Frankenstein Performance Adaptation

In Roland Barthes’ essay ‘Death of the Author’, he argues against the idea of the author being like God and says that a text does not have a single meaning but ‘is a space of many dimensions’.^[1] Using this concept, as well as content from our source material, Frankenstein^[2], we created our monster-making machine; an anti-author god. Our adaptive journey is meditated around the number 6 and through a series of systems the text is transformed into various mediums, reflecting Shelley’s Frankenstein: a ‘monstrous’ text made of all the voices that it includes within itself and creates in its reception.

We looked at artists William Burroughs and John Cage whose work not only complimented each other but also our vision to portray the adaptive process rather than a finalised product. Burroughs states that ‘All writing is in fact cut ups. A collage of words read heard overheard’.^[3] His ‘cut-up’ technique informed our decision to dissect the text and we combined this with Cage’s chance composition where the text becomes musical notation. The use of the looping allows us to evoke the novel’s ‘play of doubles [which] is not restricted to mere duality but produces a spiralling movement which returns differently upon itself and inaugurates gaps between the text and author, while at the same time proposing an analogy between the relationships of author and Frankenstein and Frankenstein and Monster: a space is disclosed, a space of language and monstrosity.’^[4]This continuous spiralling effect is evident in our machine and all of its components.

The medium of photography and a live feed combines the live body of the performer with the ‘deadness’ of photography/film. Our monster is equally made up of individual performers, technologies and audience interpretation. The space is made up of a body that is both dead and alive, constantly evolving, changing and repeating itself while simultaneously generating new material. In this way a single author is not visible. The text crosses disciplines and forms, parts of it get lost in the process and others are repeated until the end, engaging with the processes and the very act of adaptation and interpretation.