Electric Company Theatre

In researching his new play, Kevin Kerr developed a darker picture

of famed 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge

BY COLIN THOMAS,

GEORGIA STRAIGHT, JAN12-19/2006

In a series of still images, a naked middle-aged man with bushy white hair and a powerful physique walks in black space that white lines divide into a grid. The erotic invitation to gaze at his body collides with the implicit admonition to regard him as a specimen, an animal: animated meat. According to Vancouver playwright Kevin Kerr, the tension between the two impulses produces a particularly modern form of nausea. For these shots, late-19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge is his own model. Kerr, who has taken Muybridge as the subject for his latest play, says it's as if the artist is trying to dissect not just his own body's movements but his body itself, to slice it into so many pieces that it can no longer overwhelm him with its instincts and emotions.

Kerr won a Governor General's Award for Unity (1918), his lyrical and nightmarish evocation of the Spanish flu epidemic, and he has created another epic work in Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge. The Electric Company Theatre's multimedia coproduction with Theatre at UBC and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival opens on Tuesday (January 17) and runs until January 29 at the Frederic Wood Theatre. As we speak, tucked into a corner of the campus venue's lobby, Kerr describes Muybridge as "a man lost, a ghost in a machine of his own making," a flesh-and-blood creature trapped in a world of atomized knowledge.

Muybridge, who was a celebrated landscape photographer before he embarked on thousands of movement studies involving both humans and animals, is still most famous for the series of photos he took of a horse galloping. Using technology that was state-of-the-art in 1878, Muybridge proved that there is a point at which a galloping horse's hooves are all off the ground at the same time-although it's when the legs are contracted, not when they're extended as some previously claimed.

When Kerr started investigating Muybridge's story, he imagined that he would discover a man of romantic, Whitmanesque passions, partly because of the wild white mane. But, the playwright says, "I found out that he was not like Walt Whitman at all. He was very strange, somewhat reclusive and obsessive, and prone to erratic behaviour--like murder, for instance."

Kerr explains how Muybridge believed his hair turned white before he became a photographer, because of the shock of a near-fatal stagecoach accident. Others think the trauma may have resulted in a brain injury. Most of the play's story takes place years later. Muybridge is informed that his young wife, Flora, has been having an affair with Col. Harry Larkyns, the theatre critic for the San Francisco Post. He seeks Larkyns out, says, "My name is Muybridge. I have a message for you from my wife," and shoots the man to death. At his murder trial, the jury rejects the artist's plea of insanity but acquits him on the grounds that the killing was justified. Muybridge starts to howl and claw at his flesh. Kerr notes, "He didn't expect to live, but he was left to be his own judge, which may have been worse [than being hanged]."

In Kerr's script, an invented character, a young woman named Blanche who is working as a clerical assistant on the motion studies and is feeling overwhelmed by their philosophical implications, asks her boss Muybridge, "What do you do when everything you think you know is gone?" Muybridge replies: "You start again, looking at the world in very small and reliable pieces until a new picture emerges. Madness is the other option."

Muybridge used the camera to shave time into thinner slices than the human eye can capture. In doing so, he sparked an artistic revolution that led to the invention of cinema, influenced the surrealists' sense of alienation, and inspired everything from the alienation of the surrealists to the quotidian sensuality of Isadora Duncan's choreography and the loneliness of Francis Bacon's paintings. The playwright sees a dark side to the photographer's journey: "It's atomistic, right? Like, what's the smallest moment of time that we can compartmentalize? It's like looking at something closer and closer and closer until eventually it all falls apart."

At the end of Kerr's play, Muybridge is a tragic figure consumed by his obsession with controlling experience by breaking it down. Blanche, on the other hand, is liberated by new ways of seeing. Although she too fears getting lost in the apparent gap between lived experience and the revelations of technology, she is able to synthesize scientific and emotional viewpoints. "To try to hold something in view is to destroy it," she says. "And the art of seeing is the art of constantly looking away-the image briefly held in the mind to be combined with the next item and the next item, and the next. The meaning is in the memory and so you must always look away to understand."