essays on contemporary theatre

The German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English

JCDE: Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

JCDE is an international journal published by De Gruyter with CDE.

The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English focuses on issues in contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature and theatre performance. It renegotiates the understanding of contemporary aesthetics of drama and theatre by treating dramatic texts of the last fifty years. The peer-reviewed journal publishes essays that engage in close readings of plays and also touch upon historical, political, formal, theoretical and methodological aspects of contemporary drama, theatre, and performance.

JCDE appears twice a year: the first issue is based on the annual international conferences held by CDE, the second issue invites individual essays on contemporary theatre and drama in English. The journal also contains a review section.

Editors : Anette Pankratz (Bochum, Editor in Chief), Chris Megson (London), Kerstin Schmidt (Munich), Merle Tönnies (Paderborn, Reviews), Clare Wallace (Prague)

Advisory Board : Mireia Aragay (Barcelona), Ute Berns (Hamburg), John Bull (Reading), Johan Callens (Brussels), Jill S. Dolan (Princeton), Tobias Döring (Munich), Lynette Goddard (London), Nicholas Grene (Dublin), Stephen L. Lacey (Glamorgan), Martin Middeke (Augsburg, Founding Editor), Deirdre Osborne (London), Dan Rebellato (London), Anthony Roche (Dublin), Annette J. Saddik (New York), Elizabeth Sakellaridou (Thessaloniki), Aleks Sierz (London)

Publisher : De Gruyter (Berlin/Boston)

Essays should be no longer than 8,000 words (including notes and bibliography) and should be formatted according to MLA style (7th edition). Please also refer to JCDE’s stylesheet .

Essay manuscripts should be sent to the editor-in-chief , suggestions for reviews to the reviews editor .

2024, 12.1 (May): Theater and Community . Eds. Johanna Hartmann, Ilka Saal. [ table of contents, online access ]

2023, 11.2 (November): From Page to Stage . Eds. Kerstin Schmidt, Julia Rössler. [ table of contents, online access ]

2023, 11.1 (May): Theatre and the City . Eds. Cyrielle Garson, Xavier Lemoine, Anna Street. [ table of contents, online access ].

2022, 10.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2022, 10.1 (May): Critical Theatre Ecologies. Eds. Martin Middeke, Martin Riedelsheimer. [table of contents, online access]

2021, 9.2 (October): [table of contents, online access] .

2021, 9.1 (May): Performing the Future. Eds. Anette Pankratz, Merle Tönnies. [table of contents, online access]

2020, 8.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2020, 8.1 (May): Theater of Crisis: Contemporary Aesthetic / Responses to a Cross-Sectional Condition. Guest eds. Nassim Winnie Balestrini, Leopold Lippert, Maria Löschnigg. [table of contents, online access]

2019, 7.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2019, 7.1 (May): Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Drama and Performance . Guest eds. Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, James McKenzie, Daniel Schäbler. [table of contents, online access] .

2018, 6.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2018, 6.1 (April): Nation, Nationhood and Theatre . Guest ed. John Bull. [table of contents, online access] .

2017, 5.2 (October): [table of contents, online access] .

2017, 5.1 (April): Theatre and Mobility . Guest eds. Kerstin Schmidt, Nathalie Aghoro. [table of contents, online access] .

2016, 4.2 (November):  [table of contents, online access] .

2016, 4.1 (May): Theatre and Spectatorship . Guest eds. Mireia Aragay, Enric Monforte. [table of contents, online access] .

2015, 3.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2015, 3.1 (May): Theatre and History . Guest ed. Ute Berns. [table of contents, online access] .

2014, 2.2 (December): [table of contents, online access] .

2014, 2.1 (May): Theatre as Political Intervention . Guest eds. Ondřey Pilný, Clare Wallace. [table of contents, online access]

2013, 1.2 (November): [table of contents, online access] .

2013, 1.1 (May): Bodies on Stage . Guest eds. Anette Pankratz, Ariane de Waal. [table of contents, online access]

Modern Theatre and Film Industry Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

The modern theatre and film industry have helped familiarize people with the reality of the world, emotions people go through and happy, as well as sad situations. Historically, one of the first forms of entertainment which evolved into movies today was theatre.

People went to all the plays that were in their towns and greatly valued this form of art. At the same time, there were many prejudices that were a part of the society, which today might seem harsh and unacceptable. One of these is the way gender and races were viewed by the theatrical population and people viewing the plays.

The present society has seen many advances in the way people are treated and how the differences between individuals are viewed. Today, people are given an equal opportunity to participate in theatre and media, but even though there are laws that prohibit discrimination due to race or gender, there is still prejudice and stereotyping.

In the past, women were not allowed to perform plays. Men would play their parts and from one perspective, this enforced the common views that were abusive towards a certain group. Even though it changed the atmosphere of the theatre, people were not aware that anything could be different, so they accepted it as it was.

It would be reasonable to assume that women realized how unfair and humorous it was that men had to play women’s roles, but the dominant social views could not allow anything different. The same can be said about different races, as people were not used to people who stood out from the crowd. Their own insecurities and fear led them to believe that they must not allow anyone who looked different into the industry.

Right now, the world has changed and the theatres, as well as other forms of entertainment have become greatly “colorblind”. It is obvious that the theatre culture is more old fashioned, so prejudices still exist there, but other forms of media and entertainment, especially in the western world, are a clear example that people from all cultures can become successful and accepted.

Hollywood has seen many prosperous and world famous people from other races, who are loved and respected all over the world. The theatre is slowly adjusting to the change and this is most obviously seen in relation to gender. Women’s roles are played by women and it would be ridiculous to even image a man playing a woman’s role in the modern world. The society needs diversity in all its parts of entertainment, as people should realize that everyone is equal and there are no real differences between people.

Everyone wants to do what they love and have a talent for, and entertainment industry has shown that there are many actors who are of same or even greater talent in relation to “white only” population. The mixing of all societies into one will allow for greater acceptance and cooperation, and because theatre and other media are viewed by so many people, it would be most beneficial to display the unity there.

Even though the times are changing slowly, it is clear that gender or race should not matter in theatre or films. The whole world must see that entertainment comes from emotions and people’s soul and looks are unimportant, as people should be judged by their character and not how they appear to be.

• To be or not to be
• African American Theater
• Theatre and Society Symbiotic Relationship
• The Renaissance Theatre Development
• Movie Theatres' Market Segmentation
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
• The Play "Fifth of July" by Lanford Wilson
• An Analysis of Almost Maine
• Edward Albee, His Life and Works
• The Tragedy of Othello: Critical Analysis — Othello Critical Essay
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, January 17). Modern Theatre and Film Industry. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/

"Modern Theatre and Film Industry." IvyPanda , 17 Jan. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Modern Theatre and Film Industry'. 17 January.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Modern Theatre and Film Industry." January 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

1. IvyPanda . "Modern Theatre and Film Industry." January 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Modern Theatre and Film Industry." January 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/theatre/.

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• Nov 27, 2022

Modern Drama Series: Modernism and Theatre

As a philosophical and art form, modernism arose as a result of upheavals in Western society during the late 19th- and 20th centuries. In the face of a rapidly changing, urbanised culture, artists strove to self-consciously break away from traditional forms of art and express themselves freely. From a theatrical perspective, modernism oversaw a theatrical shift that challenged the established representations of Romanticism, melodrama, and well-structured plays. Influenced by the findings of prominent psychologists, artists began to prioritise the inner workings of their characters and how to best represent them on the stage. This struggle for realism came to dominate British and American theatre in the 20th century and would foreground dramaturgy’s fidelity to real life. By mid-century, the violent disruption of society, brought about by the world wars, propelled a counter art movement that rejected realism and focused primarily on symbolism and existentialism. Although opposing in many ways, these two art movements both fall under the category of modernism and would simultaneously search for innovative artistic forms to exteriorise a changed world view.

Modern Drama Series will be divided into six chapters:

1. Modern Drama Series: Modernism and Theatre  

2. Modern Drama Series: Realism and Naturalism in Miss Julie    

3. Modern Drama Series: Bernard Shaw and Satire  

4. Modern Drama Series: Existentialism and the Absurd

5. Modern Drama Series: Mid-Century British Theatre

6. Modern Drama Series: American Theatre and Tennessee Williams

By the late 19th century, the modernist spirit was established as one of technical revolution, continuously searching for innovative techniques able to capture the ever-changing world. This spirit of experimentation in all forms of expression mirrored the newfound displacement and dissonance experienced as a result of a changing social landscape. Modernist writers began to defy the well-structured, formulaic composition of the preceding century.

Changing socio-economic conditions, from overcrowding in cities to the spread of communication, disrupted the social and personal circumstances of people’s lives and blurred the boundaries between private and public realms. Previous traditional moral authorities became inadequate to make sense of people’s subconscious and exterior worlds. David Krasner in his novel A History of Modern Drama , attributes this shifting ideology to the democratic egalitarianism popularised by the 1789 French Revolution, as well as the technological advancements of the 19th century Industrial revolution. They brought about a departure from both the Enlightenment’s Rationalism and Classical Formalism and ultimately "signified a turn from deities and moral certainty and towards self-conscious individualism and ambiguity in judgment, values, and interpersonal relations" (Krasner, 2011, p.3).

In terms of drama, this would manifest itself in a distancing from the declamatory speech of Classical drama in favour of nuanced inter-personal exchanges in a struggle for self-realization. Krasner Modern drama strove to explore the general public’s feelings of alienation and "feeling[s] of waiting for something inscrutable" (Krasner, 2011, p.1). Krasner assigns this sense of growing public alienation to the uncertainty fostered by the changing social environment, as people found themselves "jostling for social positions in flatter planes and more porous and uncertain relationships" (Krasner, 2011, p.7). People became simultaneously empowered by their autonomy, whilst also limited by their inadequacies. Modern drama attempted to capture the essence of this conflict, and classical hierarchies of theatrical subject matter—concerning the high tragic, the inoffensive domestic, and the low-brow comedy—were rejected in favour of a deeper social and aesthetic hybrid. Theatre followed modernism’s ethos that "the truest art surfaces from the margins" and stories began to focus on people who did not abide by the ethical status quo (Krasner, 2011, p.8).

