Drama and the Digital Revolution

While artists in different countries certainly have different levels of expertise , resources and equipment available, it is true that many performing arts professionals increasingly see themselves as ‘creators of experiences’. This, combined with the fact that theatre has always played with different levels of ‘virtual reality’, creates the conditions for an interesting reflection on the theatre for the future - a future that is already here. The text that follows is divided in two parts. In Section 1 the curator of this publication, Joris Weijdom - himself a researcher and designer of theatrical mixed reality experiences - takes you on a playful but serious tour along the issues at stake when designing a mixed reality experience. Using a witty style and practical examples, the text is appetizing for both total beginners and advanced users. In Section 2 fellow practitioners from different countries including tactical media art group, pvi collective share their own experiences, give practical insights into their practices, and share their learnt lessons, tips, and possibilities for development and collaborations. Mixed Reality and the Theatre of the Future Fresh Perspectives on Arts and New Technologies by Joris Weijdom Published by IETM - International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts, Brussels In partnership with HKU - University of the Arts Utrecht Original edition: March 2017 (pdf version)

Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies, 2021

As digital design increasingly inscribes its own narrative from the outset of the rehearsal process, twenty-first century theatre artists and audiences are becoming more and more accustomed to porous dramaturgies, influenced by information technologies and digital articulations. This article explores the use of technology in contemporary performance by interrogating the diverse functions of the multimedia element by touching on a number of theoretical and practice-related issues: How has technology affected performance both in terms of creative strategies and audience experience? What are some of the pleasures and dangers involved in the omni-presence of the media in today’s theatre landscape? How has digital articulation enhanced, ironized or redefined structure and characterization? Under what conditions can the encounter of corporeal presence with an electronically interceded image provide meaningful experiences for the audience? Bringing in examples from different multimedia productions, I will try to illustrate a work method of compositional dramaturgy, where the philosophy that structures the mise-en-scène draws from the visual as well as ontological collision between the live and the mediated.

Theatre Topics, 2001

The simultaneous presence of virtual and physical reality on a theatre scene is of problematic nature. In terms of empathy it is difficult for an attendance to identify with these 2 different dimensions of reality at the same time. This observation led us to conceive an expressive technological environment and a theatrical concept in which we could achieve a 'natural' symbiosis of the physical and the virtual: 'multimedia as prosthesis' This application of VR technology offers intuitive tools (for drawing and navigation, speaking,..) at a paralyzed, technology-dependant actor. In order to have the mimetic faculty of this man communicated to the audience we built a computer-cave on the theatre scene, so that he can share his virtual space with the spectators. This is an environment of which the parameters are generated and steered by the actor in real time.

2006

The business of workers in the theatre is, as I see it, to express a timeless theme by means of the tools of one's own time. And we are not using the tools of our own time in the theatre.-Robert Edmond Jones (1941/1952) …A fi lm is a matter of a few miles of celluloid in a tin box.-Bertolt Brecht (c. 1930) While other writers in this book document and discuss many contemporary new media artists in the performing arts, this essay is concerned primarily with historical precedents for the current wildfire of new technologies making their way onto the stage, and how these new technologies change methods of, and approaches to, performance and production. New technologies come, and new technologies replicate, mutate, malfunction, evolve, devolve, obsolesce, and go. When they fi rst arrive, we tend to fetishize them, a feverishly melancholy act. This fervor for the machines can blot out what really matters…meaning, content, narrative, story… The panoply of computer graphics and animation, video, data, fi lm and slide projection, digital sound design, amplifi cation and sound processing, and computercontrol of scenic elements represents just some of the new devices and processes which are at the disposal of designers, technicians and other theater artists in the early 21 st century. With the profoundly new kind of theater, opera, concerts and exhibitions st century. With the profoundly new kind of theater, opera, concerts and exhibitions st which can be crafted with these innovative tools comes a whole range of challenges in how to use them, and especially in how to integrate them with live performers. The singer-actor in new media theater today learns to deal with a wireless microphone, to treat sound design as another character, to talk and interact with projected characters, become a projected character and transform back again, to lip-synch and digitally ventriloquize. They are not acting like they're Triple-A Plowed Under, Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper, 1936. 12 LIVE MOVIES LIVE MOVIES: A PERSONAL (FUTURE) HISTORY OF MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE in a play. They're not acting like they're on fi lm. They're acting as one does in a live movie, interwoven, interspersed with phantoms of the same insubstantiality in live movie, interwoven, interspersed with phantoms of the same insubstantiality in live movie which we dwell in the technospheric mediascape. Not only actors have a different task before them in new media theater. So, too, do writers, directors, designers, composers, producers, stage managers and operators. Writers compose "sampling scripts" in "synthetic fragments." New media (or multimedia, or projection) design shows up in the scenographic process and no one's really sure what to do, or what to do with it. Multimedia designers are essentially fi lmmakers. The good ones are skilled not only in creating on multiple two-dimensional picture planes, but also in three dimensions, and in four, through time. Some set and lighting designers are skeptical, even territorial, toward this (once again) new force in the theater; some resist, some try to do it themselves. But it's a different medium and discipline than most are trained or adept in, so over the past ten years a growing number of artists now train (often themselves) to focus solely on multimedia design. It is important to de-mystify so-called "new media," with the realization that they simply are tools, and will soon be assimilated by theater's production apparatus as were nautical rigging, electrical lighting, servo-mechanisms, fi lm and slide projection, and sound sampling and amplifi cation. Projections are simply another kind of light, and the set and the costumes form the screens. This interdependence necessarily leads to a unifi ed, dialectical approach to scenography, and to the fabled Gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork, total theater. Gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork, total theater. Gesamtkunstwerk Multimedia design, in American regional theater, experimental groups and grassroots companies, university-based theater, and even on Broadway, fi nds itself in much the same position that sound design was ten or fi fteen years ago, struggling to unfold as a new, dynamic facet of the production apparatus. Today most directors and production managers don't ask whether a show needs sound design, but whether a show needs sound design, but whether what will the sound design be? Ten or twenty years from now, multimedia design (with all the "new media" we can't imagine yet) will inhabit an integral place in the design spectrum. In the meantime, it's amusing and instructive to witness, and participate in, the growing pains, and the turf wars, and the experimentation and adaptation, and yet another new dawn of technologically-enhanced social and artistic change.

