Saturday, July 4, 2009

Thank You, But Our Princess is in Another Castle

As delightfully elusive as its title Eddie Kim's four machinima theater pieces that make up an engaging show at The Brick Theater substitute gamers and virtual worlds for actors and theatrical performance. According to the program the first half is comprised of "Neo In Liberty City," which involves an Xbox 360 running Grand Theft Auto 4 and samples of Alvin Lucier's "I am Sitting in a Room" and "The Matrix," and "The Four Factions," which is based on Samuel Beckett's "Quad" and uses five laptops running Warcraft 3. From there it's on to "Komachi," which is four laptops running Warcraft set to Kim's adaptation of Kwanami's "Sotoba Komachi," and finally "Niobe," Kim's adaptation of Ted Hughes' "Tales from Ovid" performed on three Xbox consoles running Halo 3 (and the most literal narrative of the pieces with bows and arrows replaced by robots with submachine guns though the text remains the same).

Of course if angels come to mind at the mention of the word "Halo" the above paragraph may as well have been written in Klingon.

To read the rest of my review visit Theater Online.

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