The transition to modern drama from earlier traditional forms of theatre found its biggest advocate in Émile Zola, a French novelist and playwright. Zola argued, most explicitly in his 1880 essay Naturalism in The Theatre , that contemporary theatre failed to reflect the scientific and intellectual developments that had been made in the last century, nor did it address the fundamental problems that had come about as a result of urbanisation. In his chapter ‘Ibsen and the Theatre’ from The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, Simon Williams refers to Zola’s 1880 essay as a "critical assault upon the theatre", whereby Zola accused French and, by association, European drama of being "mechanical, superficial, lacking in authentic characters, and perpetuating the outworn cliches of Romanticism" (Williams, 1994, p.165). Zola pushed for theatre that explored previously unforeseen topics and subject matters by eliminating the constraints of antiquated dramatic conventions.

The type of dramatic realism proposed by Zola, had the aim of duplicating the epistemology of scientific experiments by presenting characters that had explicit socio-psychological motives for their behaviour. Plays were to become accurate depictions of characters’ lives and should move away from the Romantic elements of the past. William B. Worthen in his novel Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre claims that this scientific influence would establish the "ideological neutrality" of plays and would enable the ‘construction of the spectator as a disinterested, “objective” observer" (Worthen, 1992, p.16). Worthen further explains that by ascribing "scientific transparency" to a play, it ultimately ascribes a similar scientific objectivity to the audience (Worthen, 1992, p.16). By claiming a realistic presentation on stage through the pictorial scene setting, modern drama is able to produce an objective audience who will subsequently treat the subject matter in an unbiased manner; "the aim of realism is to produce an audience, to legitimate its private acts of interpretation as objective" (Worthen, 1992, p.17).

Theatre would serve to become a forum to discuss the formative forces of modern life, amongst others class conflict and gender stereotypes, and this development was greatly advanced by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen’s introduction to Britain with his 1889 production of A Doll’s House at the Royal Theatre was received well by audiences and met with strong condemnation from critics. A Doll’s House endorsed key features of modern drama—inward processes and a rebuke of social obligations. Ibsen’s protagonist Nora disregards her familial obligations and prepares to leave behind her husband and three children for the reason that she is not up to the task of being a mother and wife. Nora abandons convention in favour of self-fulfilment, challenging the ideals of matrimony and motherhood. Krasner argues that "Ibsen’s protagonist defines the key feature of modern interiority. Social rules and obligations become mere external hand-me-down artifacts no longer applicable to the modern world" (Krasner, 2011, p.11). Ibsen utilises the theatre as a medium for social discourse and his critics believed that his play undermined the most sacred of Victorian institutions—that of marriage.

The contention behind Ibsen’s play was the fact that he was primarily concerned with revealing the interior motives of his characters and not with ideal models of behaviour. His radical approach to character also had an effect on the play’s production and performance. Actors spoke to each other interpersonally and no longer in a declamatorily classical style of direct address to the audience. The character and setting—and most importantly, the interaction between the two—took on a greater importance. Characters were no longer "a medium of theatrical exchange between actor and audience" as they had been, but instead became one part of a "dramatic ecology" that audiences can only observe (Worthen, 1992, p.18).

Ibsen’s plays were ultimately the antithesis of the formulaic conventions that had come to ground contemporary theatre. Williams explains in "Ibsen and the Theatre" that Ibsen’s recurring critiques give us the greatest insight into identifying the changes he implemented into his plays. His plays were often dismissed on the grounds that they "focused primarily on degrading aspects of human conduct" (Williams, 1994, p.167). They challenged the conventional rationale behind drama; "they confuted what was then conceived to be the fundamental purpose of art, namely to create only what is ideal and beautiful" (Williams, 1994, p.167).

Ibsen’s plays were conversely praised by audiences for their denial of theatricality and their ability to create an authentic illusion of everyday life. Through the varying receptions to Ibsen’s work, Williams asserts that "the conventions of an earlier generation were beginning to lose their credibility" (Williams, 1994, p.169). Ibsen was admired for his departure from the theatrical conventions that had come to define 19th century theatre and would influence many later modern playwrights.

Ibsen would come to be recognised as a playwright who had ushered authenticity back into the realm of theatre as he utilised the medium’s potential as a means to explore the changing social qualities of modern life. His works implemented and would inspire later works involving familiar contemporary indicators of modern drama, such as middle-class settings and protagonists and assessment of psychological motives and external pressures. Ibsen was pivotal in the advancement towards modern drama and had "a vitalizing effect on a stagnant repertoire’ as he stimulated new modes of both acting and staging" (Williams, 1994, p.165).

Bibliographical References

Innes, C. and Marker, F.J. (1998). Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett: Essays from Modern Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Krasner, D. (2011). A History of Modern Drama, Volume 1. New York: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Mc Farlane, J. (Ed.). (1994). The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen . Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521411661.011

Worthen, W. (1992). Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre . Berkeley: University of California Press.

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• English Literature

Megan Maistre

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Critical Stages/Scènes critiques

The IATC webjournal/Revue web de l'AICT – December 2012: Issue No 7

Acts of Spectating: The Dramaturgy of the Audience’s Experience in Contemporary Theatre

Peter M. Boenisch [1]

The emergence of relational dramaturgy

It is a truism to maintain that theatre has always paid particular attention to its audiences and spectators, whether in contemporary performance, the theatre avant-garde from a century ago, or virtually at any other time we may randomly pick from theatre history. The audience is inevitably theatre’s raison d’être : without spectators, there simply is no theatrical event. More recently, however, this central place of the spectators in theatre has become the focus of new critical interrogations and academic debates. New forms of so-called participatory theatre sought to ‘liberate’ the spectators from their role as (allegedly) passive consumers, while the very power of the spectatorial gaze has come under theoretical scrutiny in the wake of Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay on the ‘male gaze’ and visual pleasure in cinema, which had its repercussions in debates on the performing arts, too, especially in the field of dance. Peggy Phelan went on to dissect, in her 1993 classic study Unmarked , the spectator’s gaze and the audience’s desire within the context of her proposed ontology of performance in its irrevocable presence and the present. Phelan’s study influentially tackled some of the inner contradictions of feminist and postmodern critique which at the time dominated academia and certainly the (then) emerging discipline of Performance Studies. Analyzing her selection of primarily physically driven performance work and dance productions along an argument informed by Barthes, Austin and Lacan, she investigated the potential for the spectatorial gaze to get deflected from its habitual voyeuristic consumption of representations, and instead to obtain a different potential as a source of action and site of agency.

Such issues had become particularly pertinent with the ever growing technical, and in particular the emerging digital reproducibility of images facilitated by mass media. The more recent advent of new types of digital media which stylise themselves as ‘social’ media has today further pressed issues of spectating, media consumption and agency into the foreground of our interrogations. It may therefore have been no coincidence that recent years have seen a renewed manifest engagement with the audience from new, post-semiotic perspectives. One may here point to publications such as, in particular, Rachel Fensham’s To Watch Theatre: Essays on genre and corporeality (2009), Alan Read’s Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement (2008), Dennis Kennedy’s historiographic study on The Spectator and the Spectacle or Alison Oddey and Christine White’s collection on Modes of Spectating that they consider from a scenographic point of view (the latter two also published in 2009). This crucial trajectory in the stance that our discipline has taken towards the role of the audience is probably best mirrored by the passage of German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte: From her pioneering Semiotics of Theatre , published in the early 1980s, she arrived via a sustained engagement with phenomenology throughout the 1990s at her ‘aesthetics of performativity’ (2004). Maintaining a central focus on the performance as principal object of analysis, her emphasis has now, however, shifted from an analysis of the (semiotic) structure of the work to the (largely phenomenal) event of the performance itself, or in German terms: from a structural dissection of the Inszenierung towards an experiential recording of the individual Aufführung . The latter became, not only for Fischer-Lichte, the core aspect that signifies theatre as an art form. She firmly locates the characteristic of theatre’s specific mediality in what she describes as the ‘bodily co-presence of actors and spectators.’ The classic semiotic investigation of the production, communication and reception of meaning is hence transferred to what Fischer-Lichte calls the ‘emergence’ of a meaning localized directly within spectating considered as active participation in the process of making meaning, stimulated by an ‘exchange of energies’ and ‘bodily sensing’ ( leibliches Spüren ) (cf Fischer-Lichte 2008, Ch. 5, “The Emergence of Meaning,” 138-159). In place of the traditional idea of a unidirectional transfer of meaning from a single ‘sender’ (in our case, the playwright or director) to many receivers, Fischer-Lichte now posits a dynamic ‘auto-poietic feedback loop’ that connects the stage with the auditorium, and the performers with the spectators. Summarizing the challenge of neo-avantgarde performance art of the 1960s and 1970s (Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys and Fluxus), which are her central examples, she argues that it redefined two relationships of fundamental importance to hermeneutic as well as semiotic aesthetics: first, the relationship between subject and object, observer and observed, spectator and actor; second, the relationship between the materiality and the semioticity of the performance’s elements, between signifier and signified. (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 17)

This emphasis on redefined relationships indeed touches the core of contemporary dramaturgic challenges. Where Fischer-Lichte makes an important case for a shift, among others, in the central role of the relation between actor and spectator, we should still note that her list of altered relationships expressed in the quotation still continues to think in dualities and binary oppositions. I propose to further push this thought and to introduce a properly relational perspective on dramaturgy. What we witness in contemporary theatre performance is less a mere shift of power between some binary poles, from one point to its other, opposite end. Instead, today’s dramaturgic strategies activate the full interplay between the highlighted borders, as for example between materiality and semioticity. It is precisely no longer a matter of ‘from’ one end ‘to’ the other, of ‘either / or.’ These processes of playful negotiations (in the full Schillerian sense of Spiel ) are at the heart of what I term relational dramaturgy. I take up prompts both from Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential ‘relational aesthetics’ and from the lesser known thoughts by Leo Bersani to suggest an understanding of dramaturgy as a relational aesthetic practice (cf. Bourriaud 2002; Bersani 2010). It forges relations, changes relationships, and calibrates a dynamic interplay. Far beyond referring to a production’s specific interpretative reading of a text, to procedures of adapting or translating a text ‘from page to stage’ (in a more conventional conception of dramaturgy), and equally far beyond ‘reaching out’ to audiences not traditionally part of art circles (as in Bourriaud’s understanding), relational dramaturgy ‘acts’ in the full sense alluded to in Eugenio Barba’s seminal definition of dramaturgy as a ‘weaving of actions.’ For him, too, an ‘action’ is situated on a level beyond the action of the plot or narrative; explicitly, he includes anything that affected and impacted, thus: acts on the spectator, in his understanding (cf. Barba 1991). It is this ‘action’ which engenders theatre’s original ‘politicity’ (to use a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Rancière) within our present global digital media economy. The relational mode of dramaturgy marks a production’s spectatorial relations, its fluid shifting between materiality and semioticity. Let us turn to three recent theatre productions to further develop these considerations that take us from an ‘aesthetics of performativity’ towards a concept of ‘relational (dramaturgic) action.’

