The performance follows four women in different parts of Ukraine, at various distances from the frontline and allows them to tell their pre and post-February 2022 stories. Abrupt opening? It follows the spirit of This Is Our Home - Ukraine, which, in turn, seems to...
Call me clueless, but I wasn’t aware, before seeing Mona Pirnot’s new play I Love You So Much I Could Die at New York Theatre Workshop, that computers today are almost all able to speak any text on the screen aloud. The default voices are pretty robotic, as I...
Within the past six years, prominent Romanian playwright Saviana Stănescu has written two “AI plays” (What Happens Next, and ZEBRA 2.0) and the text for a dance theatre piece, E-Motion, co-created with Daniel Gwirtzman. All of them have been premiered in New York...
“Is it me? Am I the drama?” I’m going to be completely honest with you. Sometimes I am the drama. But I have my reasons! Hear me out. I’m a social media manager at Fun Love Media, a Houston-based social media and content creation agency. One of my clients is Stages,...
How do you market theatre on social media? What strategies can a social media manager use to promote plays and musicals? How does TikTok’s trending culture influence the type of content that a social media manager puts out? These are questions I think about every day....
UNBOX ME! Written by Simon Jones. Directed by Simon Jones. Dramaturgy by Sara Giddens. Bodies in Flight Theatre Company. The Wickham Theatre, Bristol, UK, 25 February 2023. An ordinary working man in a high-vis vest stands stunned, stopped by a descending wave of...
Originally Shomit Dutta’s new play Stumped was screened online from 27 September 2022. Streaming on-demand Original Theatre Online created a new hybridized form of online theatre that merged the live and online realms to create a production that challenged our...
European Theatre Convention published a new study, Digital Theatre – Strategies and Business Models in European Theatre. Kasia Lech speaks to its author Katie Hawthorne, whose doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh covered digital technologies and ‘liveness’...
Even though for the last decade there have been numerous attempts to unleash Chinese theatre’s potential due to the growing global discussion on technology interference with the arts and its aesthetics, distribution tools, and virtual capacity, the pandemic has...
That AI is poised to take over countless jobs, wipe out entire job sectors, is all over the news these days. Concerns about how displaced workers will support themselves tend to be met with one- or two-liners like: yes, AI is going to take over a lot of jobs, but many...
Creating art that reflects our time, Kat Mustatea is a playwright and technologist whose conceptual triumphs are rooted in narrative-led, drama. Her creative endeavors pay regard to the bearing of AI and social media on art and society. Among Mustatea’s numerous...
The topic of the digital spectator and, implicitly, the one of the multi-stratified co-presence, with all of the implications that arise from such an encounter with a production or with a performance, was not a privileged one in the Romanian space, a theatre landscape...
Undine is a three-act animated opera composed by Stefanie Janssen and Michaël Brijs. The pandemic transformed the originally staged production into a digital format, which bought about new possibilities to the operatic medium. This innovative endeavor recalls Brian...
A collaboration between metaLAB (at) Harvard and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Digital Access Research Project (DARP) developed out of metaLAB’s FutureStage project, which was concerned with the future of the performing arts and the social and...
Review: My Self in That Moment, directed by Tamara Saulwick for Chamber Made. In his visionary essay published almost a century ago, Walter Benjamin argued that something of the aura is lost in mechanical reproduction. Now, Chamber Made’s My Self in That Moment takes...
Lately, I have been seeing examples of Jason Jamerson’s theatrical design work on Instagram - images he has made in collaboration with Artificial Intelligence apps. According to a recent article in The New York Times, “[A.I.] apps like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are...
Review: Set Piece, by Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, for Rising. Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s Set Piece explores female intimacy through the relationship between screen and stage, drawing on dinner party conversation, improvisation and lesbian pulp fiction. Its...
Embodying a portfolio of projects, metaLAB (at) Harvard is a think tank spotlighting the networked arts and humanities. Set at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, the idea foundry is keen on discourse, inventiveness, theorization,...
Review: Anything & Everything, Platform Arts, infinity ensemble for Rising. Anything & Everything reminds me of a rite of passage we have all sailed through, in one way or another. That question we all ask: Who am I? The passage is quite different for the new...
Since its original 1933 film debut, the story of King Kong has become a mainstay of America’s, and New York City’s, popular culture, with the great ape’s skyscraper showdown as much a civic emblem as the Empire State Building itself. Fittingly, as the movie’s 90th...
Though Gilbert Gottfried’s voice has alternatively been described as “shrill,” “annoying” and “grating,” you can’t say it isn’t memorable. Gottfried, who died on April 12, 2022, didn’t naturally sound this way. Watch him perform as a cast member during the sixth...
Although I’m wary of declaring any literary work to be the greatest ever, Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be a frontrunner. It’s often proclaimed to be or voted Shakespeare’s best play (Google it). It has countless film adaptations, is widely referenced, and even gets a...
Deirdre V. Lyons is currently living in Los Angeles and has been in over 75 Film and Theatrical productions throughout the west coast. In 2019 she joined the ensemble cast of The Under Presents, a theater experience in VR that was selected as a finalist for an Emmy...
Review: Sex and Death_ and the Internet, directed by Samara Hersch My last experience as an audience of one at an Adelaide Festival show was the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed’s The Smile Off Your Face in 2013. Strapped to a wheelchair, we were led from room...
“We began with looking for the differences between us, but at some point we came to realize that we were so similar.”–Kasper Daugård Poulsen It will take 16 hours for a direct flight, if there is any, from Taipei to Copenhagen, but if you plunge into Port Keelung, the...
On November 20, 2021, TheTheatreTimes.com published futureStage Manifesto, developed by futureStage Research Group at metaLAB at Harvard, a group of 40 leading thinkers in performing arts. The Manifesto was "animated by the ambition of transforming the post-Covid...
When Uncanny Valley premiered back in 2018, the idea of artificial intelligence augmenting or substituting live performance might have seemed far-fetched, extravagant and very niche in its interests. Following the covid-19 pandemic, marked by the digital technology’s...
For more than four decades the visual artist Joan Jonas, representing the U.S. in the 2015 Venice Biennale, has been generating a highly refined vocabulary of forms. In her most recent work, Reanimation, she brings together multiple technologies of performance:...
A daring and nuanced documentary virtual theatre piece about Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany for Cuba by means of the M.S. St. Louis—a diesel-powered passenger ship in 1939—is a chapter of world history made real in director Igor Golyak’s new masterpiece,...
Despite being heavily indebted to electronic mediation, the dramatic situation created in contemporary multi-media theatre productions is still performed “live” on stage. If we take into account its relatively stable requirements of an audience and a set duration, we...
This Fall, the international Theatre HD company Stage Russia enters its fifth season. With a variety of shows and genres to choose from, the company now offers an all-inclusive season pass. The 2021-2022 season opens this month with BORIS directed by Dmitry Krymov, a...
