device for making strange' and this was aided by the use of new technology within Brechtian theatre.
Brecht's other innovations: the use of everyday language, the use of the comic form, the use of cabaret techniques and the encouragement of an audience's freedom to talk – THIS IS TV!!! Interestingly certain audiences can no longer behave ‘properly’ in the live performance and treat the event like a TV set in the living room – they are trapped in their living rooms and cannot even leave them even when they enter a public performance space. The silent audience was a recent construct and it seems already passing into oblivion. (3)
Audiences create the theatre with their presence. The audience is a 4th wall – a wall of eyes. But we demand the audience brings more with it than eyes – it must bring all its senses and their bodies too. Theatre must be experienced bodily. If not sit at home and watch the telly – potato – fully processed in your salty bag. (4)
There is some thing frightening and profound about live theatre, the unspoken union of audience and performers. It is an intangible phenomena and has its roots way back within ritual. But because we are a ‘civilised’ society and our rituals are mostly restrictive - the use of technology may be the key to unlock audience’s melding with a performance into a dimension beyond time, trespassing into the 5th wall. What do ghosts walk through? We show the technological Now layered with the Previous and the Afterwards. The Back and Forward in the Now of your Browser.
For theatre to truly transcend the 4th wall - it demands that the audience enters into the ‘trespass’. To enter into the website and see beyond – you need to click…
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