Instance 1: The Roman Tragedies , Toneelgroep Amsterdam, dir. Ivo van Hove

In 2007, Flemish director Ivo van Hove created for Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the principal theatre in the Dutch capital which van Hove has been leading as Artistic Director since 2001, the Romeinse Tragedies : a six-hour long compilation of Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies Coriolanus , Julius Caesar , and Antony & Cleopatra , which presented the three plays non-stop, without an interval, with the audience free to roam around the theatre – and the stage. After about half an hour – we had just witnessed Caius Martius’s return from his successful battle against the Volsci – neon working lights were switched on for the first scene change. While some stagehands started resetting the scene, we heard some ‘muzak’ from the loudspeakers, like in a department store, and a female voice welcomed us to today’s performance: ‘the stage is now open,’ we were told, and we were invited to cross that fourth wall. On stage, we were able to sit on sofas that made the set reminiscent of some hotel lobby or airport waiting lounge. Also on stage, a bar and a food stall waited for us, even a computer corner where we could access the internet, and a table with the latest newspapers and magazines. The action of the plays would simply unfold around us in this setting. During the hours that followed, we were able to move between stage and auditorium and to change our position within the theatre space, or hence also our positioning – our relation – to the performance. We were able to follow the action from very close sitting on stage or from the distance in our usual theatre chair in the auditorium. We could watch the live action in front of us, but we could instead also ‘watch live’ from the auditorium on a huge screen mounted above the proscenium, or on one of the many TV monitors that were scattered not only across the stage space but also outside in the theatre foyer, near the bars and toilets. Additionally, an electronic text display between the stage and the mounted screen above provided to those in the auditorium further information on the historic background of the plays (on the Volsci, Coriolanus, the wars, etc.), as well as details on the production (‘three hours to Caesar’s murder’), while also displaying the actual latest news headlines of the very day and even some live football results.

Instance 2: Money , Shunt

With their production Money, staged at an abandoned factory in London in October 2009, the British performance collective Shunt presented its version of Emile Zola’s 1891 novel L’Argent which of course offers some resonances of the current financial crisis. In the spirit of ‘devised performance,’ the original plot around the corrupt stock market speculator Aristide Saccard delivered mere prompts and a rough narrative outline for a highly visual and sensory audience experience. Already as we entered the warehouse space, a gigantic machine in the middle of the space roared, clattered, puffed, and rattled. Following a prelude during which we remained seated in front of the machine, we were then asked to climb up the metal staircase and enter the machine and were lead into a pitchblack space, amidst ear-spitting noise and wind. The door was closed behind us. Soon the wind and noise stopped, the lights went up, and we found ourselves standing within a stunning interior space with classy wooden panelling and some benches on either side, where we eventually settled down. After another while, a kind of foreman entered from another door with some paperwork in his hand. He read out a name. We may therefore have wondered whether he had the list of audience members in front of him, as we of course had to phone in and sign up just to find out the exact location of the factory space to attend the performance. For sure, however, no hand went up. It was only on the third attempt that eventually someone identified himself and was lead out of the room. As became obvious very soon, this was of course no ‘real’ audience member but the play’s main character, that future bankruptcy cheat from the novel.

The disjointed sequence of scenes and impressions that followed over the next ninety minutes took place within this interior site, including the floors above and beneath the room as the actual floors became semi-transparent in proper lighting. At some point, we were then also directed to the upper floor to join a party at the height of the financial speculation craze in the plot. Not only the characters but also the audience members got their glass of champagne to sip, and we also soon engaged in some silly ballgame across the huge table (the transparent floor to our seating room downstairs), throwing the little plastic balls that had fallen from above at each other and at the performers. Later, we were once again ushered downstairs. Towards the end, of course, there was the big crash, where Zola’s main character reaps his investors’ money and flees abroad. In Shunt’s version, he also took every single golden door handle with him, so that when – after some turbulent and again noisy final minutes – the light went off, and on again, we found ourselves locked into the space. There was a key on the floor in the centre of the space. We applauded. No-one entered. No door was opened. We couldn’t get out – until one audience member finally got up, picked up the key and unlocked the door.

Instance 3: Hotel Medea , Zecora Ura/ParaActive, dir. Persis-Jada Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos

The Brazilian-English co-production of the classical Medea tragedy has been performed over the past five years in several site-specific incarnations in Brazil, the UK and elsewhere, most recently in 2012 as part of the London Cultural Olympiad. Hotel Medea , which I saw in its 2010 version staged in the London Docklands, starts shortly before midnight and lasts until dawn. The audience gathered at a pier on the Thames. Around midnight, little boats took small groups to the other side of the river. Off the boat, we passed some stations where we got instructions – on dance moves, some chants, and how to behave in the ‘Zero Hour Market,’ the first part of the performance. This carnivalesque happening was staged in a warehouse. We interacted with some obscure vendors, card players and jugglers, before Jason’s troupes burst in in (in an actual car) and made an end to this illustrious and illicit going-on. Jason here was a typical British politician of the easily portrayable Camerblair-type. He went out on his ‘peace mission’ to yet another foreign country where he would meet Medea and her family. They were in this transatlantic co-production played by the Brazilian cast members. During the first part, we as audience took part in Jason’s pursuit and courtship, before we were divided into male and female audience members and assisted the bride or groom’s respective pre-wedding rituals, and eventually performed celebratory dances during the wedding. And Medea gave, right amongst us, the treacherous kiss of death to her family to then follow Jason.

Later on, in Parts 2 and 3 of this night-long production, we were courted ourselves by Jason as potential electors, were photographed with him, and some of us even got his autograph. In another scene, we were brought to bed by our personal nannies who had a mug of cocoa for us, put us into pyjamas, brought us to bed, and read us a good-night story – here from a comic book of the Medea -myth. Those who did not immediately doze off (some loudly snoring away as the lady in the bunkbed beneath me, of course it must have been around 3 am by then) could bear witness, with our eyes closed, to Jason’s (or is it: our fathers?) betrayal and a first argument of the couple. Later again, with dawn beginning to set in, we were lead out of the building, following in small groups one of the performers, to escape the furious revenge of Medea, hiding across the Dockland area. The performers left us behind, and after a while, per mobile phone, we were directed back to the main warehouse, where – together with Jason – we eventually discovered the massacre: we found, indeed, two of the audience members whom we had met and chatted to before in the intervals, lying there in state, surrounded by candles, and we threw flowers onto their ‘dead’ bodies, before following the eventual witchhunt against Medea, not the least orchestrated here by the media who played a prominent aspect throughout this contemporary take on the old story.

Sensing the ‘Mise en Event’: Shaking up the Spectating Relations

These three examples, selected from recent theatre productions, map out a panorama of dramaturgic relations that oscillate between the material performance event and its semiotic meaning. They connect, in different ways, texts, performance ( Aufführung ), and spectators. In a way that is in an additional way exemplary for a trend in current theatre practice in Europe, all three productions staged (more or less) canonical texts, by Shakespeare, Zola, and Euripides/Heiner Müller. The principal ‘meaning’ of these productions, however, was no longer primarily located in their interpretation of the text. The relational components of dramaturgy, which we encounter here, instead exploit the interdependence of representation and theatral presentation, the interplay between the performance as actualised texture of a mise en scène and the actual event and experience. The mise en scène , in all three cases, revealed itself as first and foremost a ‘mise en event.’ The dramatic text and its (dramatic and narrative) textures function as an indispensible dramaturgic mediator that energises these relations. As a result, the focus shifts from the representation of meaning to the ‘sense’ generated, or in Fischer-Lichte’s term: ‘emerging’ from the very action of presenting this text in performance. This ‘sense’ – to be perceived by all of the spectators’ senses – reveals the dramaturgic relations as its very trigger. It frames the audience’s encounter with the dramatic text and establishes co-ordinates for our experience of the situation of watching theatre.

Relational forms of dramaturgy are, as our examples have also shown, not at all confined to new, experimental genres of so-called ‘devised performance.’ In fact, the conventional opposition that pitches the drama of staged text against an alternative mode of performance no longer suffices. The dramaturgic strategy of putting relations in play marries, as all three productions demonstrate rather effortlessly, forms and strategies of contemporary theatre-making attributed to ‘performance theatre’ with the staging of a literary text. We have seen here strategies of site-specific theatre, of physical theatre, or collective improvisation as creative rehearsal strategy applied in the context of staging dramatic texts. As a result, the above instances remind us not to simply assume that the core aesthetic innovations and analytic challenges arise at the very obvious surface, for example through the ‘fall of the fourth wall,’ the suspension of conventional spatial separations or the outright escape from traditional theatre spaces, nor even per se in the ‘active involvement’ of the spectators. Ivo van Hove’s production, like all of his works created for a traditional proscenium space at the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg with one of the leading Dutch ensemble companies, is a particularly apt reminder. The actual, true shift in the relational arrangement does not happen on the very surface, by abandoning one end of the assumed opposition (the ‘consuming’ spectators gazing from the distance; the dramatic semioticity) and accommodating us, as spectators, on the other (the ‘active’ spectator participating on his feet; the event of the material performance conditions). Such a crude shift achieves nothing but to reaffirm the spectating relations and underlying ideological hierarchies ex negativo. Jacques Rancière challenged, in his essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator,’ very rightly the fetish of ‘audience participation.’ In many cases, such productions only create even more ‘stultifying’ theatre experiences, as he terms it: they may blur boundaries and confuse roles, yet without challenging the underlying (ideological) principles of the hegemonic ‘partition of the sensible,’ as Rancière calls the dominant ways of perceiving, sensing, and making sense of the world (cf. Rancière 2009a).

