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We describe1 two case studies of AvatarStaging theatrical mixed reality framework combining avatars and performers acting in an artistic context. We outline a qualitative approach toward the condition for stage presence for the avatars. We describe the motion control solutions we experimented with from the perspective of building a protocol of avatar direction in a mixed reality appropriate to live performance.

This chapter considers how one might understand the work of actors and performers with reference to ideas of multimodality. The actor is not a ‘medium’ in the way of the media types in which she performs (theatre, film, radio drama, etc.). Yet, the actor does have a communicative function. It is argued that the modes of communicative media operate in a contemporary field of modal expansion, interrelation and transposition and that an account of acting and performing that considers such a field amends the longstanding focus on the actor’s ‘intention’ and ‘presence’. Instead, such an account delineates a technical infrastructure that suggests new insights into the actor’s work. Is the actor’s mode of performing expressed, shaped or constrained by the shifting media modalities in which her or his work is conveyed? The chapter examines instances of performances in theatre, in film, in ‘reality trend’ events and online.

This essay considers five instances of costumed political protest between 2008--19, by way of the Red Rebel Brigade, the Guy Fawkes mask, the Handmaid’s Tale costume, the pussyhat and the yellow jacket (gilet jaune). It explores the cultural resonances and significance of the costumes and accoutrements involved, and in particular how they draw upon a domain of fiction, symbolism and representation in order to perform resistance in the public sphere. It argues that a ‘chorus of the commons’, where costumed individuals operate as a group, presents both an aesthetic mode of political intervention and an oppositional theatre of the real.\ud \ud

This article considers recent instances of theatre on and through the Internet, to examine relations between the two media. It considers ‘transmediation’ as a process whereby characteristics of one medium are conveyed or refunctioned in another. It addresses the specific mediality of the theatre and the Internet, to assess ways in which space and time are extruded in the latter. In particular, the article considers the matter of temporality, observing that the Internet both complicates and extends performance’s characteristic dealings with liveness and presence. It examines performances by companies including New Paradise Laboratories, elastic future, the Hamnet Players, Station House Opera and Forced Entertainment, along with the phenomenon of live-streamed theatre, to argue for the importance of a distributed present as a feature of online performance transactions.

The prefix ‘post’ by definition comes before something, in order to signal its afterwards. Discussions of (for example) postmodernism, posthumanism, the post-industrial, and indeed the post-digital have remarked that the ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ suggested in these framings is not necessarily categorical, nor even clearly demarcated by way of a date. In this case, the ‘post’ often contains significant features of what came before, and the presence of a name (the modern, the humanist) marks a continuity however much it is also always renounced. As Hal Foster suggested in 1983, addressing a trajectory from modernism to postmodernism, ‘modernism is now largely absorbed. Originally oppositional, ... today, however, it is the official culture’ (Foster 1985: ix). This raises a fundamental question concerning the ‘post’ as a cultural descriptor. To what extent does it mark a radical break, and to what extent is its precedent figured in the very shapes and expressions of the thing that it now describes? This tension is at the heart of cultural process, and thinking about the ‘post’ can help us understand principles of change within culture, society and politics, and therefore also within performance.

This essay explores duration as the notion of time passing there and then in the life of the performer/spectator. It reprises the Bergsonian account of duration (as less a measure of time, and more a function of the feeling of time passing) to suggest that Bergson’s work has a fresh charge. The construction of time in digital culture – to do with simultaneity and synthesis, where an accumulating past is held within a continually reforming present – provides points of connection with Bergson’s interest in experience as a succession of moments lived in the present. The essay takes a longer historical view, looking at accounts of renaissance painting, nineteenth-century melodrama and contemporary performance art, along with works and ideas by Abramović, Barthes, Beckett, and Cage, to examine relations between (hetero)chronology, duration, spectatorship and experience. It argues that in many instances duration in artworks is formed of proliferated moments, whose effects are to emphasize aspects of actuality by putting us in the face of the lived experience of action and consequence, and our own awareness of this (and our own) particular lived experience. Performance itself has a further charge, for its (re)presentations are encountered chronologically, precisely in and through a passage of time inhabited by both the work and the spectator/participant. The essay argues that duration is nonetheless always cultural; and is expressed and experienced in relation to a particular historical moment. The value of duration varies, whether it is a particular length of time, a passage for endurance, a field for ethical contention or a commoditized span of engagement. In a contemporary performance economy that privileges encounter and experience, duration provides the substrate for extensive and realisable kinds of living in the moment.\ud \ud