The futureStage Manifesto was written by the futreStage Research Group at Harvard metaLAB.* It offers a vision of performance as a human right, intimately entangled with all the stages on which contemporary life is performed, and offering global society new skills,...
The play Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, authentically narrates the story of a famous fatal Porsche crash in north Tehran that triggered heated debate on social media about inequality and the nouveau riche that represents corruption. The play was...
When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Brazil, I was in the city of São Paulo, covering an international theater festival, MIT-sp. On the last days of the event, we saw theaters being locked down and performances being either canceled or relocated to other performance...
Tanz mit dem Tiger (in English: Dance with the Tiger) is a forty-minute hybrid dance performance directed by choreographer and artistic director Pablo Sansalvador. It was presented to a live audience at Southern Germany's major cultural centre - Roxy Ulm, from 3 to...
A connoisseur of new art forms and emergent technology, Lance Weiler is a highly sought-after storyteller and media artist practicing in film, TV, theatre, games, and code. After stunning audiences of Hollywood in October 1998 with the astonishing horror film, The...
Does a diva ever really die? It’s a fitting question from the reigning queen of endurance art, Marina Abramović. Her first original opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, is a tribute to the titular soprano, whose voice and mythic aura have fascinated the artist since...
Running Aug 24-29 at the 2021 Edinburgh Fringe, Every dollar is a soldier/With money you’re a dragon is an immersive digital performance about immigration, money, and colonialism from the contrasted perspectives of Britain’s early Chinese immigrants and William...
Since January 2009, Chalk Repertory Theatre has been crafting site-specific theatre in Los Angeles, and now in its 12th season, they have crafted a Covid-safe theatrical experience that focuses on Districts 8 (western South Los Angeles), 9 (South Los Angeles and the...
Have the worlds of Samuel Beckett’s plays become our reality? The creators of Beckett Planet seem to answer this question in the affirmative revealing a number of parallels between the fictional and the real in seven filmed theatre pieces based on Beckett’s Rough for...
Abandoned Shores / Negative Photographs (Turkish: Terk Edilmiş Kıyılar // Negatif Fotoğraflar) by the Istanbul-based independent theatre GalataPerform has come to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe after its premiere at the 24th Istanbul Theater Festival, 2020. Created in...
Day four of the Between.Pomiedzy festival featured Virtual Beckett, the third seminar by the Beckett Research Group of Gdańsk. This session opened with a presentation by the artistic directors AnomalousCo (and authors of this article), Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva...
In the chaotically queer third act of Fake Friends’ 2020 production of Circle Jerk, the performance’s trio—played by Michael Breslin, Patrick Foley, and Cat Rodriguez—erupt into a frenetic meme ballet. As the production climaxes, audiences are inundated with TikTok...
Speaking to humanity across time and space, Archive: This Was the End is an interactive sculpture where a past performance mesmerizes the present day. Created by Mabou Mines artists Mallory Catlett and Keith Skretch in collaboration with sound artist G Lucas Crane,...
Clubhouse is taking over social media in a big way. The invitation-only, audio-only app is emerging as a popular space to host events, discussions, and more ever since it had a beta launch for Android early this month. A group of theatre-persons in Thiruvananthapuram,...
The online performance depicts marriage rituals and interactions in the digital world with a touch of humor. Corporate executives Abhishek and Manya find each other on shaadipakki.com (a fictional matrimonial website) and meet virtually over a video call. From the...
Although tragedy is not usually the preferred companion for hard times, Anglophone pop culture gravitated towards King Lear through memes and quotes during the global pandemic of COVID-19. On Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, in 2020, at the height of the pandemic,...
The Hong Kong Arts Festival has simultaneously commissioned two provocative productions of Neil Bartlett’s The Plague, an adaptation of Albert Camus’ famous novella. In 2016, an unusual political experiment took place in Hong Kong for one night only. According to the...
The premiere of La realidad, the new play by Darío Facal and Pedro Cantalejo, was in March at the Corral de Comedias, Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), one of the oldest and most beautiful theaters in Spain. The show aims to give the audience the experience of how fake news...
Pale Sister is the latest adaptation of the Sophoclean tragedy, Antigone (c. 441 BC), written by Irish playwright Colm Tóibín especially for award-winning (and fellow countrywoman) performer Lisa Dwan. Pale Sister debuted at Gate Theatre Dublin in a production...
On the 21st March 2020, I put out a simple message on my Facebook profile in response to the increasing use of online video communications due to the imminent COVID-19 lockdown: “Be creative with your videoconferencing, make it memorable, it makes a difference”....
"Waking up in the morning, thinking about so many things, I just wish things would get better / I'm trying to get rid of them, but nothing seems to stay the same / Woke up in the morning, doing my hair and makeup, getting my clothes on, walking into school, thinking...
In December 2020, Teatro Stabile di Torino worked with 63 theatre artists on seven radical, experimental digital theatre projects. The aim? To offer creative opportunities, while also putting artists “into a game they didn’t know how to play.” One morning, I received...
Igor Golyak is the Artistic Director of Arlekin Players Theatre. Arlekin Players Theatre has embraced virtual theatre during the pandemic, and their upcoming show, chekhovOS/an experimental game/, has recently announced May and June performance dates for all over the...
Located in graffiti-laden downtown Manhattan where the East Village and NoHo meet at 47 Great Jones Street just off the Bowery—CultureHub—a worldwide art and technology community, is a result of decades of collaboration between La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and...
Laila, a special co-production by the Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF) and the Finnish National Opera and Ballet (FNOB), promises to be a key highlight at the 50th HKAF. This marks the opera's first Asian premiere, also its first performance outside Finland. Laila is...
The camera can take you to places where the naked eye rarely goes. Like close. Very close. Close up. And then some. This is exemplified by Fraser Watson’s brilliant filming of The Separation, a 17-minute short written by Dan Horrigan and Haven Taranta. From the start,...
Leaders of the women’s suffrage movement relied on public performance to promote their cause. They used marches, plays, and demonstrations at baseball games to recruit women to join their efforts and to persuade men to vote for legislation that would expand voting...
Ashley Tata is a Brooklyn-based director and maker of multimedia works. I had the pleasure of speaking with Ashley about previous projects, upcoming pandemic productions, and future goals. Victoria Isotti: For readers who may not already be familiar, can you tell me...
An intimate listening party of The Empire Builders, an immersive audio production performed by the Kwasha! Theatre Company, is a bold experiment in alternative theatre! Presented by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and the Market Laboratory, the production...
Over the past year we’ve become used to a variety of home theatre: recordings of live performances, streamed shows, online films. But I haven’t really explored much sonic theatre, those plays without pictures. Making up for lost time, in the past week I’ve listened to...