Consequently, he determinedly argues against idolizing ‘interactive’ performances where the audience may no longer be seated in conventional arrangements but where still, in effect, ‘what the spectator must see is what the director makes her see. ’ (Rancière 2009b, 14, orig. emphasis). True emancipation of the spectator for him necessitates shaking up the underlying spectating relations and its implicit hierarchies: it is, we may add, an essentially dramaturgic operation, indeed. It is achieved where the individual intelligence of the spectator as spectator in their irreducible distance as thinking interpreters is affirmed without any reservations:

[In] a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts, and signs that confront or surround them. The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body or from some specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other. (Rancière 2009b, 17)

Van Hove appeals to this very intelligence of the individual ‘interpreter’ where he employs – in the Roman Tragedies and elsewhere – a range of minute realignments and refractions of the theatre space and of conventional viewing arrangements. In their very subtlety, they disclose a relational dramaturgy at work that even in the architectural setting of the traditional late-19 th century building of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg achieves to position the spectators no longer outside and opposite of the theatral situation, but that instead aims for a spectating situation which reaffirms the spectator as spectators instead of patronising them as somewhat interactivated pseudo-participants. The director’s insistence on the conventional proscenium setting discloses how we on the one hand continue, in his productions, to take our position as spectators opposite the production – but on the other hand, we are at the very same time placed right in the middle of a relational dramaturgic framework.

We may be at times directly addressed as friends, Romans, and countrymen, and elsewhere, in the Hotel Medea -performance, as electorate, wedding guests, or Medea’s children. Above all, however, these productions acknowledge in their very dramaturgic structure our own very real, ‘individual’ needs: In the Roman Tragedies , we are allowed to come and go, to take a spectating position we choose , to zoom in and out again, as it were, to eat and drink. We may browse the newspaper, update our Facebook-profile, or check our emails even while Caesar gets slaughtered right next to us. Or, we can make the choice of remaining in the auditorium: yet, even if we decide never to enter the stage during these six hours, we still participate in the changed relational dramaturgy. The very presence of the other spectators on stage is a constant reminder; they become the vicarious spectators that we spectate, a reminder that reaffirms our own ‘real’ position, too. Similarly careful and caring is the dramaturgic relation that shapes Hotel Medea : We are taken seriously in our needs as an audience, including the acknowledgement of our tiredness in the middle of the night. We have the opportunity to really take a nap, and the opportunity to share the concluding communal breakfast. The production of course also engages our enjoyment of participating in play, in playing roles, and above all in participating in ways that are precisely different from the clichéd ‘participatory performances’ where no-one wanted to sit in the front row.

Here, we were instead invited to enter protected environments of a Schillerian play of sense and senses, which I consider as an important factor contributing to the genuine audience emancipation that Rancière himself does not sufficiently take into account, as he privileges rational processes of ‘translation’ and interpreting. Let us remember that we had received some guidelines and instructions on a leaflet as we entered Hotel Medea ’s ‘Zero Hour Market’ around midnight, as well as being instructed in the dance steps – a group dance which allowed us to participate while not being oddly and never carelessly exposed. This contrasts notably with another ‘participatory’ performance I recently attended (and which shall remain unnamed here) where the audience was invited, not to say coerced into joining a waltz that mixed performers and spectators. This situation not only uncomfortably, and entirely unnecessarily and in disservice of the production’s dramaturgic aim, exposed those who had not brushed up their ballroom skills recently, it was also forgotten to make sure there was an equal number of sexes and participants. Of all people it was me who uncomfortably remained excluded, not finding any partner, not being able to participate, and hence left to have my engagement with the production taken over by anger about an unconsidered relationing that remained utterly stultifying, superficially spectacular, and nothing but an empty gesture. In contrast, the relational dramaturgies we exemplarily encountered with Ivo van Hove and in Hotel Medea , acknowledged us fully as spectating subjects – in our needs, but also in our fears and anxieties. They took care of us, and in that sense the ‘Hotel’-metaphor in the very title of Hotel Medea confirms the site of meaning in the relational dramaturgy: the ‘Hotel’ had nothing to do with the interpretation and representation of the Medea-myth here, yet everything to do with our own engagement as spectators staying overnight.

Double Exposure: The ‘I’ of the spectator

In each of the three performances, our ‘gaze’ and our ‘spectating’ was in different ways always already inscribed within the field of the production. They require from the spectator a relation to the (re)presented drama that is different from the standard mode of engagement i.e. one based on identification with whom and what we see. We are no longer the ‘recipients’ of the classic dramatic dramaturgic paradigm, or in psychoanalytic terms: no longer ‘the other’ who necessarily complements the stage and gains a position and role (and hence identity) as spectating subject on precisely this ground of being the receiver, of being on ‘the other’ side of theatre. An explicitly relational dramaturgy hence, at its very core, opens up and prominently highlights a certain ‘gap’ within the spectator which puts us in an ambiguous distance towards our own ‘acting’ as spectators. We find here interesting echoes of Lacan’s account of the logic of signification. Famously, he insisted on the ever gaping hole, the distance between the subject of the enounced and the subject of enunciation: between the ‘speaking I’ and the ‘I being spoken.’ The symbolic order requires us to ignore, erase, and disavow this gap. In a most interesting way, the medium of theatre makes this fundamental structure of signification palpable in an even more highlighted manner. There always remains an irreducible, necessary distance between the ‘spectating I’ and the ‘I of the spectator.’ We are offered ways of relating, modes of sensing, spectating and engaging. It is this double experience of spectating that blurs the clear separation between representation, presentation, and the very presence and present, between materiality and semioticity. This is exactly where we find the seeds of the (political) ‘act’ of spectating, and/or of spectating as an act.

The interesting question to be asked is now how any specific theatre production negotiates this rift. To enable, or even assert spectating as an ‘act’ in the Lacanian sense, or ‘emancipation’ in the Rancièrian terminology, this peculiar ‘double experience’ needs to be acknowledged in its ultimate incompatibility. Whether in Van Hove’s leather sofas or in the chequered comfy cushions and blankets in which our maids wrapped us up in Hotel Medea : while we were ‘participating actively’ in the performance, as the usual description and reading goes, our very individual subjectivity as spectators remained acknowledged precisely because the production never suggested that this fundamental experiential gap could be bridged or synchronized. In fact, in some of the cases discussed here, the opposite was true. Then, as an effect, the very process and activity of spectating loses its usual transparency – and the activity of spectating gains the momentum of an act. Activity as act means not only any response or intervention in the performance, but it is a direct assertion, even provocation of our individual ‘response-ability,’ as Hans-Thies Lehmann famously termed it (Lehmann 2006, 185): we are at once enabled to respond, yet also cannot get away from this response – we need to take the responsibility for our act and our actions as spectators. This responsibility of the spectator is the very moment that makes us abandon the (also relational) attitude of consumption which is so characteristic for our global digital economy of goods and services, including the performative service spectacles provided by our entertainment industries.

But there is also another, and equally political option. The gap in our subjective position may just as well be covered over in performance, and we as spectators are reassured (Rancière would say: stultified) by being allowed to perform an action in accordance to a script. We should here once more revisit Shunt’s Money , since it discloses a significant difference in its relational structure compared to the other two performances referred to in this essay. The spectators in Money have, precisely, not been asked nor been allowed to take responsibility for their action beyond some token gestures of ‘interactivity.’ The distinction becomes very clear: If someone raised their hand in the early moment of the play, thus acting playfully, they already disturbed the play’s carefully plotted machinery. At the end, one of the spectators simply has got to pick up the key and unlock the door. Our actions of spectating remain organised throughout; they have at all times been administered or carefully managed for us : We become ‘subjects supposed to watch,’ to paraphrase Lacan once more: locked into a dramaturgy of audience relationing whose machinery would just as well function without our physical presence. This could not be said about either of the other productions alluded to. As spectators we had been in the midst of things and even literally locked in, yet we remained, as far as our own spectatorial agency and ‘response-ability’ was concerned, still opposite and excluded: literally locked in yet thereby at the same time left out. Shunt, hence, despite their surface appearance as devised performance company, at the dramaturgic core of their production confine themselves to the parameters of the ‘well made spectacle.’

Action as (scripted) re-action, and in opposition to an ‘act,’ is perfectly exemplified in the forced gesture in the (in a very literal sense) ‘key scene’ from Shunt’s Money , where the choice for the spectators is merely illusory and from the start only one predetermined ‘choice’ can be made – it is thereby that this relational arrangement exactly replicates the dominant dramaturgy of our global liberal society, with its reassuring illusory foundation of a subject position that makes safe the gap of subjectivity and prevents us from falling into the open hole that is the subject. Of course, taking such a more conservative dramaturgic option should not be outright discredited. It remains, above all, another option of relational dramaturgy. Artists as well as audiences have the space to navigate. They can (but also: must ) take a decision whether, and to what degree, we participate, ‘act,’ and – again in a Rancièrian term: ‘par(t)-take’ in the world, or allow such part-taking and participation. The curious double-bind of a simultaneous, yet incongruent, even contradictory perspective is at the heart of these spectating relations: relational dramaturgies revolve around the very gap between the spectating ‘I’ which the performance addresses and the perceiving I (or maybe better: ‘eye’) of the spectator. This gap may be opened or it may be glanced over. Relational dramaturgies stage theatre situations that ‘put in play’ this very relation: they inescapably expose us to, and hence also gamble with and put on the very line, our ultimately ‘real’ role as spectators, our own experience of subjective agency. Here, a relational understanding of dramaturgy makes clear that true acts of spectating are not just a matter of explicitly ‘political’ performances. All the time we find the singular viewing perspective threatened by the blurred sense of being at the same time opposite and still within, even right in the middle of the performance. Whether the dramaturgic relations offer moments of contingent action where spectators are prompted to ‘actually act,’ as in Roman Tragedies or Hotel Medea , or whether ‘superfluous’ gestures of action effectively make a perfectly economic framework of a cause-effect logic transparent, as in Money, we find acts of spectating emerging where the contingent, incongruous and inconsistent gap between the ‘I’ as spectator and the spectating ‘I’ forces us to confront ourselves as spectators. Dramaturgic relations prompt us, in fact throw us back onto our own actions: they force us, the audience, to take ultimate responsibility as ‘acting agents,’ for our own agency, for our actions as spectators in this world.

