Category Archives: Event

DocPerform Webinar: Internet Theatre

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Date: February 16th 2021 18.30-20-30

Register (closed) : Internet Theatre

View Recording: Internet Theatre

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A panel of academic-practitioners will discuss theatre and performance pieces produced for the internet.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced theatre-makers to produce work online. In distinction from streaming live and recorded shows, theatre and performance produced for the internet represents a new frontier for artists.

Shows such as Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting For All frame the grid of screens on Zoom as a collage of encounters between six connected yet distant bodies, each one inhabiting a reality that never fully converges into a communal experience, whilst Dead Centre’s To Be A Machine turns the audience into data subjects by having them present as recorded video footage and as viewers watching the performance as a live stream on Vimeo. Other examples of internet theatre include Gob Squad’s Show Me A Good Time, New Diorama and Nathan Ellis’s work_txt_home, Coney’s Telephone, and Dante Or Die’s USER NOT FOUND.

This webinar has been organised to begin developing new discourses of ‘the digital’ beyond questions of liveness and ephemerality to explore how the internet has become a performance medium in its own right. The panel will explore ideas relating to the spectator as a data subject, digital intimacy, and writing plays and devising shows for performance in cyberspace with reference to pieces produced during the lockdown.

DocPerform is an interdisciplinary project based in the Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London. DocPerform investigates new and emerging documentation technologies used in the performing arts, the performativity of digital information, and concepts of theatricality and unreality as they relate to the contemporary information environment.

Panel:

Elena Araoz

Elena Araoz is a stage director of theater and opera, as well as a writer, choreographer, and performer. She works internationally, Off-Broadway, and across the USA. She is a faculty member in the Program in Theatre at Princeton University. This summer, she will direct the live virtual CGI and motion capture opera Alice in the Pandemic (White Snake Projects) and a virtual production of Virginia Grise’s a farm for meme (Cara Mia Theatre). In this time before her currently postponed productions return to their stages, this research project is fueled by Elena’s passion for innovation in the theatre. She is particularly interested in developing systems to redistribute resources and opportunities within the field and democratize theatre making and consumption. She also hopes that this research will unlock new structures of storytelling for her. Elena holds her MFA in acting from the University of Texas at Austin. http://www.elenaaraoz.com.

Jo Scott

Jo Scott is an intermedial practitioner-researcher and senior lecturer in performance at the University of Salford. Following the completion of her practice as research PhD project at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2014, Jo has developed both practical and theoretical research in the area of intermedial performance, addressing in particular the intersection of digital computational processes and live performance practices. Her first monograph, Intermedial Praxis and PaR, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016 and she has also contributed writing to a range of recent books and journals. Jo’s current practice as research project engages digital technologies in creative encounters with wild urban spaces, through live mixing practices, combining video, text, sound and song. See http://www.joanneemmascott.com for publications, projects and documentation.

Harry Robert Wilson

Harry graduated from Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow in 2008 and has since completed an MPhil and PhD through creative practice at the university (co-supervised at DJCAD, University of Dundee). Harry’s practice sits between live art, contemporary performance and new media and often involves methods of devising through creative response. In his work Harry is interested in exploring the politics of affect and emotion, autobiography, memory, time and the body. Harry has shown work at a number of venues and festivals across the UK including The Arches; the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow; Forest Fringe, Edinburgh; DCA, Dundee; BAC, London; and internationally at Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago and Kilowatt Festival, Sansepolcro. Harry’s research is often practice-based and generally explores the intersections between performance, media and philosophy – from photographic performances (via Roland Barthes), to virtuality and perception in VR.Harry is an associate artist with Glass Performance and has collaborated with Untitled Projects, Cora Bissett, and Magnetic North, amongst others. Between 2018 and 2019 Harry was Digital Thinker in Residence at the National Theatre of Scotland, an AHRC funded artistic research residency supported by the University of Glasgow. Harry has taught theatre, performance and digital art at the University of Glasgow, University of the West of Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Moderator:

Joseph Dunne-Howrie

Joseph is an academic whose research specialisms include immersive and interactive theatre, archives and performance documentation, intermediality, autobiographical theatre, the politics of audience participation, site-based performance, and the media performativity of contemporary fascism. He is a long-term collaborator with the theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Lincoln in 2015 for his practice research thesis Regenerating the Live: The Archive as the Genesis of a Performance Practice. Since then he has taught drama at postgraduate and undergraduate levels at Rose Bruford College, Mountview Academy, and the University of East London. Joseph currently splits his time as the MA/MFA module year co-ordinator for Performative Writing/Vade Mecum at Rose Bruford and as artist in residence in the Library and Information Science department at City, University of London where he is one of the leaders of the DocPerform project. He has published articles in Performance Research, Desearch, Stanislavski Studies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Proceedings from the Document Academy and Drama Research. See his website for more details about his work josephdunnehowrie.com

To Be A Machine by Dead Centre (2020)

DocPerform Webinar: Internet Theatre

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Date: February 16th 2021 18.30-20.30

Register: Internet Theatre

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This post has been updated.

Lockdown has opened up a new frontier for theatre-makers who wish to experiment with expanding the communication space of performance into cyberspace. Shows such as Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting For All frame the grid of screens on Zoom as a collage of encounters between six connected yet distant bodies, each one inhabiting a reality that never fully converges into a communal experience, whilst Dead Centre’s To Be A Machine turns the audience into data subjects by having them present as recorded video footage and as viewers watching the performance as a live stream on Vimeo. Other examples to cite include Gob Squad’s Show Me A Good Time, Nathan Ellis’s work_txt_home, Coney’s Telephone, and Dante Or Die’s USER NOT FOUND.

In February 2021 Joseph Dunne-Howrie will be chairing a webinar on internet theatre. The webinar will explore issue related to those performances that have been created for the digital medium (as distinct from NT and other streaming programs).

The webinar will explore the following themes:

  • The affordances of the internet as a performance medium
  • Audience as data subject
  • Are these pieces ‘real’ theatre or something else?
  • Digital intimacy
  • Writing plays for cyberspace

Panel:

Elena Araoz, Innovations in Socially Distant Performance

Joanne Scott, University of Salford

Harry Robert Wilson, University of Glasgow

Other panelists TBA

When:

February 2021. Final details TBA

DocPerform 2: New Technologies 6-7th Nov 2017

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Just over a year ago, I penned the first entry for this website’s blog. My aim was to detail the backstory to my idea for the DocPerform project, as we planned our first, exploratory symposium. I wrote that we hoped ‘our initial event will spark further interest to form a longer term project’. I also hoped for participants.

I am pleased then, to now write, that today, CityLIS will host our second symposium DocPerform 2: New Technologies. Our 2017 gathering will run for two days, to allow for more presentations and ideas, discussion, reflection and planning.

Since the previous event, we have thought much about the concepts of documents and the processes of documentation, and the central place of these activities within the discipline of library & information science. In respect of new/future documents, we have focused on performance, and the likely impact of immersive technologies and behaviours. Over the course of 12 months, we have seen many developments in the technologies and social-cultural behaviours which first inspired our thoughts on immersive documents, and the processes which could support their amalgamation into mainstream library and information services. All of this has enriched our curriculum here at CityLIS, not least as a result of the new colleagues we have introduced as contributors to our master’s course modules.

Further, we are delighted to have appointed Dr Joseph Dunne as part-time lecturer in Library Science, to explore further the concept of performance as a document, and the documentary processes associated with the recording and archiving of the performing arts. Joe will also bring an external perspective to LIS, encountering and commenting on our work from the perspective of theatre and performance, and considering how we can communicate our work in recording humankind’s endeavours beyond the classroom and the profession, into the wider community.

Our first symposium collected together existing documentation projects from both the LIS and the theatre and performance disciplines. In our second event, we have elected to focus on theatre and dance, looking at how new technologies have changed the way in which we understand, create and experience performance, and consequently how we record, archive and preserve it as part of our cultural heritage.

Interestingly, despite significant developments in technologies and participatory behaviour, the documentation of performance appears to be somewhat reticent to move beyond record keeping as already understood. Maybe our work within the DocPerform project can change that, as we have drawn out some exciting conceptual ideas and prototypes for innovative use of technology for our Programme.

And finally, massive thanks to the DocPerform Team for making this happen, Joe Dunne, David Bawden, Sarah Rubidge, Ramone Riedzewski, and Ludi Price (admin magician). Thank also to Tom Ash for tech support and blogging, and to artist James Hobbs for our lovely logo!