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| Illustration of The Tempest by Edmund du Lac, 1908 |
I've explained previously that I'm involved in an experiment in distance education. While 19 students attend this weekly night class in Provo at BYU, another three observe and interact via teleconferencing from the BYU Salt Lake Center. We're figuring out technical and pedagogical issues, and each week I will be experimenting with different modes of using teleconferencing.
For example, tonight a student actor in Salt Lake City will perform a monologue that will be broadcast to students in the Provo classroom. How will this change the performance experience for the actor, for the audience(s)? Would it be possible, for example, to imagine a virtual, collaborative performance -- something along the lines of Eric Whitacre's amazing virtual choir? (Austen Allred blogged a bit about this). Certainly online collaboration is not limited to business meeting type coordination, right? I read a science fiction book that imagined such blended collaborative performances, Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.
Perhaps it is appropriate to mention speculative fiction when introducing The Tempest. It is certainly a fantastical work: an enchanted island, a benign sorcerer, conjurations of spirits and visions, music and magic. Science fiction or fantasy literature is really a romantic genre -- not in terms of love stories, but in the older sense of the word romance that refers to legends and folklore. The Tempest fits in the category of plays known as Romances.
Romances are often premised upon distance: "once upon a time," "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." That distance lends a kind of glow to almost any enterprise. Emerson said, "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board." I think he means that distance offers a sense of possibility, of change, of transformation, and even the supernatural. Another Shakespearean romance, The Winter's Tale, plays upon the notion of credibility and ties this to faith. Things become credible faraway in time that are less so up close. Christians can believe that Jesus rose from the dead because it was two millennia ago; few among them believe that an angel appeared to Joseph Smith in 1820 America. Possibility multiplies with space, time, and distance.
In The Tempest, the isle over which Prospero presides has been separated from mainland Europe by great space (it is generally thought to be set in the Bermudas). And the play begins only after great time has elapsed -- pretty much the whole lifetime of his young adult daughter, Miranda.
So, what possibilities for transformation or change might attend a class divided by space as the one I am teaching? Obviously, as Miranda says, technology frequently takes us to a "brave new world." As The Tempest shows, such worlds combine the monstrous and the miraculous. Hopefully, we'll experience more of the latter...