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2018

This paper describes an experimental project that aims to investigate the scope of methodological and technical possibilities of using 360° videos for experiencing authored drama. In particular, it examines how a work written for the medium of theatre, with a traditional audience-drama relationship of viewer invisibility and non-participation, might translate into a viewing experience as a VR drama. The technical and dramaturgical issues arising from this are discussed. Specifically, the shared voyeuristic quality of both media is examined. Is the invisible viewer of VR drama in the invidious role of Glaucon’s iniquitous shepherd Gyges, or does the medium give invisibility a cloak of aesthetic value?

2009

Is an actor performing live if that actor is out of sight in the wings and appears on stage as a computer-mediated representation? Is co-presence with such a mediated embodiment problematic for the performer? This project seeks to explore the use of digital media elements, from the perspective of the actor, in the collaborative process of devising, designing, rehearsing and performing a Shakespearian theatre production. It raises issues of the creative possibilities that applications of new technologies afford and of a changing perception of the nature of liveness. Can digital media techniques usefully enhance the liveness of performance and extend the audience’s experience of the production? Specifically, can it augment their perception of themselves, mirrored on stage? Exploring the usefulness of digital media techniques takes a theatre practitioner into the intermedial, liminal spaces where the two fields converge. These are spaces of possibility where new ways of working might emerge. This thesis is presented primarily as an experimental performance and is contextualised by this exegesis with its written and DVD components.

In every century, there are different apparatuses that are redefining and refining the notion of immersion. After experiencing panoramas, planetariums or even IMAX movies, we are now longing to see whether VR can really fulfil our expectations. We are ready to offer all our senses and to experience new situations and to be present somewhere else. But is the virtual reality's medium prepared for these expectations? Meanwhile the immersive theatre's genre is spreading and engaging the audience for couple of hours into their very peculiar environments. The aim of my research is to point out different features of live theatre that, when combined with or added to VR-experiences, can enhance the immersion and create more realistic illusions. My investigation is related to narratology and reception studies, and is based on recent findings related to VR. First I'm going to present through some examples how 360-degree fictional movies are exploring their specialties by transferring the narrative literally into the viewers head (e.g. Alteration by Jerome Blanquet, or Rhizomat VR by Mona el Gammal) as a way to capture the viewers empathy more. In immersive performances the audience is considered a participant with a given role. This way the narrative environment is constructed in such a way that allows the participants to unfold the story by directing their focus to carefully planned details. This does not make the participants the story's protagonist, but they can become the protagonist of the experience itself. They can have a variety of experiences that are directly addressing all of their senses creating more suspense. Based on different examples, I will point out various tactics that VR-movie creators can use to draft their own language and offer more inputs for their viewers. I will also point out how to create such environments for using the VR HMD that can dramatically be built into a viewing situation, without having the forced isolation feeling. My research is based on an audience survey made in June 2017 in Mannheim following a performance by SIGNA, on several interviews conducted with immersive theatre makers, and also on hermeneutical analysis of different VR creations. Virtual reality. 360-degree movie. Immersive theatre.

2017

This article is a brief, individual review which illustrates some advances that digital technology can foster for theatre. Whether this can be seen as an encroachment or augmentation in this field, there are clear examples of significant opportunities for practitioners who follow the digital route as a means to increase theatrical participation. Concurrent to this, this article will demonstrate the validity of using the principles of game design to consider the potentials offered by digital theatre and indicate possible avenues for future research.