Bibliography

Barba, Eugenio, ‘Dramaturgy’ (1991), in Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, eds, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer , London and New York: Routledge, pp. 68-73

Bersani, Leo (2010), Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Réel.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2008), The Transformative Power of Performance: A new aesthetics. Trans. Saskya Iris Jain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006), Postdramatic Theatre . Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Rancière, Jacques (2009a), Aesthetics and its Discontents . Trans. Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity.

Rancière, Jacques (2009b), The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott London and New York: Verso.

[1] Peter M. Boenisch is Professor of European Theatre at the University of Kent, where he was founding director of the European Theatre Research Network (ETRN). His primary interest is in the aesthetics and politicity of theatre performance, especially in the context of theatre directing and dramaturgy, dance and corporeality, and theatre and intermediality. He currently writes on a monograph Regie: Directing Scenes and Senses in European Theatre, and he prepares a book on German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier.

Copyright © 2012 Peter M. Boenisch Critical Stages/Scènes critiques e-ISSN: 2409-7411

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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• Interventions 28.2 Duška Radosavljević introduces this special issue of CTR Interventions on the controversial European theatre director Oliver Frljić.
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• Dissensual Politics of Performance Andrej Mirčev explores the controversy that greeted Our Violence and Your Violence (2016) when it premiered in Split, Croatia, through Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus.
• Who’s afraid of Oliver Frljić? Aljoscha Begrich, dramaturg at Gorki Theater Berlin, reflects on the many Frljić productions and many Frljić’s he has encountered before working on the new Gorki – Alternative für Deutschland.
• Teatr Powszechny: Frljić’s theatre playground Agnieszka Jakimiak, dramaturg on The Curse, reflects on that production and its controversy, arguing that Frljić’s work attempts to dismantle the complicity of representation with power.
• What on earth is happening in Poland? On Klątwa, protest, and a new regime Bryce Lease discusses the protests that followed the premiere of Klątwa (The Curse) in Warsaw, in the context of political transformations and firings of artistic directors in Poland.
• Latest journal: Volume 28, Issue 1 Special issue: Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures Edited by Anna McMullan & Graham Saunders This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review reflects on how selected contemporary theatre and performance practices and discourses have engaged with or been influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett.
• Interventions 28.1 (March 2018) Anna McMullan introduces the set of Interventions published alongside this special issue on Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures, co-edited with Graham Saunders.
• Incommensurable Corporealities? Touretteshero’s Not I Derval Tubridy explores questions of neurodiversity and agency in the performance of Beckett’s Not I by Jess Thom of Touretteshero.
• End/Lessness Jonathan Heron discusses his series of projects with the late Beckett theatre scholar and performer, Rosemary Pountney, and the digital iterations and traces of that collaboration.
• Virtual Play: Beckettian Experiments in Virtual Reality Nicholas Johnson and Néill O’Dwyer reflect on a series of projects that use virtual reality and other twenty-first century technologies to creatively interpret Beckett’s plays.
• Beckett, Ireland and the Biographical Festival: A Symposium Reporting on a symposium they co-organised, Trish McTighe and Kathryn White argue that an analysis of festival culture is an important aspect of the consideration of Beckett’s place within contemporary art.
• Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 4 Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
• Interventions 27.4 (December 2017) This issue probes questions of ‘the civic’: the space where citizen meets public. A series of provisional reports from Broderick Chow, Jen Harvie, Simon Bayly, Elaleh Hatami & Sepideh Zarrin Ghalam
• Free Dissociations Simon Bayly, with Johanna Linsley, probe the state of 'contact', relation and non-relation, and the limits of writing for approaching all of these.
• Civic Inquiry: Interview with Jen Harvie Jen Harvie discusses her experience as specialist advisor to an inquiry into skills for theatre for the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications.
• Gendered Bodies in Motion: Representation of Iranian Women Dancers in Public Spaces of Tehran Elaheh Hatami and Sepideh Ghalam explore how women dancing in public spaces in post-revolution Iran challenge a state regime that regulates and controls women’s bodies.
• Civic Violence: Grappling with Life in the UK Broderick D.V. Chow, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Bryce Lease, Royona Mitra, Grant Peterson, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and Joshua Abrams reflect on gaining Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK.
• Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 3 Special Issue: Encountering the Digital in Performance: Deployment | Engagement | Trace Edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Andy Lavender & Eirini Nedelkopoulou This special issue explores theatre and performance in digital culture – recognising that digital technologies are now in a second and even third generation of common use. In particular, then, it examines how changes in digitally enabled practices are affecting the way we make, participate in, and think of performance.
• Interventions 27.3 (November 2017) This issue of Interventions accompanies the Encountering the Digital in Performance special issue. The four pieces explore new approaches to performance and audiences in a changing cultural and political landscape.
• Sound Choreographer <> Body Code Alex McLean and Kate Sicchio reflect on their collaborations around dance and code, focusing on their piece Sound Choreographer <> Body Code, which here uses your computer's microphone to generate choreographic instructions.
• Fluidity and friendship: the choir that surprised the city Elena Marchevska talks with activists-researchers Nita Çavolli, Jana Jakimovska, and Katerina Mojanchevska about democracy, location, and media in song protests of the Skopje choir Raspeani Skopjani.
• Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) In this playful video, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck interviews Tei Blow and Sean McElroy from Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (ROKE) about their use of karaoke, ritual, metaphysics, and media.
• Digital Arts Organisations: 3-Legged Dog and The Space Andy Lavender discusses digital culture with Kevin Cunningham, Executive Artistic Director of 3-Legged Dog, NY (USA), and Fiona Morris, Chief Executive of The Space, Birmingham/London (UK).
• Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 2 Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
• Interventions 27.2 (June 2017) This issue of Interventions attends to collaboration as a method of theatre-making and scholarship, and as a way of studying their conditions of possibility.
• Hidden Vacancies Hillary Miller analyses the curatorial and real estate collusions involved in Coney Island’s Art Walls.
• Vulnerability and the Lonely Scholar The research collective After Performance explores how vulnerability might productively work against the norm of ‘lonely scholarship’.
• Dyspraxic Collaboration Daniel Oliver and Luke Ferris’ video on/of ‘dyspraxic collaboration’ unapologetically performs the generative possibilities of ‘inattentivity’.
• Learning to stand together In this interview, Elyssa Livergant and the Precarious Workers Brigade consider the relationship between higher education, the cultural industries and labour through the theme of collaboration.
• Latest journal: Volume 27, Issue 1 Special Issue: Theatre, Performance, and the Amateur Turn Edited by Nadine Holdsworth, Jane Milling & Helen Nicholson This special issue brings together research that examines amateurism as a cultural practice and as an aesthetic strategy, engaging with questions of shared experiences and sociability; everyday creativity; practical tools, skills, and volunteer labour; cultural legitimacy and value; and amateurism as a contested site of failure.
• Interventions 27.1 This issue of Interventions extends some of the ideas and practices behind this quarter's special issue on ‘Theatre, Performance and the Amateur Turn’.
• Evocative Objects 'Evocative Objects' collects the stories and memories behind objects brought by amateur theatre-makers to research workshops.
• ‘You start an amateur and you end up an amateur’ Nadine Holdsworth interviews 81-year-old Arthur Aldridge about a career that has moved between amateur theatre and the West End.
• Amateur Theatre in the Royal Navy This slideshow of archival and contemporary images offers a guided tour of amateur theatre in the Royal Navy.
• Twenty-First Century Amateurs and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages Initiative Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research, Molly Flynn reflects on the Royal Shakespeare Company's Open Stages initiative that involved over 300 amateur theatre companies.
• Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 4 Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
• Interventions 26.4 (December 2016) Georgina Guy and Johanna Linsley introduce ideas of permissibility and allowance which frame this special collection of Interventions.
• ‘And what places light up the air between you…’ PA Skantze and Laure Fernandez reflect on the modes of permissibility and allowance that attend their movements across national borders, and how these affect their work and lives.
• To Permit Refusal Emma Cox inverts the liberal terms of the editors’ provocation to construct a powerful response to recent European referenda and increasing cultural permissions of exclusion.
• Two Episodes of Permission and Allowance: Oakland Summer 2016 Olive McKeon looks at two specific examples where permission is negotiated in real time, among physical bodies: one in a theatre space, and one in a street protest.
• Sex, Work, and Negative Affects in Participatory Performance Owen G. Parry reflects intimately on the process of writing about his own one-to-one practice and the stakes of spaces of permissibility in performance.
• Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 3 Special Issue: Simon Stephens: British Playwright in Dialogue with Europe, edited by David Barnett This latest issue of Contemporary Theatre Review collects critical perspectives on the work of contemporary playwright Simon Stephens, with particular focus on his collaborative relationships with directors and the productive exchange between British and European theatre-making practices.
• Interventions 26.3 (September 2016) In his Introduction to this issue of Interventions, Adam Alston reflects, post-Brexit, on the prescience of Simon Stephens as an especially European British writer.
• Things That Always Tend to Happen in Simon Stephens’ Plays Louise LePage uses video as critical medium, assembling a cast of scholars to respond to Billy Smart’s provocation regarding ‘things that always tend to happen in Simon Stephens’ plays’.
• When Little is Said and Feminism is Done? Simon Stephens, the Critical Blogosphere and Modern Misogyny Melissa Poll uses this online forum to argue that many criticisms of Stephens’ Three Kingdoms, including the main articles in this special issue, avoid grappling with its ‘modern misogyny’.
• Harper Regan by Simon Stephens: through a Greek lens Reflecting on her staging of Stephens’ Harper Regan in the United States, Gaye Taylor Upchurch asks: ‘why is a woman with agency still such a scary notion?’
• The Funfair : A New Adaptation by Simon Stephens Walter Meierjohann discusses his production of Stephens’ The Funfair for the opening season at HOME, Manchester, in light of nationalist resurgence in the UK.
• Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 2 Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal, engaging with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.
• Interventions 26.2 (May 2016) This issue of Interventions explores what the digital might offer to performance scholarship, practice, and criticism.
• Postmedia Performance In ‘Postmedia Performance’ Sarah Bay-Cheng offers theatre and performance scholarship a provocation to rethink its approach to making sense of the digital.
• Megan Vaughan – Public Twine Using the interactive storytelling tool Twine, Megan Vaughan brings recent performances, public space and spaces of encounter into conversation.
• Possible Public and Private Narratives Johanna Linsley talks with artist Brian House about his recent projects and the relationship between data gathering, participatory systems and the performance of the private and public.
• Listening post: Public voices on the digital stage ‘Listening Post’ is a curated collection of artistic projects and critical reflections that offer insight into the performance of the vox populi, the ‘voice of the people’.
