“Blue Velvet, Live!”: Shadow Casting and the Politics of Becoming the Movie

Eli Horwatt, York University

Shadow casting refers to the practice of staging live theatrical performances directly in the foreground of a film screening, which pantomime the original cinematic text to produce alternative readings and new contextual framings of popular cinema. Performers in a shadow cast negotiate the characters, spaces, set design, and camera movement of a film with the fixed theatrical frontality of a play, while audiences derive great pleasure both from the communal and participatory experience encouraged by the actors and from the humor inherent in the divergences between the two mediums.

Unlike the rhetoric of reanimating the theater present in multi-media experimental theater performances associated with directors and collectives like Robert Wilson, Robert Lapage and the Wooster Group, shadow casts come from a folk art context and reverse this precedent by reintroducing theatricality to the cinema. Drawing parallels between shadow casting and other forms of cinematic appropriation like found footage, digital video remixing and the preponderance of remaking in contemporary experimental media (evinced in the work of Pierre Huyghe and Francesco Vezzoli), I frame this process as the folk art repossession of films, often for the purposes of critical transformation. Though this practice has historically been linked to the cult phenomenon The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a series of performance in Toronto have produced shadow casts of Blue Velvet (recasting the psychopathic Frank Booth as a young boy), Jurassic Park (transforming the immersive CGI ride film into a burlesque masquerade ball) and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (contextually reframed as a commentary on bike activism by a local bike lanes legislation organization). My essay engages shadow casting with the discourses of medium specificity, appropriation, adaptation, and conceptualizes the history and future possibilities of the technique.