2016

This dissertation attends to the ways in which the deployment of technological devices in twentyfirst-century intermedial performance might influence the audience members' perception of the relationship between humans and technology. Drawing upon the work of scholars in the fields of new media, performance studies, and the philosophy of technology, I argue that intermedial performance artists reinvigorate the role of the human body in performance by mobilizing embodiment as a techno-dramaturgical strategy for shaping the audience members' perception of human-machine interaction. Chapter One surveys the history of performance and technology from the ancient Greek theatre to twentieth-century performance, with particular emphasis on the conceptual significance of techne and poiesis in dramatic theatre. Chapter Two examines the theories of intermediality in performance as well as the co-evolutionary relationship between human beings and technicity in order to delineate the analytical and dramaturgical potential of an original conceptual framework known as critical techno-dramaturgy. Chapter Three explores the interplay between embodiment, technology, and space in intermedial performance and its effects on the audience members' awareness of their embodied existence as they navigate the cityscape with bicycles, handheld computers, and mobile phones. Chapter Four investigates the intersection of performance and techno-anxiety by looking at how intelligent machines that appear to perform autonomously might affect the audience members' perception of these anthropomorphic technological agents in relation to their own bodies. Chapter Five examines how the construction of the "cyborg" as both a conceptual metaphor for and a material instantiation of human-machine "fusion" could impact the prosthetic relations between persons with disabilities and the technological devices that they employ in intermedial performance. Finally, Chapter Six looks at my involvement in the production of an original creative project that uses critical technodramaturgy as a strategy for shaping the audience members' perception of the complicity between digital media (particularly video technology) and the mediation of death. ! "#! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Any major project that takes a few years to complete would require a great deal of dedication and perseverance on the part of the person who is pursuing it. This dissertation is in no way the result of a solitary effort, but that of a collaborative relationship with brilliant mentors who have supported me throughout this intellectual journey. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following individuals and organizations for their assistance and encouragement over the past four years. First, I would like to thank the University of Waterloo's Department of English Language and Literature. It is a privilege to be in the company of an exceptional group of faculty and students who are not afraid to push the boundaries of critical inquiry and knowledge creation in the humanities. I owe a debt of gratitude to Fraser Easton, the previous chair of the department, for supporting my academic pursuits at every step of the way. My gratitude also extends to Aimée Morrison and Randy Harris, who, as graduate chairs, provided much motivation and care for my wellbeing. And many thanks to Julie-Anne Desrochers, Margaret Ulbrick, and Mélanie LaFrance for all the help and assistance that they have offered me through the years. Indeed, this dissertation couldn't have come to fruition without the kindness and generosity of Andy Houston from the Department of Drama and Speech Communications. Andy has been an amazing teacher and friend to me. He had invited me to join the creative team for the production of From Solitary to Solidarity (S2S), and this performance has since become the focus of the final chapter in my dissertation. Although I was an external collaborator on the production, Andy made sure that I felt right at home with the team members during rehearsals. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to work with him and his talented team at the Drama department. I am also extremely thankful for the thought-provoking questions and insightful comments that my external examiners, Bruce Barton and Jennifer Roberts-Smith, had raised during the defence. Both have provided me with interesting ideas to think about for any future ! #! project that I may intend to pursue. A special note of thanks goes out to my committee members, Beth Coleman and Jay Dolmage, for their feedback on the chapters of my project. Beth's study of avatars in digital networks and Jay's work on prostheses and the embodied rhetoric of disability have inspired and informed the topics that I have explored in this dissertation. I have been very fortunate to have the both of them on my committee. I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Marcel O'Gorman, who has been a great mentor and a wonderful friend to me. Through his critical approach to the study of media as well as his creative teaching methods, he has introduced me to a fascinating range of ideas espoused by such innovative thinkers as N. Katherine Hayles, Ernest Becker, Bernard Stiegler, and David Wills. As the director of the Critical Media Lab, he has provided a collegial environment for my colleagues and I to work on digital media projects that examine human-machine interaction. Marcel's commitment to his students' development is highly admirable, and I have been a beneficiary of his steady guidance. I can't thank him enough for the valuable feedback and unwavering support that he has offered me throughout the writing process, and I hope to emulate his assiduous dedication to scholarship and teaching in my own career. But this journey wouldn't have taken flight if not for the love and support of my family. Many thanks to my brother, Nigel, for helping me to stay positive and focused as I worked on this project. No matter the time of day, you have always been willing to provide a listening ear. Thanks especially to my parents for encouraging me to do the things for which I have the greatest passion. The both of you have taught me the importance of asking good questions about the world. Through you, I have learned how to dream, and for that, I am forever grateful. And then there is Suzanne, my best friend and life partner. Words can never fully express my appreciation for the love, kindness, and encouragement that you have so generously offered during this process. You have been most patient with me, even when I am busy working away on the computer for hours on end. This entire endeavour wouldn't have been possible without you, and I thank the Almighty for bringing you into my life.