Sarah Bay-Cheng

Mapping Intermediality in Performance

This volume examines afresh the impact upon acting and performance of digital technologies. It is concerned with how digital culture combines the traditional ‘liveness’ of theatre with media interfaces and internet protocols. The time and space of the ‘here and now’ are both challenged and adapted, just as barriers between theatre-makers and the ‘experiencers’ of events are broken down. Today many of us are everyday players performing the interconnectedness of digital culture and a key aim of the book is to unpack the multiple interrelations within the landscape of contemporary performance. Access to a range of ‘instances’ (The Builders Association, Castellucci, Castorf, Gob Squad, Lepage, Second Life and VJing) is through ‘portals’ which afford perspectives on the main characteristics of theatre and performance in the digital age.

‘When This You See’: The (anti) radical time of mobile self-surveillance

Of all the things computer technologies have changed, few are more fundamental than the effect on time of digital culture. Theorists such as Paul Virilio, Alice Rayner and others have argued that digital domains – still sometimes quaintly known as cyberspace – displace conventional notions of space and time, turning digital realms into virtually unlimited spaces that exist within a perpetual ‘now’. But even among the earliest formulations of computer technologies, the function of time was seen as significantly changed. ‘Time in the digital universe and time in our universe are governed by entirely different clocks,’ writes George Dyson in Turing’s Cathedral: The origins of the digital universe (2012: x). ‘To an observer in our universe,’ he writes ‘the digital universe appears to be speeding up’ (Dyson 2012: xi). As digital technologies are ever more closely connected to our every part of our daily life and integrated within our bodies, culture reflects the temporal effects of digital time. In hyper-connected, digitized culture, digital media have become an increasingly ubiquitous presence, such that the existence of a single moment in time is replaced by a continuous state of being. Take, for example, journalist Dan Lyons’s report from the 2012 International CES (the Consumer Electronics Show):

The Living Theatre: A Brief History of a Bodily Metaphor

By now, we are nearly all familiar with the metaphor of the living theatre. The life of the drama, the stage life, the living art wend their way continuously through the criticism, theory, and practice of theatre and performance studies of the past century or more. The analogy is so entrenched in the rhetoric of theatre and performance that we hardly register the oddity of the idea. The title of the 2010 ATHE conference—Theatre Alive: Theatre, Media, Survival—provides, perhaps, the best example of late. Examined more closely, however, we find that this figuration contains a central assumption in need of further questioning: the conception of theatre itself as a living, reproducing, and dying body. In this essay, we revisit the recent history of theatre’s body to articulate the persistence of this metaphor and its deeper implications for the field of theatre and performance studies. After a century of living, dying, postliving, and rebirth, such theoretical formulations, we argue, may be limited. Theatre itself is not and has never been a living thing, nor is it a body, though it is certainly constituted by living bodies. Such metaphors obscure the ways theatrical forms have always sought to

Theatre Squared: Theatre History in the Age of Media

In 1964, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould quit live performance in favor of perfecting recordings of his performances. In an essay published two years later, “The Prospects of Recording” (1966), Gould explained his decision by predicting that in the next century, the live concert would reach “extinction.” Far from a lamentable course of events, Gould embraced the end of the live performance as the opportunity for “a more cogent experience [of music] than is now possible” (47). The end of the live concert may never come, but Gould’s comments are eerily prescient of contemporary performance and its reliance on recording technology: first film, then video, and, more recently, digital recording. Much attention has been paid to the impact of these technologies on live theatre production and reception, but little criticism to date has considered the impact of recording technology on theatre history, on the archive in the making. And yet, moving images on screens have become a dominant, arguably the dominant, mode of viewing throughout our increasingly mediatized culture. From portable DVD players to video iPods to cellular phones, modern culture communicates onscreen. This essay is a preliminary consideration of the impact of recording technology on the study of theatre history, and a proposal for a critical means for assessing the phenomenon and effect of recorded, or mediated, theatre. “Mediated theatre” may be broadly defined as any theatrical performance originally created for live performance (that is, live actors in visual proximity to a live audience, although this distinction is hardly absolute) and subsequently recorded onto any visually reproducible medium, including film, videotape, or digital formats, presented as two-dimensional moving images on screens.