• Latest journal: Volume 26, Issue 1 David Greig: Dramaturgies of Encounter and Engagement, edited by Jacqueline Bolton This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review focuses on the work of contemporary Scottish playwright David Greig.  The issue emerges from a symposium held around the time of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and addresses issues of national identity and globalization, utopianism and dissensus, and political engagement and participatory practice.
• Interventions 26.1 (February 2016) This issue of Interventions accompanies a special issue of the journal dedicated to the contemporary Scottish playwright and theatre director David Greig.
• Dan Rebellato in conversation with David Greig In this excerpt from a live conversation, Dan Rebellato talks with David Greig about what it's like to have his work critically analysed and the playwright's process of writing The Events (2013).
• “CONJURORS! CONJURORS!…Who wrote this!” * : Some Reflections on Lanark: A Life in Three Acts Victoria E. Price offers reflections on the 2015 production of Lanark: A Life in Three Acts, Greig's adaptation of the 1981 Alasdair Gray novel of postmodern Scottish identity.
• Welcome to the Fringe Welcome To The Fringe, a collaboration between David Greig, Forest Fringe, and London’s Gate Theatre, supported Palestinian artists in visiting and presenting at the 2015 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
• Butterfly Mind ‘Butterfly Mind’, a performance-text adapted especially for the web, recreates David Greig’s journey on what he calls ‘an adventure in contemporary shamanic soul retrieval’.
• Celebrating 25 Years of Contemporary Theatre Review (part 2) This second collection of hand-picked articles from Contemporary Theatre Review's archives celebrates the journal's 25th anniversary year.  These articles will be freely available for the next six months, until June 2016.
• Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 4 From a close reading of a recent playscript to an analysis of interventions in spectator relations, and from configurations of femininity in Japanese Butoh to the use of ‘play’ in the ceremonies of the Shona people of southern Africa, this latest journal reflects a breadth of contemporary theatre practices as well as a variety of scholarly modes of engagement with them.
• Interventions 25.4 (October 2015) This issue of Interventions focuses on the relationship between ‘practice’ and ‘research’, offering four different case studies in which these concepts are configured in quite different ways.
• World Factory: The politics of conversation In this cross-disciplinary forum, the research project and interactive performance World Factory, directed by Zoë Svendsen, is discussed from multiple perspectives ranging from social geography to marketing.
• The Sick of the Fringe Brian Lobel and Hannah Maxwell assess The Sick of the Fringe, a Wellcome Trust-funded programme of talks and events exploring the relationship between medicine and the arts at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
• Infecting Archives: An interview with Martin O’Brien In ‘Infecting Archives’, Johanna Linsley talks with Martin O’Brien about his collaboration with Sheree Rose and their work with the Bob Flanagan archive at the ONE Lesbian and Gay Archive.
• Karen Christopher: The duet residencies Following ‘duet residencies’ with Chris Goode and Lucy Cash, performance-maker Karen Christopher reflects on how the artistic residency might remain open to collaboration, surprise, and even mayhem.
• Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 3 Special Issue: Theatre, Performance and Activism: Gestures towards an Equitable World Edited by Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry The latest print issue combines scholarly articles with contributions from artist-activists to explore the theatrical gestures of protest: gestures that traverse the private and public realms, gestures that manifest the labour of care, gestures of migration and movement, and gestures of solidarity.
• Interventions 25.3 (July 2015) This issue of Interventions is focused on activism and performance and accompanies the print journal’s special issue ‘Theatre, performance and activism: gestures towards an equitable world’.
• Domestic Gestures Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry reflect on a collectively authored blogging project on activist performance, in which 'domestic gestures' emerged as one of its core themes.
• Irresistible Images In this interview Shane Boyle and Larry Bogad reflect on the relationship between performance and protest through a critical exploration of the ‘irresistible image’.
• Celebrating Margaretta D’Arcy’s Theatrical Activism Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A and Robert Leach contribute to a reflection and celebration of Irish writer and performer Margaretta D’Arcy’s ongoing activism.
• ‘How do we imagine something other than what there is?’ An interview with the vacuum cleaner 'How do we imagine something other than what there is?' This short film is an edited version of an interview with the vacuum cleaner, an ‘art activist collective of one’.
• Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 2 Special Issue: Electoral Theatre Edited by Stephen Bottoms and Brenda Hollweg This edition of Contemporary Theatre Review is timed to coincide with the UK General Election of May 2015. It deals in part with theatre about electoral politics, but also considers electoral politics as a kind of theatre, taking an interdisciplinary approach to affective dimensions of voting, dramaturgical strategies of address, and critiques of broadcast media.
• Interventions 25.2 (May 2015) This issue of Interventions looks ahead to the UK General Election on 7 May 2015 and accompanies a newly published Special Edition of the print journal on ‘Electoral Theatre’.
• Parallel Interview with Jonathan Petherbridge from London Bubble and Tom Bowtell from Coney In this ‘parallel interview’, Jonathan Petherbridge from London Bubble and Tom Bowtell from Coney reflect on electoral democracy and acts of voting as core themes in their recent work.
• Acts of Voting: A Lexicon Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager compile a ‘lexicon’ on acts of voting, presenting contributions from 26 scholars who explore the ambitions, achievements and economies of voting in Europe.
• Early Days: Reflections on the Performance of a Referendum A short film by Laura Bissell and David Overend on theatre, performance, and the Scottish Referendum, featuring interviews with Christine Hamilton and Scottish theatre-makers.
• ‘…faces behind the numbers’: Rimini Protokoll and Daniel Koczy discuss 100% City The topics of demography and representation are foregrounded in Daniel Koczy’s interview with Rimini Protokoll, which focuses on the challenges of staging populations in their 100% City project.
• Latest journal: Volume 25, Issue 1 The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing, guest-edited by Maria M. Delgado & Joanne Tompkins This special issue brings together 33 short essays offering critical reflections and commentaries on the myriad practices, problems and provocations of editing. It is a conversation about how – as editors in formal and informal capacities – we write, how we curate, how we fashion and formulate, how we shape and feedback, and the changes and challenges that the digital era has introduced.
• Interventions 25.1 (February 2015) These online Interventions offer a variety of perspectives that complement the journal’s latest special issue on the politics, processes and practices of editing.
• Editing Ourselves into History: A Live Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Various participants reflect on a recent ‘edit-a-thon’ that sought to redress the invisibility of feminist Live Art practices within Wikipedia.
• Postgraduate/Early-Career Researcher Forum on Academic Publishing This forum, curated by Charlotte Bell, offers five different views from postgraduates and early-career researchers on the shifting landscape of academic publishing.
• NOTA NOTA, a collection of unedited responses produced and 'archived' in real-time, collapses the distance between performance and critical response.
• Delegitimizing the Performance Document: Tales from the Open Call ‘So what is Performance if it includes this?’ asks Yelena Gluzman, editor of the deliberately non-selective compendium Emergency Index.
• Celebrating 25 Years of Contemporary Theatre Review In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Contemporary Theatre Review, the current editors have hand-picked a selection of articles from the archive that reflect something of the breadth and distinctive character of the journal.  The articles will be freely available until the end of 2015, and are introduced by the members of the editorial team.
• Latest journal: Volume 24, Issue 4 A Controversial Company: Debating the Casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, edited by Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe. The storm surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2012-13 production of The Orphan of Zhao brought to the fore issues of racial-ethnic theatrical representation in casting. This Special Issue brings together material from all sides of the debate, from the RSC and British East Asian (BEA) actors, from practitioners and academics, to offer a series of documents on what could become a decisive, and positive, moment in the history of BEA performance in Britain.
• Interventions 24.4 (October 2014) Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe, co-editors of the special issue debating the casting of the RSC's The Orphan of Zhao, introduce the online features that accompany the print issue.
• Orphan à la Crouching Tiger In 'Orphan à la Crouching Tiger', Daphne Lei reports on a production of The Orphan of Zhao in La Jolla, California, featuring an all-Asian American cast.
• Purchase Power: The Marketing of Performance and its Discursive Effects To accompany his analysis of why the casting of The Orphan of Zhao became so contested, Ashley Thorpe provides a critique of the marketing of the RSC production.
• Anna Chen – Yellowface Watch a video of Anna Chen performing her poem Yellowface, which satirises and reappropriates this practice of racial stereotyping.
• The Orphan of Zhao Redux This specially commissioned video, The Orphan of Zhao Redux, features an all-British East Asian cast, performing a hybrid text edited and compiled by Daniel York.
• Latest journal: Volume 24, Issue 3 As with a previous forum on theatre-maker Tim Crouch, this special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review focuses on a single writer, contemporary British playwright Martin Crimp. Titled ‘Dealing with Martin Crimp’, this issue documents and expands on a conference held at the Royal Court in 2013. As the articles in this issue address, the source of Crimp’s originality is composed of a variety of factors: distinctive writing strategies that continue to be refined, an understanding of internationalism but also of distinct cultural sensibilities, and the value of collaboration across a diverse range of genres and media.
• Interventions 24.3 (July 2014) Alongside our special issue on 'Dealing with Martin Crimp', these online Interventions complement and extend the discussion in the print journal.
• Composition as Textual Illumination: Martin Crimp and George Benjamin Discuss Written on Skin Watch a video of Martin Crimp in conversation with composer George Benjamin about their collaboration on the 2012 opera Written on Skin.
• Sounding Crimp’s Verbal Stage: The Translator’s Challenge Elisabeth Angel-Perez, who contributes a longer article to the special issue, reflects on the challenges of translating Crimp's world where 'acts of language are all there is to "see"'.
• Writer or Director? The Case of Martin Crimp Aleks Sierz, author of The Theatre of Martin Crimp, challenges the binary opposition of writer and director in Crimp’s work.
• Keeping it Real: Stories and the Telling of Stories at the Royal Court Dan Rebellato teases apart the reputation for realism at the Royal Court, where many of Crimp’s plays have premiered.
• Volume 24, Issue 2 (May 2014) Methodologies for our discipline continue to expand to recognise the cross-cultural currents that shape much scholarship across the live art, performance and theatre boundaries. As such, the articles that constitute this issue similarly demonstrate a breadth of methodologies used in contemporary theatre, performance and live art studies, through: close readings of a production from first-person viewing; study of play texts and their reception histories; cultural materialist analysis of venues and urban settings; and interdisciplinary analysis drawing particularly on the history of art (and particularly of photography).
• Interventions 24.2 (May 2014) This new website provides a gateway to Contemporary Theatre Review, as well as online Interventions that add to and complement the themes and topics of the journal.
• Comment: Sochi 2014 Following on from a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on the 2012 London Games, Yana Meerzon and Lynne McCarthy address the cultural politics of the Sochi Olympics.
• Video: The radical in engaged practices Watch a collection of artist films and interviews coming out of Beyond Glorious, a symposium that explored connections between experimental forms and socially engaged practices.
• Audio: Performance Matters Crossovers Listen to a dialogue between Gareth Evans, Mike Dibb, Hugo Glendinning, Deborah Levy, and Alan Read, recorded as part of Crossovers, an initiative of the Performance Matters project.
• Parodying ‘Blurred Lines’ in the Feminist Blogosphere Geraldine Harris, whose discussion of ‘post-post-feminism’ appears in the latest print issue, comments here on the proliferation of online parodies of Robin Thicke’s controversial ‘Blurred Lines’.