Does a subjective theatre piece encourage a subjective critical response? I think it might, especially when it’s a memory play about dementia, so here goes: First I turn off the lights, then I press play. From the darkness comes jaunty music—it’s a dance class. The...
Today, 23rd of April 2021, is the 405 anniversary of Shakespeare's death. In two months, on the 23rd of June, it will be five years since the Brexit's referendum. That day my notion of being a foreigner changed forever and so it did for many people. For the next two...
This year, the University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film & Television partnered with The Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre to present From the Fishbowl, a new fantastical work devised in collaboration with Theatre Studies and Design & Technical Production...
For Part 1 and 2 go here. Revolution: A Response to a Systemic Crisis Those theaters of ambulatory care which see the pandemic primarily as a crisis affecting communities on a systemic, national, or even global scale, tend to recommend a different sort of remedy....
Stage Russia is an international Theatre HD project formed by Eddie Aronoff, an American producer living in Moscow. Since the pandemic, Stage Russia has expanded its programming across the world, offering access not only to professionally filmed theatre productions,...
Manimals, created by Michelle Hudson and her team, shines as a piece that accomplishes the difficult taste of engaging audiences across the computer screen.
While theatre in its early days existed in a strong relationship with verse, the social, cultural, and technological developments of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries strained the tie. Many of the twentieth century’s theatre practitioners seemed to adhere to...
As a female-identifying artist deeply invested in women’s stories (and as a staunch feminist), I’ve been following the work of Artemisia Theatre for years. Their dedication to their mission and unending innovation is a blueprint for us all to follow. 2021, with all of...
Redemption Room, an experiential horror-thriller theatre performance by New York-based Secret Theatre, is set to premiere in India. It is not unusual to lose oneself in a particularly intriguing story, the kind where fictional characters become more familiar than...
In March 2020 in the midst of social isolation, Oskar Sadowski suggested to his friends that they read Balladyna in a group video chat. The reading sparked the idea of making what the creators call a “virtual video-based show” (wirtualny wideospektakl) as an...
The works of San-Diego-based theatre company Lonesome Whistle Productions thrive in the intersection of satire, improvisation, boundless imagination, and profound appreciation for innovative solo pieces and local talent. Following a successful run of SPACE FORCE!...
Tarragon Theatre’s technological foray into the virtual reality of a Covid-19 lockdown begins with news of a murder, specifically, the brutal slaying of Clytemnestra at the hands of her son Orestes. But Orestes’ isolation in what appears to be a virtual cell – he has...
In his 1964 anthem, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Bob Dylan sings: “As the present now / Will later be past / The order is rapidly fadin’…” At the time, he may have had social turmoil in mind when he wrote those lyrics, but the sentiment applies just as well now to...
Galina Borissova is a dancer and choreographer, working mainly in the field of modern and contemporary dance. Her professional path is almost 40 years long, resulting in the creation of more than 40 artistic projects on stages across Europe and the USA, and the...
This article has been translated from it's original Yiddish by Vassili Schedrin The year 2020 withered away, a difficult, dramatic year with much sorrow and loss. People, however, do not give in, nor lose themselves. They believe and are able to see bright rays of...
Charles Mee’s Heaven on Earth conveys the message that our civilization, too, has come to an end; and life goes on. Encompassing bits of text, skit-like sections, songs, dances, a projected movie, and more, Heaven on Earth is traditional theatrical script credit to...
Within the acoustics of Arter's Karbon, a hall for sound installations and concerts is a curation by Melih Fereli, conceived by David Tudor and realized by Composers Inside Electronics Inc., titled, Rainforest V (variation 3). In musical terms, the suspension is best...
December 9, 2020, marked an important anniversary in Jewish theater history: a centennial of the world premiere of The Dybbuk, Or Between Two Worlds, the most often staged Russian/Yiddish/Hebrew drama penned by S. An-sky (pseudonym of Shloyme Zanvl Rapoport,...
Artist and Director, Susie Lawrence, takes on the challenging aspects of Covid-theatre to a new level with the creation of a Minecraft production of Comedy of Errors. What do you do when you have a lot of 13-year-old drama students but no safe way to perform theatre...
Lights up. Enter a troll. Literally. Circle Jerk, returning to stream on demand January 1 - 17, 2021, is the latest offering from Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s exciting Brooklyn-based company Fake Friends. In a piece where “the ends justify the memes,” what...
*Content Warning: This article discusses and describes new musicals that deal with such topics as police violence against the Black community* The future of Broadway is effervescently bright as indicated by the works presented at the National Alliance of Musical...
Chennai-based theatre group, The Art Factory, debuts with an anthology of Tamil and English short plays Aparna R had no background in theatre whatsoever, except the odd dramatics classes back in school. But this August, the forty two-year-old realized that there is a...
Classical murder mysteries end with a neat solution — and with the arrest of the perpetrator. Postmodern murder mysteries play games with the genre, turning it upside down and inside out. So don’t expect a satisfying ending. This film adaptation of What a Carve Up!,...
At first glance, one might consider portraying someone’s older brother, boyfriend, or therapist, an incredibly unusual route for their creative voice. However, twenty-five year old actor David French has been doing just that, to great success, for over two years on...
Recently a friend sent me a message that read, "I'm not sure if you have TikTok, but something has been going around. Users are making a Ratatouille musical and I thought you'd appreciate someone's scenic design contribution." I downloaded the TikTok app and followed...
When, nearly three years ago, I wrote about the first Teatroteka (Didaskalia, No. 142), I looked at the language and narratives of what I then referred to as “plays/films”. I also mentioned the controversy that bubbled up in the Polish theatre and film circles over...
Maybe 13 is an unlucky number? Contemporary theater’s annual Festival/Tokyo is known for its focus on young artists and edgy productions, but, for its 13th edition, it has had to deal with the pandemic like many other events of its kind. Speaking at a recent press...
Co-workers Masha and Nikolai sit side by side in separate black boxes on my laptop screen. Their banter is sexually charged. They are bad for one another and they know it, but this only adds to their attraction. In what has already become a trope of virtual...
As part of the XXX Baltic House International Theatre Festival, the conference "Theatre and Virtual Reality" took place on October 16 – 18, 2020 at the Baltic House Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In cooperation with International Theatre Institute, this event...
While theaters around the United States typically produce The Rocky Horror Picture Show around Halloween, the city of Chicago, Illinois has a different tradition. Starting in 1987, The Annoyance Theater has produced Splatter Theater. Parodying 80s slasher movies like...
Actor and artistic director Atul Kumar speaks on the need to experiment with ‘form’ to make theatre more engaging A woman haunted by insomnia, a djinn, and a hallucinatory mind during the COVID-19 lockdown; a failed social media influencer’s journey down the rabbit...