This might sound paradoxical. Digital practices are increasingly embodied. They are turning back to analogue styles. Sometimes they appear to cancel out technology. And they provide us with new enc...

In many contemporary theatre productions, a mixing of modes of performance, presentation, and participation is observed. In this scenario, change and adaptation occur within specific media precisely through their interrelation with other media. Lars Ellestrom describes intermediality as “intermodal relations in media,” or “media intermultimodality.” This essay explores Ellestrom’s account of modes and modalities in order to address the adaptation of media form and function in contemporary theatre and performance. It proposes that the notion of modal transposition across media helps to account for both the technical efficacy and aesthetic affordances of contemporary intermedial performance, particularly in “reality trend” work that aims to provide lived and felt encounters and draws on actual lives and experiences. By way of example, the essay examines Before I Sleep (dreamthinkspeak), Hotel Medea (Zecora Ura Theatre), The Drowned Man (Punchdrunk), Situation Rooms (Rimini Protokoll), and The Pixelated Revolution (Rabih Mroue). Taken together, these productions suggest that modal transposition serves a characteristic agenda: the provision of encounters with actuality, where both artwork and experience are pluralized, segmented, and synthesized.

This article addresses the relationship between Shakespearean dramaturgy and contemporary manifestations of surveillance, space and location. It focuses on a workshop production of The Tempest at the Gdansk Shakespeare Festival, which explored the use and adaptation of digital surveillance technologies in order to appraise and restage Shakespeare's arrangement of power relations and spatial organization. The article draws on scholarship on surveillance and transit in order to expand on the workshop production, and relate theatre and performance practice to contemporary cultural process and experience. In both production and article I attempt to move between early modern dramaturgy and contemporary multimedia staging to examine mutually informing principles and structures.

Craft? An Airfix kit bought with your pocket money. You create an object from instructions: glue parts together, then paint. The parts are all quite big to begin with, but get smaller as the work g...

This article explores the contemporary phenomenon of living statue performance. It addresses the attributes of this work as a mode of disciplined physical presentation; a cipher for acting; and an instance of pure watchability. I discuss examples of statue performers in Sao Paolo's Parque Ibirapuera, to examine ways in which living statues present personae, interact with spectators and create situations of affect. I note some historical instances of statue performance and their taste for the uncanny. In addressing the recent ubiquity of the form, I argue that today's living statues can be seen as characteristically posthuman and suggest that their tropes of presentation are consistent with other kinds of performance within digital culture. © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article.

Many recent events and performance pieces have challenged the distinction between viewing and acting, from the promenade performance experiences organised by Punchdrunk, to the games-based events o...

5,000 word chapter on theatre, telematic performance and the bearing of digitality on theatre.

This article concerns a practice-as-research process to develop a production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest for production in 2013. Firstly I outline an approach to the play that sets the terms of the project. I introduce two phases of development of practice. Lastly, I reflect on a process that involves a mix of collaborators, including professional practitioners and students, and on what I understand here by practice as research.

In our previous issue, NTQ18 (May 1989). We carried a report on the exploratory discussions held by a number of theatre people on the left (Under the joint aegis of NTQ and the Drama Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London) to discuss the problems posed by ‘Thatcher's Theatre’ and the national priorities it reflects. A more broadly-based conference was held on 4 December 1988, devoted to the theme of ‘British Theatre in Crisis, and here Andy Lavender, theatre writer and graduate student at Goldsmiths’ College. Provides a brief report of the proceedings. We also reprint the manifesto to which the conference gave its unanimous support.