The Unmediatisable Eye Contact

If ‘unmediatisable’ is a word... If ‘mediatisable’ is a word... Actually, it could be argued whether anything can be mediatised without being altered. But at least on the reception end, sentiments can be evoked by a mediatised object (or work or thing) as much as the ‘real’ (or ‘original’ or unmediatised) one. Roland Barthes certainly felt emotional when looking at his mother’s photographs[1]. There have been a lot of discussions on the affect of online performances especially during the pandemic[2]. But what cannot be mediatised in the sense that without actual physical presence the feelings one normally experiences would fail to transmit through media? (Obviously with current technology, it is still difficult to replicate tactile, olfactory or gustatory sensations telematically, but they are not my major concern here because in the context of theatre, these senses are fairly rarely crucial elements of a performance.)

Today I participated in a site-specific work produced by One Step Theatre, created and performed by young students (I later learned three of them are fourteen and one seventeen). True to its description as ‘a tapestry of recorded audio and movement performances’[3], the event took place at a local park, where participants gathered around a patch of trees, listening to a pre-recorded audio track while watching the students perform. The audio is basically monologues of reflections on nature, touching on issues such as paying attention to the natural surrounding, as the title of the event suggests, human’s relation with nature, and global warming, etc. The performers were also listening to the audio at the same time. Their movements looked like half pre-deviced acts half response to the general content of the recording, like observing plants and insects, dancing or moving in semi-dancing gestures, alone or with each other. Sometimes they would interact with the participants like a wave, walking pass us or just standing in front of us.

On two occasions a girl stood before me, and with no facial expressions just looked straight into my eyes for several seconds. I tried to respond with a smile but after about two seconds I couldn’t help feeling timid and slightly turning away. But the girl held her gaze firmly. I was rather surprised. In my mind I was admiring her professionality like a real trained actor and at the same time wondering why I was intimidated by a teenage girl’s eye contact. It probably has nothing to do with the theme of the performance, but this was what left the deepest impression on me: a simple penetrating eye contact. It indeed can be powerful. In 2010, Marina Abramović presented a performance called The Artist Is Present at MoMA where she simply sat quietly looking eyes with a visitor. This work is essentially nothing but eye contact. Yet people queued for hours, and many were ‘moved to tears’[4]. It seems to be the best example of the power of simple presence[5], glorified by Peggy Phelan and later dismissed by Philip Auslander in their famous ‘liveness’ debate (which I have written about in my previous entries).

I would of course be reluctant to go back to the pre-postmodern (if that is a thing) essentialist binary of ‘absolute theatrical presence’ versus mediatised non-presence. But it is interesting to revisit this debate in relation to eye contact in online performances. In the pandemic, a large number of online productions are streamed staged shows either pre-recorded (archival) or performed in real time. If the looking relation in the illusionist proscenium and darkened auditorium theatre configuration is one-directional, then the screen becomes the ultimate fourth-wall making the spectator who watches at home even more like a voyeur. Not that these performances are not interactive at all. Audience participation takes many forms like live chat, hashtag comments on social media and so on. Face-to-face (virtual) and synchronous interaction is featured in many other productions as well, especially the prevalent so-called Zoom theatre during lockdowns. Zoom, a platform designed for corporate conferencing can make eye contact in performances very interesting and different from usual in-person theatre experiences.

On the one hand, when the performer directly addresses the audience, it could feel more intimate as if it were a one-to-one communication, whereas on stage, the performer normally looks at a general direction in the auditorium. Except occasionally when the performer picks an individual spectator, the audience are usually addressed as a collective. Probably more interestingly, in some productions, for example, Creation Theatre’s Horatio! and Hamlet (September 2020) about a devastated Hamlet confiding in his best friend Horatio over Zoom during lockdown. It is sometimes unclear when Horatio performs to the camera, whether he is talking to Hamlet, or to the audience, or it is an aside (i.e. he is talking to himself). Conventionally, theatre is a fluid space where the performer can break the theatrical frame by acknowledging and addressing the audience. The video-conferencing platform designed for face-to-face communication thus becomes a facilitator of such fluidity. And it can further unstablise the frame by making it intentionally ambiguous whom the performer is speaking to (whether they are breaking the frame or not).

On the other hand, the direct eye contact on screen is an illusion. Whether used on a smartphone, tablet, computer (with integrated or external webcam), or television, the camera cannot be positioned at exactly the same spot as the displayed eyeline of the user on the other side. That is why performers have to train themselves to look at the camera instead of their screens when performing in Zoom productions.[6] I am curious therefore what a performance such as The Artist Is Present would be like if presented on digital media, whether the performer could really ‘delude’ the audience into believing that they have direct eye contact, if so, or if technology one day could make it really happen, whether a mediatised fixed gaze could have the same penetrating affect on its receiver.


[1] Barthes, R. (1993) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. London: Vintage.

[2] To be added.

[5] According to Pascale Aebischer, ‘Abramović’s work has become a touchstone of reflections about absolute theatrical presence’. Aebischer, P. (2020) Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[6] I have discussed the use of camera (and eye contact) in online performances in more detail in my ongoing thesis. 

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