Actor Shernaz Patel speaks about supervising the transition of theatre to benefit an online audience at Aadyam, and what this shift means to the art form’s future Shernaz Patel holds on to the memory of the last time she set foot on stage, in early March this year in...
Madrid is the European capital worst hit by COVID-19. There nevertheless remains more theatrical activity than in most other cities. The 2015 book by investigative journalist Nacho Carretero has already spawned a sensationally successful TV series, streamed...
"The use of Kerala’s traditional puppetry in a music video by director Emcy Joseph throws open a world of possibilities for the art form." Kochi’s metro train gliding over tracks, a traffic signal, the Biennale, a Royal Enfield motorcycle, or for that matter a...
Consciousness, cognition, and perception have fascinated Jisun Kim and The House of Sorrow is a mind-mending Möbius strip of a show, blending Buddhist philosophy with video game streaming. Where are your thoughts? In your mind? Then where is your mind? In your brain?...
The pandemic, like the tragedy of the 21st century, has a theatrical mode, and the social response to navigate it is to build an internal script to resist and survive; the situation has generated an affective atmosphere that has prompted an arc of emotional responses...
LILIAN, the debut radio play from award-winning composer Kasia Głowicka, will premiere Friday, September 18 as part of the Warszawska Jesień (Warsaw Autumn) cultural festival. Based on a true story and using real WhatsApp message transcripts as its source material,...
Cursed problems often require unorthodox solutions, ones that transgress or delineate anew previously set boundaries – and this is why we seek them in a theatre which wants to push the history of ideas further, in one that isn’t afraid of radicality. Initially slated...
The Lunar New Year of 2020 struck Chinese people as unprecedented as Coronavirus forced Wuhan to go into city-wide lockdown the day (January 23) before the New Year’s Eve, and the rest of China soon transitioned into travel restrictions of various degree. Wuhan...
After nearly half a year in quarantine, many artists still wrestle with the conundrum of COVID-era theatre: how can we create meaningful work when stripped of the in-person contact on which our field relies? Despite having made considerable strides in moving our lives...
Beginning with the erecting of a green screen and ending with its dismantling, Different Stars: A Reckoning with Time, Trauma, and Circumstance is one man’s self-aware journey into his most internal mind. Creator Karl Saint Lucy and director Raquel Cion do not shy...
Strange Bird Immersive premieres its all-new immersive, virtual theatrical experience “The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook,” playing through October 10, 2020 on Zoom.
Heidi Latsky is a dancer and a choreographer who puts her vision of an inclusive integrated world on display, unapologetically. Her dance company Heidi Latsky Dance has been at the forefront of multidisciplinary inclusive performing arts for years, staging vulnerable,...
ArtAloneTogether is a mix of dance, theatre, magic and music performances, in addition to socio-political conversations. From 10 am to 10 pm on Sunday, 23rd August artists from Kolkata, Shillong, Bengaluru, Imphal and even Amsterdam will be sharing a virtual stage, in...
With the coronavirus pandemic still running rampant and limiting in-person gatherings, theatre festivals around the world have been forced to rethink their approach to their annual season. One that has done this flawlessly is New York City’s Corkscrew Theatre...
Throughout the pandemic, Guggenheim has been committed to financially supporting artists and providing opportunities to experience music and art through their “Works in Progress” series. Two such works that premiered on YouTube on July 12 and July 13 respectively were...
I’ve never not gotten lost in Green-Wood Cemetery. One of the oldest landscaped cemeteries in these United States, Green-Wood was founded in 1838 when Brooklyn was still a mostly rural region. It sprawls over nearly 500 acres of now extremely desirable real estate;...
The season 2019/2020 is over. While there were several remarkable events, some aspects — coronavirus outbreak, total unpreparedness for online broadcasting, as well as political situation (which has its impact on the local theatres) — left a negative impression about...
Creating live theatre performance during the COVID-19 pandemic is tremendously complicated. At Arlekin Players Theatre, a resilient Needham-based Massachusetts theatre company with Russian roots, challenges are turned into opportunities, as Igor Golyak and Darya...
When performance spaces closed during the lockdown, digital mediums became the stage for several artists across the globe. Theatre also went online, with productions being streamed live or uploaded after recording. Kalanilayam, a theatre group that made a mark with...
Theatres remain closed, so instead of publishing reviews of new pieces, Etcetera asked artists to share a virtual contribution: a peek inside their studio, an insight in their research, or work in progress. Why does it give me such a kick to hear a small detail that...
Digital dance piece tells the never-before heard stories of deaf survivors of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 Reminding us of the stark truth of one of the world’s worst atrocities: DAO journalist Kate Lovell talks to Chisato Minamimura about her...
M(O)ther is an international online collaboration to be shown August 9, 2020: 2pm EST, 8pm South Africa, 9pm Iraq and Turkey, 10:30pm Iran. It will feature original music, modern poetries (Farsi, Arabic, Turkish, English), live drawings, and physical performances....
The following review is based on the Snowdrops and Chlorine script, which differs slightly from the play's hybrid recording. To watch the Snowdrops and Chlorine recording, please visit Staging Breast Cancer's Facebook page. Catalina Florina Florescu’s Snowdrops and...
The “ironic, but reliable” version recreates the theater experience in the finest details. The Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater in St. Petersburg (not to be confused with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow) staged a brief version of The Cherry Orchard, a famous play by...
As the new reality of daily life amid a global pandemic settles in, many people are getting accustomed to somewhat isolated lifestyles as they abide by social distancing measures and work remotely. For Japan’s theater folks, however, a community that thrives on...
Award-winning disabled documentary filmmaker, photographer, artist, published writer, and investigative journalist Richard Butchins has been exploring the word of epidemic theatre through a new serial drama-documentary podcast, “213 Things About Me.” Not only is he...
"They’ve locked us in here and they’re going to wait for the virus to finish us off." Thus goes a caption on a WhatsApp GIF Dalen sends to fellow retail workers. The workers have just found themselves marooned in Mega Mart when a customer with a suspected contagion...
As many have already said, the best streamed performances seem to be those that are made for the online venue. This is opposed to shows that originally debuted for live audiences and happened to get recorded, or for performances that had to be canceled due to the...
In 1971, in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, a site-specific dance performance — one in which the ‘site’ in question encompassed a dozen rooftops over a roughly ten-block area — was staged by the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC), one year into its inception. Considered...
The play imagines an encounter between composer, Benjamin Britten, and poet, WH Auden. Picturing a meeting between two of the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Benjamin Britten, the composer and WH Auden, the poet — in the form of a play, is no small feat....
On Thursday, June 4th, Jasen Mphepo Little Theatre in Zimbabwe showcased the first of many shows as part of their way of responding and navigating the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. With the national lockdown in the country having been extended indefinitely a...
