The ‘Silent Conversation’ given a voice
By Geoff Ryman

All art finally happens in the heads of the audience.  Its final form is what the audience performs, imagines, and decides. 

It’s that final part of the artistic process that gets integrated into the experimental new show Kamza Bar Kamza about to receive a special performance at The Loft at UC San Diego’s new Price Centre.

The show retells an ancient tale from the Talmud with speech, live modern music, and audio visuals.  But the audience come with laptops and use them to become part of the show themselves.   This is an attempt to get at what the show’s principal creator Shlomo Dubnov calls “the silent conversation” that follows any concert or show.  “People go away and imagine the show or think about it, but this last phase of the artistic experience is lost.”   For him this is a core element that is missed by a lot of interactive art.  

“In games you get the audience determining the outcome of the action, but what interactivity is missing often is the reflective and deliberative part.  Our core story of Kamza Bar Kamza does not move.   What does shift is what the audience makes of it.  They become a kind of Greek Chorus within the performance.”

Talmudic texts are particularly useful source material for a show with these aims.  The texts are plain, but their meanings are not. The whole point of Talmudic texts is the debates they inspire. 

“It’s a story about a refusal to compromise and continuing escalation.  The performances will use prepared videos to link the story to modern conflict, from the Bay of Pigs invasion to Gaza. We want to give the audience a chance to express themselves on these issues.  Ideally, there might be an actual debate during the performance.  There will be mikes for that, but people don’t have to stand up if they don’t want to.”

“The aim of art is to get at truth, but who knows what the truth is?  It’s a moving target, it’s created socially.  The truth of a piece is often created years after the initial publication or performance of a piece, and it is often missed.  This show tries to bring into the thing itself.”

Geoffrey Charles Ryman is an award winning writer of science fiction, fantasy and surrealistic or "slipstream" fiction. His own hypertext novel, uploaded in stages from 1996 to 1998 is called 253 and is about 253 people on a London Underground tube train. It won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award for best novel not published in hardback, and can still be found in all it's hand-coded, 1995 HTML glory at www.ryman-novel.com .