Steve Dixon (actor) - The Chameleons Group

The Chameleons Group

The Chameleons group was a multimedia performance research Company directed by Steve Dixon. The company was founded by Steve Dixon and Paul Murphy, and performer Wendy Reed in 1994. It was established from within the Media and Performance Research Unit (Now the Music, Media, and Performing Arts Research Centre) at the University of Salford. The group consisted of Wendy Reed, Fiona Watson, Paul Murphy, Steve Dixon and Sara Bailes.

The aim of The Chameleons Group was to create multimedia performances. The company devised and toured with live 'film-theatre' productions, where live actors work in front of large video screens, interacting with film characters and their own ‘digital doubles', and appear to move from the stage to the screen space. The company has also toured with many original theatre performances that experimented with the integration of video and live performance. In 2000, the group presented their most ambitious interactive cyber-theatre event ever staged, the performance allowed online audiences to direct the actors and write dialogue for the performances in real time.

The Chameleons group produced four performances, these were:

• Chameleons: The Dark Perversity of Chameleons
• Chameleons 2: theatre in a movie screen
• Chameleons3: Net Congestion’
• Chameleons 4: The Doors of Serenity

As well as four performances Steve Dixon went on to create a two award winning CD-ROM’s which documented and analysed the creation and rehearsal process of the performance’s of ‘The Dark Perversity of Chameleons’ and ‘Theatre in a Movie Screen’. More recently Chameleons Group performers have collaborated with artist: Paul Sermon, Andrea Zapp and Mathais Fuchs, on the telematic performance Unheimlich. Unheimlich was a telematic performance installation (funded by the Art Council) that was exhibited at conferences including SIGGRAPH which enabled the audience in the USA to participate in an improvisation with live performers in the UK. The performance used Freud’s notion of the uncanny, Unheimlich (at once familiar, homelike, but also strange, alien and uncomfortable) as its starting point.