Troupes turn to telework in a bid to keep audiences entertained The performing arts are built on interactions between live audiences and artists — whether ballet dancers, circus performers, actors, or whoever else — that help to create a magical extra dimension for...
The frame lingered some seconds too long on Frances McDormand, playing Jocasta, just long enough to glimpse her listening mournfully, painfully, to Oscar Isaac, playing Oedipus. On a stage, it would have been the stuff of theater magic, the mark of a sublime actor of...
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant shifts in routines all over the world. With more people finding themselves adapting to a lifestyle they’re less used to, the latent emotional distress is unavoidable. Flute Theatre’s team comes live on Instagram to play an...
During the lockdown, the best online theatre, more or less, are shows that are specially created for this digital format. Much better than dull records of dramas that might have worked well on stage, but now seem sadly moribund and exceedingly slow on the laptop...
Health and government officials around the globe are slowly and ever-so-tentatively moving to relax lockdowns due to coronavirus. In Canada, where the possibility of health-care collapse seems to have been averted (for the time being), some are beginning to ask...
The Covid-19 Emergency has been and still is a challenge for theatre companies, institutions, and artists that had radically to re-think their own practice in terms of social distancing and using tools as the on-line and digital. In this perspective, in collaboration...
While theatres remain closed, the way we watch Shakespeare is changing. When I picture the audiences Shakespeare would have written for, I think of the groundlings in Shakespeare in Love(1998). They stand, arms on the edges of the stage, staring upwards, eyes filled...
The coronavirus empties streets and theatres. Because we prefer virtual theatre to none at all, we give the stage to some of the artists whose premieres got canceled. How does corona impact their practices and lives? What kind of piece should we have seen? You should...
Individual tastes notwithstanding, it can be argued that the best theatre is that which connects us to our own humanity and lived experience. Though the COVID-19 outbreak, and ensuing mass quarantine, has curtailed our options for public performance, this collective...
Milo Rau was to receive an honorary doctorate from the UGent in March. Corona decided differently, but Etcetera decided to go ahead and publish the essay Rau wrote for this occasion. The essay has been translated by Lily Maeve Climenhaga. "Proceeding from times of...
Writer and theatre director Amaan Ahmad’s idea of doing digital theatre live received a big thumbs-up on Facebook. It was actually his wife who had suggested he develop a play for a digital platform. “I was apprehensive that it might kill the essence of physical...
Actors attempt to host Indian first-ever virtual interactive play Lockdown Love. Multi-hyphenated entertainer Roshan Abbas who, apart from being a radio jockey, theatre actor, writer, and director, has now turned technical support, editor and the first to attempt...
Theatre has survived thanks to its mobility and potential to exchange creative ideas. Since its inception, it has been open to the circulation of different practices, approaches, and conscious action. It is a platform for communication – an exchange of ideas, or...
Because of COVID-19, Italian singers can only continue to work online by using live streaming. The absence of direct contact with the audience has the ability to transform silence into an intense emotion, giving it a quality that is emblematic of the time. This is the...
Virginia Woolf’s reputation has closely followed British cultural trends: in the interwar years she was a beacon of modernism, austere and difficult; by the 1970s a feminist icon; in the 1990s a cultural and social snob who disparaged servants and the poor; and today...
Georg Hobmeier is an artist and narrative game designer who is working in several fields: game design, theatre, but he is also organizing other game-related events as well. Hobmeier was one of the special guests of Zip-Scene Conference vol. 2. On this occasion, we...
Originally a street play, Sheher-e-Naqab was put together by Pune-based group Swatantra Theatre. The scene opens with a man wearing a mask reading news related to Coronavirus in a newspaper... His son walks in excitedly to show the college letter informing him of a...
From play-readings and performances on Facebook live to apps that access playscripts, the online space is giving theatre lovers in the city the much-needed antidote to these grim days. Who would want to miss Andrew Scott, with his impeccable British accent and...
There’s a colloquialism within the theatre community that ‘you know lighting design is good when you don’t notice it.’ While the validity of that statement remains debatable, the future of transmedia theatre could be in a similar direction. It’s certainly true that...
Armchair theatre-lovers rejoice. During the lockdown, the National Theatre is streaming a selection of its past hits for free for one week at a time. These shows, originally filmed as part of the flagship’s NT Live project (which broadcast beautifully produced...
While it can never really supplant the vibrancy and vividness of live, in-the-flesh theatre, the showcasing of performing arts in the digital space has expectedly received a fillip over the past couple of weeks as Covid-19 containment measures are implemented the...
It’s only been a week since London’s West End went dark and theatres closed all over the UK, but it feels like months. Really. Like many others, I’m in self-isolation, stressed by working online and worried about getting enough food and essentials, so it is heartening...
Of all the unexpected things I think I might be able to imagine, one I could never have imagined for a minute was Alexander Zeldovich's production of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in Moscow in 2016. Whether I was right or wrong (it...
The history of puppetry is full of supernatural bodies on stage that dramatically or subtextually represent their quest of coming to life and gaining autonomy from their masters. A puppet’s performance often reflects on its condition of existence: How does a random...
In Italy, in the hard times due to the national sanitary alert for COVID-19, everyday life is completely destroyed. The number of deaths is constantly increasing, and anguish is the dominant feeling. In this tragic condition, towns are paralyzed but the silence must...
This conversation with Christa Sommerer focuses on some aspects of the gigantic artwork that Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau have been building together since 1992. After a brief synthesis of their career, the conversation will address the relationship between the...
Rebecca Rouse is a Professor at the University of Skövde (Sweden), media artist and researcher. VR is the latest medium – many claim this. But what exactly can VR do, how can we trace back its origins and what comes afterward? She coined the concept “media of...
This interview was made within the framework of the exploratory research project rethinking intermediality in contemporary cinema: changing forms of in-between-ness, PN-IIIIDPCE-2016-0418, funded by a grant of the UEFISCDI (executive unit for financing higher...
The last time I took my non-theatre-going husband to the Royal Court was in the autumn of 2013, when I was heavily pregnant with our first child, to see Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients. That was a huge success, and not only as far as taking my non-theatre-going...
Mika Johnson is an artist with a background in theatre, but also a film director. Besides this, he makes music and works as a photographer. He is the director of VRwandlung, a production that is based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The production toured around the world,...
Maša Ogrizek (1973), a university graduate in Sociology of Culture and a philosopher, has been self-employed in culture as a critic and writer since 2008. She has published book reviews, interviews, and articles in the field of sociology of everyday life in Delo's...
Architectural mapping, façade projection, 3D projection videomapping, display surfaces, and architectural Vj set are some of the definitions used for a new artistic format and a new technique that consists in projecting video images on buildings, façades, and other...
