Punchdrunk Faust and a lesson in rights management

(This post includes references to the PunchDrunk production of Faust running in London until the end of Mar07. If you plan to see it, reading this post might spoil the experience.)

Last night my wife and some friends and I went to see Punchdrunk's Faust, a mostly-silent theatrical performance spread over the whole interior of an abandoned Wapping warehouse. The building is vast and barely illuminated, and the performance consisted of what I suppose may have been as many as a couple of hundred audience members in identical anonymising masks following a dozen or so actors across multiple sets, multiple floors and multiple intertwined plots. Punchdrunk's Faust isn't entirely like a play or a party or a piece of performance art, and in a tip to the media buzzterm of our age - audience engagement - much of the atmosphere is created by the sea of identical blank faces presented by fellow audience members.

So much for theatre review - I do not have the knack. However one point in particular came out of the post-show conversation (in a basement bar that was part of the set) and I would like to share with you - "what a shame you can't get it on DVD".

It would be impossible to capture Punchdrunk's Faust using any existing recording technology. The interaction between atmosphere, location, actors and audience would be lost in any linear presentation and seen on screen the experience would be almost meaningless. And this, it occurred to me, is perhaps the most reliable form of rights-management remaining to us. In a thirst to reach impossibly large global audiences, artists and studios have compartmentalised artistic endeavour into a handful of categories which admit of mass duplication and marketing - songs, films, books, games. It is perhaps this thirst for mass audiences that makes it trivial to steal film and TV online; trivial (though inexplicably uncommon) to copy and distribute books; effortless to pirate music.

Jeff Jarvis advises news originators to concentrate on what they do best and link to the rest. Wise words - but can they be stretched far beyond their original reference to the potential uniqueness of news content? Musicians (and record companies) fight with Napster and YouTube when they could be emphasising - and monetising - the uniqueness of live performance. Performance artists (and film companies) fight with BitTorrent when they could be doing the same with the inimitable nature of live performance. And (some) game designers have already cracked this problem with persistent, non-linear, interactive gameworlds which are monetised not via the sale of easily-duplicated software but as a fee to take part.

What does this tell us? Perhaps only what Cory Doctorow has told us already, that "content isn't king. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about". Perhaps that charging for content, a virtually dead model already in a number of industries (notably online news) is a strategy belonging to a time when a printing press wasn't owned by everyone. (Writers of teaching books were telling me, as much as twenty-five years ago, that the advent of the photocopier had demolished their own business model as each school bought one book and copied the relevant worksheets for the class.) Sure, in one sense there's less money in reaching the sort of audience that can visit a concert arena or a theatre than there is in selling millions of copies to a global audience. But in another, the tools that let you reach that audience with your material are the tools that let the audience steal it. Creative forms that are all about the experience - and therefore fundamentally unrecordable - are already on the rise.