Sitting behind her Powerbook, with her back to the audience, Director Catherine Henegan’s Upgrade! presentation at this week’s Digital Soiree was an extension of the role that she plays in The Shooting Gallery, her controversial "digital ceremony"  which is currently running at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg.  The  Shooting Gallery was Catherine’s debut as a theatre director in the Nederlands, where she studied at DASARTS (The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theatre Studies).  Producing the work in  South Africa has been an exciting attempt to "bring local theatre into the 21st century".

_{Catherine Henegan during the discussion which followed her Upgrade! presentation at a Wits Digital Soiree.}

During her performance in The Shooting Gallery, she communicates through her keyboard, dipping into archives of current news photographs, assembling in realtime  an electronic meditation on  the media world beyond the theatre.  Projected onto a large screen in the theatre space, the mosaic of images, text, and video is also an interaction with the single performer, Aryan Kaganof, who improvises a primitivist counterpoint to the video stream on the screen above his head.

_{A photograph of The Shooting Gallery performance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Aryan Kaganof is in the foreground with Catherine Henegan in the background. The staging used for the Johannesburg performance was slightly different and, to my mind, more effective, with Catherine and her computer gear situated to the side of the performance area and the screen.}

The form she has designed for The Shooting Gallery is an innovative attempt to incorporate physical energy with modern media technology.  Kaganof, himself a digital filmmaker and a cult-figure on the Joburg underground scene, spends a significant part of the  performance suspended upside down and naked, his body a cruciform screen onto which Catherine projects a spluttering collage of cut-up video and photographs.  Lowered to the ground, Kaganof enacts a series of ritualistic sequences while Catherine assembles an electronic newspaper that progressively takes shape on the screen.

In her texted presentation she introduced the two works which were stepping stones to the creation of The Shooting Gallery. Her own short film, "The Island" (2003), a verite documentary about the life of a female beggar and her child who live on a traffic island in a busy Johannesburg traffic intersection; and  and "Toto! I have a feeling", a mash-up of network news footage and South African struggle images.  For her own video technique makes use of the Trivid software, designed by TeZ  of  Sub Multimedia.  The software generates random sequences from the actuality footage which she "throws into it".  This then becomes the raw material for her own edited sequences used in the context of the performance.  Presenting the footage in real time has necessitated extreme compression of the video footage; but Catherine confessed that she has  become fond of the aesthetics of low quality video.

Originally inspired by Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich’s book The Bang Bang Club about the group of young photographers who operated in the violence and turmoil of the South African black townships during the last years of Apartheid, the play goes beyond the immediate circumstances of that history to become a meditation on the construction of reality through contemporary global media.

_{A selection of screen shots from Catherine Hegenan’s presentation. The characteristic look of the Trivid video processing is apparent in the top three screens.}

In the lively discussion that followed her presentation the central issue that came up was her choice of a theatrical space for the presentation of  The Shooting Gallery.  Some members of the audience felt that a more appropriate venue would have been an art gallery or at least a space in which the work could have been read as performance art and not theatre.  Catherine admitted that many of the negative reviews of The Shooting Gallery had been handicapped by an expectation that it was a "play" with characters and a story arc.  She also acknowledged that theatre in South Africa is currently very conservative, and lacks the engagement with an international avant garde which characterises the visual arts scene in South Africa. Nevertheless, she insisted that the work functioned best in a theatrical space making use of the lighting and staging capabiliites that are possible in a theatre.