I’m not apologizing: this is going to take time. Visit a website. Choose an image: of a bag of rice, or a hibiscus flower, or a protest with a placard saying “Stop Racism." Download a soundtrack, make a journey, and listen. Homemakersounds.org is a collection of...
I’m a thirty-four-year-old straight woman who grew up in the suburbs with an older brother. That means I’ve spent a lot of time watching dudes play video games. I thought those days were behind me, and I never thought I’d be bamboozled into reliving this experience in...
Sorak Gemilang Entertainment (SGE) brings a world-class exhibition by art collective teamLab to Indonesia this year, presenting Jakarta’s biggest interactive, creative experience teamLab Future Park and "Animal of Flowers, Symbiotic Lives." There will be five...
If modernity is a stage, the artwork is its main prop. And in a culminating planetary crisis, voiced in anti-humanitarian grammar, the spectacle’s fourth wall has long since melted into air, writes Frida Sandström, on the 58th Venice Biennale. Without barricades, life...
Creativity is mostly regarded as one of the last domains of the human species and it serves as a key element in the construction of the idea that the human species would be exceptional. My interest in confronting this discourse is grounded in my belief that the human...
Swiss theatre company Trickster-p’s production .h.g. is based on the classic Hansel and Gretel, by the Brothers Grimm. You half expect to run into a witch as you walk through the dim-lit passages of the theatrical set based on the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale....
Returning to Taiwan for the first time since 2016, Australian-based Shaun Parker & Company is thrilled to be showcasing its latest work ReMOTE at the 2019 Kuandu Arts Festival this week. The invitation to perform came from the National University of the Arts in...
What happens when somebody dies at the frontline? Who’s responsible for getting in touch with their family members? And how do they manage to cope with the sudden loss of their son, brother, father, uncle or friend? All That Remains is an experience that takes the...
My instinct is to describe Looking at You, the new opera from librettist Rob Handel, composer Kamala Sankaram, and director Kristin Marting, a work of sci-fi, but that would be naïve. I want to call it a cautionary tale, but the moral would be moot. The creators...
Silent Voices Uganda has for many years now outdone themselves while producing theatre. From a set on wheels in Ga-aD!, Just Me and the Silence or Holy Maria to swift transitions between these plays, it is clear the director, Adong Judith is always trying to push the...
Nalini Malani has won the prestigious Joan Miró Prize for 2019, and she talks of her journey. One of our most thought-provoking contemporary artists, Nalini Malani, known for her lush, politically charged mixed-media paintings and drawings, videos, installations, and...
Chris Salter is an artist and theoretician based in Montreal, Canada. In his artistic work, he creates multisensorial environments that regularly challenge our senses, especially our haptic and gustatory senses. In March he held a workshop at the Media Design...
Virtual reality has been a trending topic for quite a while. Headsets and cardboards for smartphones have been just as en vogue as entire virtual reality arcade machines. Like quite a few technological inventions, virtual reality has its basic roots in the arts....
We are republishing this article from 2012 to remember Boguslaw Schaeffer who died today....He was 80 years old... Polish theatre has gained world renown thanks to its innovative and bold experimental style. In international theatre circles, it is often enough to...
Technology is pervasive in today’s society. Code = culture. Algorithms define our way of life. In his book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte coined the term ‘digitality’– in line with terms such as modernity and post-modernity – to describe the condition of living in...
I didn’t know what to expect from the Telekinetic Assault Group. The name was aggressive and the venue, Punctum in Prague’s working-class Žižkov neighborhood, was unmarked from the outside, and inside looked like a hostel bar. I was there because I was intrigued by...
The fourteenth installment of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ) kicked off this week, welcoming professional and student theatre artists from 80+ countries for a week of performance and cross-pollination. The Exhibition Grounds, a massive...
An abandoned high school in the village of Farrellton, Que., just north of Wakefield, seems an unlikely place to be charting the future of theatre and exploring the role of digital technology in live arts. But Nadia Ross is having a shot at it. Ross is the artistic...
I can give two accounts of Sachli Gholamalizad’s solo performance Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season, which premiered on May 11 at KVS in the frame of KFDA. First one: It is a show by a very virtuosic performer, sliding back and forth between...
This summer, a wonderful artistic tradition will return to the city of Prague, as the Czech capital opens itself to the fourteenth edition of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Established in 1967, the PQ has continuously evolved while staying...
The politics of (dis)association The sixth edition of Performatik, the Brussels Biennale for “live art,” this year continues with its legacy to explore the interface between performing arts and visual art in today’s artistic practices. While the fourth edition focused...
In Somewhere, players set out for Kayamgadh, a mythical city of storytellers in colonial India. In order to navigate through this city, a gamer takes on the avatar of a treasure hunter, detective or ghostbuster. The brainchild of game designers Dhruv Jani and Sushant...
Belarusian theatre is not well-known abroad because of a certain cultural isolation. Several local productions have been presented at international theatre festivals, but most of the Belarusian stage shows still happen under the radar (in terms of global theatre...
Andrew Schneider, a Milwaukee native, is an OBIE Award-winning, Drama Desk-nominated performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist. His interactive work has been featured in such publications as Art Forum and Wired, among others, and at the Center Pompidou in...
Media artist Choy Ka Fai experimentally explores movement, art, and technology with some science added to the mix. His pieces delve into and document traditional and contemporary Asian dance culture. Trained in Berlin and Singapore, choreographer and video artist Choy...
Cutting-edge technology and visual immersion in a flow of digital images have been the focus of the Tokyo-based creator group teamLab. With their key theme, “borderless,” they have been creating immersive environments of multimedia installations since their founding...
Virtual reality, 3D animation, and robotics have long been used by theatre directors in other countries but they have yet to be embraced as tools of stagecraft in Germany. That is about to change. The new Akademie für Digitalität und Theater (Academy for Digitality...
teamLab, founded by Toshiyuki Inoko and several of his friends in 2001, is an art collective, an interdisciplinary group of ultratechnologists whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, design and the natural world....
Ayesha Jordan and Justin Hicks have been collaborators for many years. Their work transcends genres, borrows from various performance styles and disciplines, and provides a uniquely shaped social commentary on the most relatable issues. Justin Hicks is always learning...
Until the beginning of February, the New York MoMA is mounting an exhibition on Judson Dance Theater. In the sixties, this legendary collective, which used the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village as its home base, paved the way for a postmodern dance and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaE3BdKCfJE A futuristic freezing laboratory where naked human avatars hang for research purposes. Doctor Frankenstein has occupied the laboratory and taken the patients hostage. Has he found a likely place to piece a creature together?...
Blurring the lines between the grotesque and the beautiful, the cerebral and the corporeal, theatre and sculpture, is Brooklyn based artist Molly Lowe. Tapping into “the dark, vulnerable, absurdity of being human” Lowe makes work that is both emotionally relatable and...