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

• © 2018
• Eamonn Jordan 0 ,
• Eric Weitz 1

School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

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School of Creative Arts, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

• Examines key moments, movements, works, artists, companies and spaces in contemporary Irish theatre and performance from a range of thematic angles
• Provides new insights into the ways Irish theatre practice has evolved over the past sixty years
• Brings together a wide spectrum of voices and perspectives to encourage fruitful new understandings of the legacy of recent Irish theatre and performance

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Introduction

Of Adorno’s Beckett

• Contemporary Irish theatre
• Contemporary performance
• Drama studies
• Modern Irish drama
• The Theatre Royal
• Irish language theatre
• Lambert Theatre
• Pat Kinevane
• Olwen Fouéré
• Marina Carr
• Brokentalkers
• Conor McPherson
• George Bernard Shaw

Table of contents (60 chapters)

Front matter, introductions/orientations.

• Eamonn Jordan, Eric Weitz

The Mainstream: Problematising and Theorising

• Shaun Richards

The Theatre Royal: Dublin

• Conor Doyle

The Politics of Performance: Theatre in and about Northern Ireland

• Lisa Fitzpatrick

The Literary Tradition in the History of Modern Irish Drama

• Christopher Murray

#WakingTheFeminists

• Carole Quigley

Live Art in Ireland

• Una Mannion

Gestures of Resistance: Dance in 1990s Ireland

• Finola Cronin

Contemporary Theatre in the Irish Language

• Máirtín Coilféir

Theatre for Young Audiences in Ireland

• Tom Maguire

Performance in the Community: Amateur Drama and Community Theatre

• Elizabeth Howard

Performing Politics: Queer Theatre in Ireland, 1968–2017

• J. Paul Halferty

Long Flame in the Hideous Gale: The Politics of Irish Popular Performance 1950–2000

• Susanne Colleary

Other Theatres

• Christopher Collins

Independent Theatre and New Work

• Gavin Kostick

Funding, Sponsorship and Touring: Causing a Co-Motion

• Shelley Troupe

New Century Theatre Companies: From Dramatist to Collective

• Cormac O’Brien

“This groundbreaking volume of extraordinarily diverse essays may well heal the schism between playwriting and performance in current Irish theatre. The reach of the volume goes well beyond the traditional emphasis on the playwright to consider the central contributions of performers, directors, dramaturgs, musicians, choreographers, designers, and sound and visual artists to the making of the theatrical act. Essays defending the playwright and these other theatre makers are often provocatively juxtaposed by the editors in the interest of opening up debate and extending interpretation. The dazzling outcome is a decisive intervention in the current state of Irish theatrical practice.” (Anthony Roche, Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Ireland)

“A vast array of voices and approaches to the contemporary moment of Irish theatre, historically contextualised, and socio-politically framed, is contained in this book. Its 'broad spectrum' approach to theatre and performance blends the writing of scholars and practitioners, blurring disciplinary boundaries and providing 'snapchats' of insight, reflection, and critical thinking.” (Brian Singleton, Samuel Beckett Chair of Drama & Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

“The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance is a beautifully curated collection offering unique and varied perspectives on theatre and performance in Ireland over the last sixty years. In its carefully selected montage of contributions from leading scholars and practitioners, the handbook moves beyond the shape and structure of conventional scholarly collections and offers ‘a wide range of generational voices’, whilst also making room for ‘closeups from the spectator’s or social observer’s view’. Readers can explore ‘previously unexamined surfaces’ through essays that reflect on theatre process and performance, or new scholarly perspectives that theorize, historicize, summarize, and scrutinize. This is an exceptionally important and interesting collection; a rich resource for contemporary and future scholars, practitioners, and general readers in the field.” (Marie Kelly, Vice-President, Irish Society for Theatre Research, Lecturer in the Department of Theatre, University College Cork, Ireland)

Editors and Affiliations

Eamonn Jordan

About the editors

Eamonn Jordan is Associate Professor in Drama Studies at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Ireland. His published works include Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (2000) and Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre (2010), and he has co-edited The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories (2006) and The Theatre of Conor McPherson: 'Right beside the Beyond' (2012) with Lilian Chambers.

Eric Weitz is Associate Professor in Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His publications include  The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy  (2009) and  Theatre & Laughter  (2016), as well as edited collections and single-author essays and articles. He sits on the boards of two socially-engaged theatre companies – Smashing Times (Dublin) and Collective Encounters (Liverpool) – and he is President of theIrish Society for Theatre and Performance Research.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

Editors : Eamonn Jordan, Eric Weitz

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58588-2

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Hardcover ISBN : 978-1-137-58587-5 Published: 08 October 2018

eBook ISBN : 978-1-137-58588-2 Published: 18 September 2018

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XXXIII, 866

Number of Illustrations : 21 b/w illustrations

Topics : Theatre and Performance Studies

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Doris Duke Foundation Announces Grants to 20 Innovative Theater, Jazz, Contemporary Dance and Multi-Disciplinary Projects Through Its Inaugural Performing Arts Technologies Lab

September 25, 2024

Artists, Technologists and Arts Organizations Receive Funding and Support to Develop New Uses for Digital Technologies Across the Performing Arts

Sept. 25, 2024 - New York – The Doris Duke Foundation today announced the 20 pioneering artists, technologists, and arts organizations that will receive grants through the inaugural Performing Arts Technologies Lab , a first-of-its-kind accelerator for projects seeking to explore innovative uses of digital technology in the performing arts. Projects accepted into the Lab will receive funding for prototyping and feasibility testing, production facilities advice and knowledge- and network-building opportunities.

“ These aren't just technology projects. They are ambitious proposals to radically innovate in the performing arts—how they are made, how we experience them and who they are for ,” said Sam Gill, president and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation.

Selected projects tackle a wide range of opportunities in how the performing arts are produced, distributed, and consumed, including:

• exploring the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence in creating, presenting, experiencing and preserving works across the performing arts, particularly among artists representing underserved populations and cultures;
• enabling artists and audience members with disabilities to further access, create and engage with art through the development of new digital tools;
• preserving inherently ephemeral works in the performing arts through new archiving technologies, fulfilling a need that is especially acute for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) artists; and
• pursuing field-wide solutions to pressing issues such as capital needs.

Doris Duke Foundation Arts Program Director Ashley Ferro-Murray said, “The more than 700 applications we received for this program sent us a clear message: performing artists are ready and excited to push the boundaries of what technology can do. They are asking critical questions about open-source approaches, accessibility and representation. Our goal is to help these innovators do what artists do best— bringing new, powerful experiences to audiences.”

In addition to funding, a critical part of the Lab experience will be technical advice and programming that help grantees build and benefit from peer-to-peer support networks across the field.