“I Am the Man!” Performing Gender and Other Incongruities

Abstract “I Am the Man!” Performing Gender and Other Incongruities

Digital Historiography and Performance

In the wake of the so-called digital revolution, media and technology affect not only performance practices, but also how the history of those practices can be documented, analyzed, and shared. The last several years have seen significant increases in digital research and scholarship projects, as well as more official recognition throughout the field, including special issues and edited collections dedicated to the digital humanities in theatre and performance studies research. At the same time, digital technologies offer new approaches to history that may themselves resemble performance. These histories need not be only linear, narrative historiography, but can enable a conception of historiography that exists in multiple places at once, incorporates many voices (some contradictory), and is distributed, sometimes bodily, among multiple perspectives. This essay considers both the distinctions between digital performance and digital methodologies in performance history and historiography, and how these changing digital practices—both methodological and creative—are shaping both the history of performance and history as performance. It responds to larger trends in digital methods affecting not only academia, but also contemporary culture more broadly. The convergence of these inquiries into digital history and theatre culminates in a case study of the Decision Points Theater at the George W. Bush Presidential Museum and Library in Dallas, where the recent history of the Bush presidency can be played out in real time by visitors through digital, performative displays.

Global Screen Shots

The Harbourfront Centre World Stage opened its season with the #artlive Vogue Ball, playing the hashtag of social media, itself a form of mediated performance, against the “realness” of the New York drag world. This programming decision broadcasted questions of authenticity, identity, and representation that would emerge as the most salient links among this year’s otherwise distinct offerings, alongside a corresponding interest in the consequences of performance’s ongoing appropriation of media. In addition to a host of international performances, World Stage has also dedicated resources to cultivating original work. These concerns were apparent across a range of works, from Kyle Abraham’s dance The Radio Show to a newly commissioned audio play from Fixt Point, titled The Tale of Harbourfront Centre, as well as in the festival’s embrace of a broad-based media platform. The festival’s strength, however, came from those offerings that were more difficult to absorb, bringing questions of contemporary culture, media, and politics to the forefront.

Virtual Realisms: Dramatic Forays into the Future

Technology futurist Jaron Lanier claimed to have coined the term virtual reality in the 1980s, but Antonin Artaud first used it when he argued that theatre belonged to the “virtual arts.” To the best of my knowledge Lanier never acknowledged artaud, and yet both highlight the notion of the virtual in art and performance as not about the technology with which it has most often been associated, but about a social and experiential phenomenon. Less cited than other essays (Susan Sontag’s collection ignores it entirely), artaud’s “The Alchemical Theater” (Le théâtre alchimique, 1932) draws on alchemy as a metaphor for theatre as the physical instantiation of an unseen and dangerous world lurking beneath the surface of everyday reality. not so different from Lanier’s description of what the “sense organs perceive,” artaud’s theatrical fantasies have much in common with virtual reality,

Climate Report from the United States

This performative provocation replays a moment of political anticipation leading up to the US presidential election of 2016 and reflects on those sentiments with musical accompaniment by the Rolling Stones.

Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology

Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well. This description comes from the September 2009 blog post ‘Life Recorders May Be This Century’s Wrist Watch’, a reflection as much about the ways in which we capture and process memory as it is about the possibilities for new devices. In fact, Michael Arrington’s post for TechCrunch was not about an actual device that could do these things; rather, it was an anxious look to the future possibilities of forthcoming devices. ‘Imagine’, Arrington posits, ‘an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors.’ Part wonder, part horror, Arrington’s essay focused attention on what would become a frequent feature of contemporary life: the compulsive, even obsessive desire to capture and translate every experience – however momentary, however unexperienced, however trivial – into digital images for recording, searching, and re-searching in the future. Arrington suggests that the emergence of a life recorder functions as a form of digital memory, but we might also consider how digital records have become not only encoders of personal memory, but also new 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 507– 30 (p. 527).