Essayisting Figures On Stage The influence of the essay as a means of expression has long reached beyond the confines of literature. Just think of the visual essay and the rich history of the essay film. In his groundbreaking study Postdramatisches Theater (1999),...
For those of us that are perennially nostalgia bound—even for the sepia-tinted memories of the vast cultural landscapes of yore—the “old web” is a treasure trove. It’s a place that has access to grainy videos, scans of old artifacts, miles of newsprint, restored...
Performance Between the Real and the Virtual: The Odiseo.com Project I will focus here on the experience of Odiseo.com, a performance I directed, which brings together three actors in three different countries using Skype. It tells the story of a contemporary Ulysses...
In 2013, Goosan Artistic Group, an Iranian group of performance artists, created a promenade performance based on Euripides’s Hippolytus, in which the spectator became the actor, the actor became the director, the video installation became the corpse, and all of them...
In recent theatre practice, attempts have been made and desires expressly voiced–from puppet theatre to robotic, cyborg, hybrid and/or intermedial performance—to create pieces of theatre that defy the gravitational limitations of live presence. The flexibility of...
The Mind of non-Cartesian Theater To contextualize my work HUMAN SIMULATION, I organized a Cybernetic Conversation at the Beursschouwburg in March 2017 with Professor Francis Heylighen, head of the Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition research group at the Free...
In recent times in India, we have seen the actor’s presence eclipsed by technology in productions affiliated with national institutions. The actor is reduced to a scenographic tool and converted into a component in a show. Upon closer examination, this can be seen as...
Ellen Pearlman is a New York based media artist, curator, writer, critic, and educator. She holds a PhD in Digital Media from the School of Creative Media at Hong Kong City University and was a Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology, and...
Clara Fernandez-Vara is an Associate Arts Professor at New York University. Her background is in literature and performance studies, but she quickly began looking at how text can change meaning when it is enacted and how action or actors or context can change the...
The digital age! (…) Can we turn it off? Real people want to see real people! The voices from Mount Olympus sounded so skeptical at the beginning of the millennium. Meanwhile, cultural marketing is blowing myriads of virtual cotton candy clouds into the electronic...
In 2011, a woman stood outside an abortion clinic in Manhattan and asked Siri a simple question, “Where can I find an abortion clinic?” Siri, an algorithmic virtual assistant on Apple’s iPhone, replied, “Sorry, I couldn’t find any abortion...
Exploring the common phenomenon of livestream communication in modern society, the performance collective Factory Irregular came up with their new mixed media show Together, a recreation of the online broadcasting experience performed in the basement of Camden...
Want to catch a glimpse of a play before splashing the cash on a ticket? Now you can...in 3D on the street. Theater companies Moscow Broadway and Fancy Show have started using augmented reality (AR) to promote new performances. The technology has been adopted for...
“YES! Wow! I think we are finally entering the twenty-first century!” the troll roared, stomping her feet joyfully on the ground, each stomp producing thunderous, boulderlike sounds. It was her first time trying on the troll sound costume I had prepared for her–and...
This is a transcription of the project Stage Your City presentation during the Theatre Digital Network Meeting in Ars Electronica Festival, September 7, 2018. Stage Your City is a participative theatre research project using digital media. With our partner theatres in...
Soho’s Performing Garage is the setting of a brief engagement from Poland called Białoszewski/Ginsberg VR. A collaboration between Warsaw’s famed Nowy Teatr and the imaginatively titled Dream Adoption Society, Białoszewski is an hourlong experimental production that...
Faced with new staging mechanisms, the actor must develop new strategies, which must lead to specific acting that navigates between real presence and virtual presence. The director, who is still at the heart of the creation, sometimes develops his own video and even...
Studio Azzurro is an Italian group that has been working with different performative languages since the 1980s: video installations, theatre, video art, cinema, interactive installations, interactive museums. In all these artistic experiences Studio Azzurro has never...
It is true of all of the FC Bergman collective’s productions, but 300 el x 50 el x 30 el is perhaps the strongest case for it, that the performance works at the viewers’ guts while simultaneously firing off intellectual and emotional triggers. This complex, visceral...
VR film buffs are still trying to crack the code of blockbuster flicks, even now that the hype and cash have left. SHANGHAI—Li Yaqin is buckled into an egg-shaped chair with a pair of clunky goggles strapped on his head. All of a sudden, the chair starts to spin and...
Peggy Phelan in her famous text Ontology of Performance asserts that: “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance....
A Very Queer Nazi Faust is an experimental participatory performance piece created by artist Vince Laws. It was cast via social media and originally performed at Norwich LGBT+ Pride in 2017 to great acclaim. Commissioned and supported by Unlimited, celebrating the...
Since 2002, every time Academy Award nominating season rolls around, it is guaranteed that journalists will once again raise the question, “When Will a Motion Capture Actor Win an Oscar?” (Hart). This discussion began when New Line Cinema, the company that released...
Artists in the performing and theatrical arts currently have access to technology of an unprecedented variety and complexity in comparison to classical methods. Without necessarily dismissing traditions, artists can work with devices that originally had no artistic...
Polish theatre artists have recently been experimenting with Virtual Reality (VR). What is it, and how does its use affect the reception of performances? VR technology is gaining popularity in recent years. It’s used not only in computer games and short films but also...
Montreal, Québec Willow Whitereviews Daughter Product’s production of A Dyke’s Guide To Fair Play in the Montreal Fringe Festival: Darkness falls on the stage as Lady Gaga’s 2010 smash hit Telephone begins to play. Two performers—Emelia Hellman and Ross...
In a small empty space illuminated by several enlarged computer screens, a shadowy figure sits contemplating the lists of glowing symbols, mathematical signs, and strange calculations whizzing along in front of us. This is the current knowledge of the world enticing...
The first shock that lands from #Faustus is the language. Against the backdrop of a visual barrage of what looks like a WikiLeaks spill of internet data mixed with images and headlines Faust, William Beddoe, plunges into a poetic narrative, courtesy of Christopher...
A shallow learning-play In Deep Present (2018) Seoul-based director Jisun Kim stages four artificial intelligences (AIs) that either dialogue or ruminate about "outsourcing" and its implications, i.e. the displacement and delegation of the production of goods or...
An assemblage of intriguing aesthetic strategies, what Mallory Catlett’s This Was The End lacks in structure it makes up for in auratic power. Using Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya as a pretext, Catlett and her crack team of designers and technicians have turned Mabou Mines’...
There is a rather iconic scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda (played by Meryl Streep) recounts the lineage of the cerulean sweater that Andi (played by Anne Hathaway) is wearing. Beyond its being a fairly brutal dressing-down, it also outlines how avant-garde...