The initiative generated widespread enthusiasm, with an open call generating 745 applications from individual artists, universities, presenters, producers and arts organizations in 43 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

Grant Recipients in the Inaugural Performing Arts Technology Lab

• Alaska Native Heritage Center, Anchorage, AK – Dance Yuraq Project The Yuraq Project seeks to use motion capture technology to develop 3D asset files that will be incorporated into XR programs on site at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Contemporary Alaska Native dance encompasses traditional practices used for millennia to pass down important cultural knowledge. This project seeks to explore the creative possibilities of visualizing and analyzing dance movements using motion capture processes that will allow for the creation of cutting-edge digital experiences.
• Alley Theatre, Houston, TX – Theater Alley Theatre Simulated Environment for Theatrical Staging (SETS)  Alley Theatre will develop Simulated Environment for Theatrical Staging (SETS). Using virtual and augmented reality, artistic and technical teams will experience the set and artistic elements in the context of the stage space well before fabrication, enabling earlier decisions that affect budget and safety. Embracing the power of virtual modalities provides an alternative, resource-friendly future for the theater industry. 
• Andrew Schneider, Brooklyn, NY – Theater Tools for spatialized lighting and sound design for performance Andrew Schneider proposes building and sharing tools that change how 3D elements such as volumetric lighting displays, Wave Field Synthesis arrays, and RF tracking systems are programmed for live performance, creating a reactive performance space that responds not only to the performers inside but to the audience as well.
• Ballet Hispánico’s Instituto Coreográfico and Cornell Tech’s \ Art Initiative , New York, NY – Dance Innovación Fellowship in Dance & Emergent Technology Ballet Hispánico and Cornell Tech have designed an artist-centered fellowship of discovery and collaboration, empowering choreographers, dancers, technologists, and researchers to explore new modalities for activating Latine/Hispanic dance in New York City and beyond. The collaboration asks, “How do we use dance and emergent technologies to elevate the voices of people of color, especially Latine voices, in art and dance?” and “How do we employ immersive and algorithmic innovation in service of education and societal impact?” 
• ChromaDiverse, Inc., San Francisco, CA – Dance Unlocking History: Enhancing CD SmartCapture™ ChromaDiverse, Inc., is revolutionizing the way underserved dance companies preserve and showcase their legacies online. Through the use of the innovative software solution CD SmartCapture™, companies can now quickly digitize performance program information, creating a comprehensive digital archive twenty times faster than when done manually. For the purposes of the Doris Duke Performing Arts Technologies Lab, ChromaDiverse is set to expand the capabilities of CD SmartCapture to make it applicable to other genres of the performing arts. 
• grisha coleman, Cambridge, MA – Dance The Movement Undercommons: Technology as Resistance | Future Archives The Movement Undercommons brings custom built, mobile, motion capture technology out of the lab and into the field to look at choreographies of labor. By centering vernacular movement, this project raises questions, which ways of life are “carried along” through expressions of the body. Which vernaculars persist? Which are vanishing?
• Guillermo E. Brown, Los Angeles, CA – Multi-disciplinary THE INSTRUMENT Guillermo E. Brown’s upcoming project THE INSTRUMENT is an interdisciplinary system within a musical framework, focused on performative complexities and aesthetic considerations of jazz. The project continues Brown’s nearly three decades of work engaging with issues around drumming and new technology. THE INSTRUMENT builds on the hybridity of the drum set, envisioning a percussion instrument as a living installation producing audio and visuals in reaction to human gesture. THE INSTRUMENT becomes an intersectional vehicle inducing performer and audience to dream across boundaries, into the future.
• HBArts Collective, Inc. (Hope Boykin and Albert Crawford), New York, NY – Multi-disciplinary Creating and Seeing S.M.A.R.T: Spatial Movement Artistic Rendering Technology HBArts Collective aims to develop virtual technology for choreographers, directors, and lighting designers to foster efficiency in the creation/pre-production process by developing a method of moving animated forms that can be illuminated within a virtual space, widening the door of previous systems. These editable polygons will aid in virtual collaboration, putting artistry at the forefront and giving time and energy back to the artist.
• Junebug Productions and Well Endowed Philanthropy, New Orleans, LA, Los Angeles, CA, and Portland, OR  – Theater The Future is Us: ChatGPT for Black-led Arts Organizations Junebug Productions and Well Endowed Philanthropy are partnering to explore how ChatGPT technology can transform the operations and creative programming of Junebug Productions, a Southern, Black-led performing arts organization. The project aims to streamline administrative tasks, enhance fundraising and communications, and support creative production, thereby increasing Junebug’s capacity to focus on powerful theatrical works. This collaboration will examine the ethical considerations of working with AI and create a replicable model for other arts organizations to responsibly integrate large language model AI technology, fostering innovation and inclusivity while maintaining integrity and solidarity with marginalized communities.
• Kinetic Light, New York, NY – Multi-Disciplinary Advancing Innovation in Performing Arts Access Technologies Disability arts company Kinetic Light will advance research and development in the use of technology that supports deployable, user-centered, flexible, and powerful methods of access in the performing arts. Kinetic Light will further its exploration and experimentation in audio description, spatial audio, and haptic interfaces. The project will advance critical phases of development in the creation of technologies and approaches that will become a working infrastructure and series of practices from which we can create cutting-edge performance experiences. 
• jaamil olawale kosoko / kosoko performance studio, Brooklyn, NY / Philadelphia, PA – Multi-disciplinary Mapping the Ephemeral Passage: Methods for Archiving Performance kosoko performance studio will create an open-source, user-friendly archiving platform designed to help performing artists— particularly Black, queer, and Indigenous artists, whose work is almost always in-between, marginalized, and invisibilized—easily document and organize their creative output using customizable templates, serving as a platform for digital distribution and a historical record of artistic labor. 
• Marcus Roberts, Tallahassee, FL – Jazz Remote Real-time Performance and the Future of Jazz Remote Real-time Performance and the Future of Jazz seeks to use emerging technologies to remotely create, perform, record, and share jazz music. Complex latency issues will be addressed to enable audio-video recording of performances in real time with musicians in different geographic locations. This work will facilitate new interactive opportunities for artists and audiences as well as innovative strategies for young musicians and educators. Software and hardware accessibility issues for blind musicians and production staff will be addressed throughout.
• Momentum Stage, Inc. with Nicole Perry, Pedram Nimreezi and Ed Talavera, Plantation, FL – Dance Totentanz: Creative Performance Protection (aka T3) Totentanz (aka T3 ) is a new use of pose estimation and facial recognition technologies to decrease AI theft and training that occurs without choreographer and dancer consent. Devised by Pedram Nimreezi, an AI engineer, and Nicole Perry, a dance and theater artist, Totentanz aims to increase ownership and creative agency of artists. 
• Open Circle Theatre. Inc., Rockville, MD – Theater Bridging Worlds: Reimagining Live and Virtual Theatrical Experiences through The Grieving Project Musical   The Grieving Project (TGP) is a groundbreaking disability-centered musical that uses cutting-edge technologies to create radically accessible, comparable immersive live and virtual hybrid theatrical experiences. TGP reimagines theater by bridging physical and digital spaces for those who can't be physically present. The project explores immersive technologies, refines 3D environments, and develops new accessibility and artistic features, fostering an inclusive and interactive community for all audiences. 
• Scott Oshiro, Mountain View, CA – Jazz Deciphering Broken Rhythms Deciphering Broken Rhythms explores jazz through an Afrofuturistic lens, highlighting the shared properties among improvisation, quantum physics, and the cosmos. Drawing from the philosophies and approaches of artists such as Alice and John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Donald Harrison, this project will integrate emerging technologies such as quantum computing and immersive audio to create an Afrofuturistic jazz performance illustrating how jazz serves as a tool for liberation. 
• Sélébéyone, Altadena, CA – Jazz The international avant-rap collective Sélébéyone will collaborate with the renowned electronic music center IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) to conceive, develop, and implement a series of workshops and research residencies in Dakar, Senegal, and New York City designed to explore a variety of cutting-edge applications for computer-assisted composition and real-time artificial intelligence. The workshops and residencies will aim to provide a wealth of new and easily accessible tools to underserved communities of musicians, working across a wide variety of artistic milieus.
• brooke smiley & SOZO , Oakland, CA, Oklahoma, Missouri – Multi-disciplinary  EARTH.SPEAKS: Bridging Indigenous Wisdom and Modern Technology through Co-World Building EARTH.SPEAKS is a groundbreaking multi-year project led by 𐓷𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 (Osage) artist brooke smiley and developed by SOZO that seeks to redefine our relationship with Indigeneity, technology, and the land. EARTH.SPEAKS invites Native and non-Native communities to work together to co-create physical and virtual earth markers: sustainable and functional outdoor structures based on ancient building technologies, which become dynamic virtual stages for site-reactive choreographic and spoken theatrical performances. 
• The Healing Project, New York, NY – Jazz The Healing Project Digital Archive The Healing Project’s Digital Archive will serve as a combination of storytelling archive, digital exhibition, living library, and online performance and gathering space. This dynamic new digital platform will have three interrelated components: a living digital archive that allows people all over the U.S. to record their stories of healing and collaborate to turn those stories into music; a co-ownership model for participating storytellers; and a robust social media content production strategy that activates the archive’s artistic assets toward freedom campaigns for incarcerated people and their families. 
• Toni Dove, New York, NY – Multi-disciplinary Sunjammer 6: A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze In a mixed-reality interactive performance and installation driven by a hybrid AI, virtual characters see and react to multiple participants by tracking their movement with responsive visuals and sound. It’s a love story, and a conversation between two people connecting across time: the ghost of Hypatia, and a NASA engineer who in the future is building an off-world power station. A dreamlike experience, a visual and sonic poem, and a machine that tells stories, participants activate the piece and become embedded in another dimension. 
• VisionIntoArt, Prestini (Artistic Director/Composer) and Luke DuBois (Creative Technology Lead), Brooklyn, NY, Omaha, NE – Multi-disciplinary Sensorium AI: Disability, Technology and Voice - co-designing creative tech to expand the creative expressions, perceptions, and possibilities of the human voice Sensorium AI is an arts/tech/research project devising creative technology tools to offer artists and people with disabilities new possibilities for increased agency and nuanced expression in shaping their voices. The project is part of Sensorium Ex, an opera exploring intersections of disability, technology, and voice.  

About the Doris Duke Foundation The mission of the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) is to build a more creative, equitable and sustainable future by investing in artists and the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research, child well-being and greater mutual understanding among diverse communities. DDF focuses its support to the performing arts on contemporary dance, jazz and theater artists and the organizations that nurture, present and produce them. 

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