Digital media and technology are ever-evolving, and so is their relationship to theatre. In this section, you can learn about how theatremakers are incorporating media and tech into their art-making and career-building, as well as read New Crit pieces about work created to be shared online. Two interesting series to explore for a sense of how quickly the conversations change are Gwydion Suilebhan’s Techne—essays written in 2013 and 2014—and Performing the Internet, curated by Kate Bergstrom in January 2021. Check out content from the 2019 Digital + Performance Convening for a multifaceted look at this topic!
The Latest
Essay
How to Embrace the Dramaturgy of Creative Caption Design
Ash Marinaccio talks with Scott Illingworth, founder of the Verbatim Salon, where actors perform real stories from those navigating the US immigration system. They explore the creative process and how verbatim theatre sheds light on today’s urgent social issues.
“If your body is a portal, where does it lead?” This question led the creation of Paradise Portals, an immersive performance and dance party featuring Baltimore-area trans and queer artists. Laura Grothaus captures some of these artists’ answers, which span the celebration, transformation, ecology, and even escape.
Online theatre spaces can promote accessibility, democratic processes, international connections, and ecological benefits, but many digital platforms act as intermediaries that disrupt storytelling for their own profit. L. Nicol Cabe considers this paradox and offers potential paths forward.
A Space for Artists, Technologists, Scholars, and Audiences to Create Agency in the Face of End Times Fascism
Wednesday 4 June to Friday 6 June 2025
Ontario, Canada
FOLDA’s eighth edition continues its mission of uniting audiences through innovative, thought-provoking live performances that challenge conventions and spark conversation.
In this session, we look at how to make long-term plans to fully shift your internet life away from services that track, harvest, and control your information.
In this session we take a look at password managers and virtual private networks (VPNs) with both free and paid options, talk about email masking, discuss some more in-depth habit shifts, and look at security for higher-risk situations.
Host Tjaša Ferme chats with playwright Chisa Hutchinson about her play, Bleeding Class. Chisa was aiming to write a wacky satire about a global pandemic, but then everything came true. She says she’s not clairvoyant, but has always been just a bit before her time!
HowlRound Theatre Commons is committed to amplifying the voices and perspectives of theatremakers around the world. This piece, like everything on our platform, represents the work and views of the author(s) and not those of Emerson College, where HowlRound is based.
Host Tjaša Ferme chats with David Cote and Hai-Ting Chinn about their opera, Meltdown. This is an adventurous episode about arctic expeditions, drilling ice cores, what monodrama really means, and creating unique experiences mixing operatic tragedy with funny ukulele songs about pee bottles.
Host Tjaša Ferme talks to multimedia artist Sister Sylvester about Drinking Brecht/Good Genes, which cautions how simplistic readings of genetics have always led to fascism. Join a label-defying conversation about the absence of authority in theatre and becoming an amateur geneticist to read the DNA on Brecht’s hat.
Creative director and choreographer Brandon Powers takes host Tjaša Ferme on a deep exploration of the merging of extended reality (XR) with theatre. He explains how theatremakers’ knowledge as spatial creatures is exactly what the virtual reality (VR) world is looking for.
Host Tjaša Ferme has a lighthearted chat with director, choreographer, and filmmaker Mary John Frank about the climate, virtual reality (VR) musicals, why VR works better in “one take,” and how and why to make theatre in VR at all.
Host Tjaša Ferme and media artist Ellen Pearlman discuss Ellen’s projects Language is Leaving Me and Noor: A Brain Opera. They go on a deep, granular dive into the loab: the psychic, unconscious, dark side of artificial intelligence rendering; the future of language depositories; and why all this matters seismically!
In this conversation with Kat Mustatea we chat about her project, BodyMouth, that is also a new instrument where a dancer’s movements prompt a speech synthesizer. For an extra twist, we ponder if we could use this instrument to reverse and decode the messages behind Tai Chi or the magical gestures of Carlos Castaneda.
Fareeda Pasha wrote The Last Word based on Michael Levin's research on the first robots from living cells. We had a lighthearted conversation about spooky action at a distance in playwriting, equal-opportunity inspiration, and how plays on science can change the world of business, art, and medicine.
In this conversation with director Coral Cohen and sound and video designer Ettie Pin, we discuss the process of making a gamified play, Third Law. Insights from the makers take us through game theory, and how the audience had the unique opportunity to shape the world of the play and the trajectory of the characters.
Playwright Javaad Alipoor’s trilogy of plays interrogates how technology, global politics, and fracturing identities are changing our world. He reflects on how technological adaptations and new political circumstances of the past decade have changed the context of the work and what the trilogy might be if written today.
There are so many cool Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) performance artists out there! Since this performance art season only had ten episodes to talk to artists directly, this last episode wraps up the season and goes through a whole bunch of other contemporary artists that hosts Marina Johnson and Nabra Nelson are excited about.
This episode analyzes narrative podcasts as a form of performance. Hosts Nabra Nelson and Marina Johnson and guest multi-hyphenate artist Laila Abdo utilize Laila’s latest project The Great Pyramid Scheme to discuss how comedy can be used as a powerful form of representation.
Lebanese multidisciplinary artist Khansa shares his artistic journey, blending traditional Middle Eastern music with modern avant-pop, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at his creative process. This episode delves deep into the power of art as a medium for cultural fusion and storytelling.
An Ongoing Conversation Between Artists, Thinkers, and Activists
Wednesday 10 July 2024
London, UK
performingborders is excited to invite you to join artists Rosa-Johan Uddoh and Party Office for an open online conversation exploring their upcoming performingborders commissions: our annual performance to camera for 2024 and our guest-curated digital pamphlet, both to be published before 10 July.
Panels and Performances from the Global Community of Live Digital Art
Thursday 13 June to Saturday 15 June 2024
Toronto, Canada
Join us for the launch of PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation by Dr. Jenn Stephenson and Mariah (Mo) Horner; a panel on AI in Creative Performance by bluemouth inc, Cole Lewis, and David Rokeby; and a performance of Windrush by Marcel Stewart and Oonya Kempadoo.
Sophie Sagan-Gutherz shares about Kat Mustatea’s ielele, a show that uses a unique instrument called the BodyMouth to sound out histories of the ielele, a genderless creature in Balkan folklore. Sophie highlights how this show’s use of technology illuminates connections between disability and transgression of binary gender.
Amelia Parenteau explores the creation of The < 3 G E N Project: a documentary theatre project in which the creators, Beatriz Cabur and Giulia Cavallini, are using digital theatre to bridge the digital divide between generations of women, and invite these women into conversation on how to better connect.