Creating large-scale cultural experiences in abandoned spaces, Secret Cinema fuses film, music, theatre, and installations where audiences explore ultra-immersive worlds in which fiction and reality blur. In 2007, Secret Cinema introduced site-specific, immersive...
An audience assembles on the grassy margins of Prospect Park in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, New Zealand, on a late summer Sunday afternoon. Numbering twenty–and a dog–we chat, admire the view, greet friends, and wait for the promenade theatre event that marks the concrete...
Hatsune Miku, the most famous non-human pop singer in the world, will visit Spain for the first time this month. Keiichiro Shibuya and Hatsune Miku’s Vocaloid Opera The Endwill showed in Madrid’s Naves Matadero between March 22 and 24 and in L’Auditori in Barcelona on...
In 2016 the art & science collective Dæd Baitz (Agnieszka Jelewska, Michał Krawczak, Paweł Janicki, Rafał Zapała, Michał Cichy, Exu Arin) created a concept and a prototype for an interactive environment for experimental transopera. The project was commissioned by...
The interactive installation Post-Apocalypsis was designed as part of the Polish pavilion at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space in 2015. The project was curated by Agnieszka Jelewska, who invited Michał Krawczak, Paweł Janicki, Rafał Zapała, Michał...
The Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center was founded in 2011 at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland) on the initiative of Professor Agnieszka Jelewska and Dr. Michał Krawczak. The Center is a pioneer institution in Poland doing transdisciplinary research...
Interview with Dr. Robin Curtis, professor of media studies at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg who puts herself between theory and practice with expertise both in filmmaking and in researching the history of immersion. How did you start to become more immersed in...
Ten Years of Robot Theatre Directed by Oriza Hirata In Japan, the development of humanoid robots and their integration into human society has been in the forefront of research for decades. Robots are becoming a common sight in various settings. One of the biggest...
Inspired by the Edward Snowden case, James Graham's Privacy shows us the consequences of living life online where everything we share can be used by governments and corporations that monitor our information without being aware of it. Written by James Graham and Josie...
Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning to experience the mystery and suspense of Attempts: Singapore, read only after you’ve attended the performance. “She is a terrorist, she is a cultist, she works for sex.” “Who is she?” Like a foggy recreation of a Black...
“To dive we must forget the surface fuss… Ignore all surface fuss.. Ignore the surface…” -From Jump Blue, text by Hannah Silva Black Inscription, a new multimedia love song cycle to the ocean composed by the talented team of Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi, and Jeremy...
2018 is the European Year of Cultural Heritage. To bring awareness to the wealth and contribution of the performing arts to contemporary European identity and discourse, the three major performing arts organisations European Theatre Convention, Opera Europa/...
In 2007, visual artist Jewyo Rhii and curator Hyunjin Kim held an unusual exhibition titled Ten Years, Please, in which some visitors took one of Rhii's pieces home with them. Rhii's work often entailed international travel, and she couldn’t afford long-term storage...
It’s often stated that performing arts reflect changes in society. But how does this look when we face such major changes, changes the information society is facing with the digital transformation that is radically altering our style of communication? This is an...
With the team of Polski Theater in the underground we streamed 360-degree video from the container where actors performed Lady Macbeth. The audience could see the play live through a window, but some of them were standing there with their phones anyway Wojtek...
What’s the digital revolution doing to us? A web series, a book and one of our theatre projects are exploring the issue. How long will we actually still be human? What does the exponential growth of progress have in store for us next? Have we already begun to morph...
In true international award-winning Black Honey Company style, One The Bear bursts on the audience. In an apocalyptic aesthetic avalanche, its stars, the story’s titular One (Candy Bowers) and her best friend Ursula (Nancy Denis), emerge from a rubbish skip. One and...
What do Coldplay, Stevie Wonder, and the Imagine Dragons all have in common? The answer, and well done if you got this right, is that they have all had recent live shows broadcast in virtual reality. Music fans with VR headsets like Google Daydream or Samsung Gear VR...
Founded in 1969 by Artistic Director Ron Sossi, The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble is Los Angeles' oldest 99-seat theater complex and is recognized nationally and internationally as “Los Angeles' flagship innovation-oriented theatre and presenter of international work.” In...
What is algorithmic theatre? For the last several years, I've been using the term "algorithmic theatre" to describe my projects. It's a phrase I chose for two reasons. First, I wanted to distinguish what I was doing from “multimedia performance,” which describes work...
Signa and Arthur Köstler are the creative directors of SIGNA, the well-known performance installation company. Their latest performance, Das Heuvolk, took place near Mannheim in Benjamin Franklin Village during the bi-annual Schillertage Festival organized by the...
Please, take your laptops out of the suitcase. Liquids in a plastic bag. No belts. No shoes. Little by little, we have given up freedom, comfort, and some rights in exchange for security. Looking at the recent events, the terrorist threat, it seems reasonable....
When the legends of opera were composing their works, it is unlikely they ever envisaged a time when intricate sets made by man’s hand would be replaced with virtual reality. But that is just what the Wales National Opera is doing this summer. The company has created...
The Field Survey, Part 1: Seeing Summarizing the answers of the playful poll done at the conference “Digital Innovation in Theatre” in April in Karlsruhe, Germany, we find that there is a lot of best practice already out there. If you have other examples you would...
The Field Survey, Part 4: Dreaming What would you like to happen in the (near) future in relation to digital technology and theatre? This was maybe the most interesting question in our field survey on theatre and digital technology. The result is no surprise: the...
Work on a documentary performance called End of Imitation started last autumn. It was shaped by artistic and personal introspections of young independent theatre professionals from Ukraine, after their visit to creative residencies that took place within the framework...
Since Argentinian physical theater troupe Fuerza Bruta burst onto the scene in Buenos Aires in 2005, some 5 million people in more than 30 countries have experienced its high-energy, postmodern productions, which are often tailored to wherever they’re staged. This...
This is the second blog post looking at acting and transmedia. It identifies several key relationships the actor has with the story and particular skills she is advised to develop. Interaction changes everything In the same way that format affects acting...
As a storyteller and music performer, Lina Tur Bonet is wary of fusions. Last May, she was part of the presentation Made In Murcia that took place at the Cervantes Theatre in London.
This is the first of a series of blog posts that look at the role of the actor in a transmedia experience. We examine how the actor becomes a collaborator with the writer and audience in the development of a character and what this might mean for everyone. Background...
At the core of Secret Cinema, there is the promise of daring to be different. Combining the realms of large cinema screenings, theatre and immersive spaces, they offer unique experiences surrounded by mystery. Most reviewers keep the secrecy as to not spoil the event...
Belén Santa-Olalla has a BA in Media Practice and Theory from Sussex University, Brighton. She studied audiovisual communication, drama and performance art, and was an assistant director for the former director of the National Theatre and the National Dramatic Centre...
This post was written by Magda Romanska.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.