What Will We Do On Saturday Night?

By Julie Taymor

We thought movies would kill live theater. We thought television would kill movies. Now we ask whether video/computer/ virtual-reality images streaming into our homes will keep us on the couch Saturday night.

I doubt it. Entertainment works as a private but also a social event. Movies on the VCR don't keep people from going to the multiplex, just as boxing on pay-per-view doesn't stop fans from craving ringside seats. The senses are a huge part of the experience. The smell of popcorn, the crush of bodies, the communal sense of anticipation and the space itself all add to the story of the entertainment. Spaces, architectural enclosures, shape our relation to an event. You can pray at home. But a church, mosque or synagogue gives prayer scale, grace and a heightened sense of spirituality because of the aura of sacred ritual deemed appropriate within the religious house. People cling to ritual. It gives structure and comfort to chaos. It creates a sense of awe.

I need awe in my life. The Internet experience doesn't awe me. The act of sitting at a computer is so unaesthetic and unsexy--all those cables, that horrid fluorescent screen, those puny two-dimensional images. Give me a human voice over e-mail. I like the sound of communicative delivery--the tone of voice, the innuendo. Of course, I appreciate convenience when I'm using a search engine to find gifts, vacations or pieces of information. But as a way to spend leisure time--not for me. The closer the World Wide Web seems to bring us together, the truly farther apart we are. It's simply too safe, too anonymous and too antiseptic. All those numbers, dots and letters. Some messy inkblots, please. Who doesn't prefer ripping open a sealed envelope?

When cable television arrived to expand our viewing possibilities, it multiplied the mindless rubbish you have to wade through to find something worth seeing. There is so much information running rampant that the object of desire has been thoroughly obscured. What is the desire that entertainment fills? We want to be touched emotionally, be viscerally moved, perhaps have our minds challenged, or at best blown. We travel to a different place when we enter the world of a storyteller. Some call it escape; some call it experience.

Sensory experience. We live in our bodies. Our heart beats faster when we are scared; our eyes tear when we are emotionally touched; and we howl, hoot, whistle and clap when turned on. No amount of technological development will alter our basic instincts. Watch a film in a large theater, and the experience will be doubly charged, not by the size of the screen but by the energy of the audience. Coliseums, football stadiums, rock concerts--to be a part of the action, as opposed to just being a voyeur, is as old as the ritual of performance. Yet bigger does not necessarily mean better. Off-Broadway theater is doing very well right now, and the physical intimacy of the live event has a lot to do with its success. Feeling that your presence affects the event may become more and more important as we look to be entertained in the 21st century.

I have no doubt that live theater will continue to exist. Its very liveness--its impermanence, its vulnerability to error, its essential humanness--is its unique draw. Its survival will depend on the tension-filled interplay between the raw and the cooked--the balance between high and low technology, primal spirit and cultural concoction. Live theater will blend with three-dimensional digital projection as that technology develops and becomes economically feasible. And I look forward to films moving off the flat screen to invade the dimensions of space. With the onslaught of interactive play, there will no doubt be cinematic experiences in which the viewer can control the outcome of the story, as now happens in video games. But interactivity is not the most important thing. If we, as social animals, are to be lured away from the convenience and comfort of our home-entertainment center, it will be for a shared physical, sensory experience that yields the unique and evokes awe.

As we rave about the lifestyle changes that technology will bring, the essential questions of substance and quality of content never seem to change. It took an artist's vision to imagine and create the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, the Duomo in Florence. Technology cannot imagine. It's just a tool, like a chisel. I look forward to the vision and imagination of the artists who will harness these transforming media to tell the old tales in a new way.

Julie Taymor is director of the musical The Lion King; the movie Titus; and The Green Bird, due on Broadway this spring