Dr Joseph Dunne-Howrie
Rose Bruford College, Postgraduate School, Faculty Member
- Rose Bruford College, Research Office, Post-Docadd
- Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Drama, Dance Studies, Theatre, Live Art, and 26 moreContemporary British Theatre, Intercultural Performance, Performance Documentation, Documenting Durational Live Performance Art Using Social Media, Performance Archives, Digital Archives, Archive Fever, Archives, Archaeology, Performance Studies, Urban Regeneration, History and Memory, Regeneration, Drama and theatre studies, Theater and Performance Studies, Sarah Kane, Devised Theatre, Historical memory, Postdramatic Theater, Site-specific performance, Olympic Legacy, Digital Curation, Interactive Narrative, Experimental Theatre, Audience Research, and Political theatreedit
- I am an MFA Programme Director whose research specialises in the politics of digital culture within performance. My w... moreI am an MFA Programme Director whose research specialises in the politics of digital culture within performance. My work interrogates the performativity of online media, performances of rightwing culture war discourse, and theatre’s role in supporting and opposing far-right movements in Europe and the North America. I teach performative writing, live art, participatory theatre, postdramatic theatre, and intermediality. I am currently writing books on theatre and the culture wars and digital far-right performativity. I am also the co-convener for the TaPRA Performance and New Technologies working group.edit
The chapter looks at Barker’s legacy in the context of East London’s cultural ecology. I returned to my PhD audiowalk ‘Voices from the Village’ to consider how versions of Joan Littlewood’s fun palaces can be created digitally to... more
The chapter looks at Barker’s legacy in the context of East London’s cultural ecology. I returned to my PhD audiowalk ‘Voices from the Village’ to consider how versions of Joan Littlewood’s fun palaces can be created digitally to transform public spaces into playful and theatrical environments. I also discuss these ideas with reference to work by ZU-UK.
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Hate speech allowed at the Battle of Ideas. A festival organised by the libertarian right to promote so-called free speech is an unserious and cynical performance event
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The war on woke is the latest iteration of a rightwing culture war that has been waged for decades. The performative affectivity of the term woke functions to marginalize, exclude and ultimately erase those who search for a new language... more
The war on woke is the latest iteration of a rightwing culture war that has been waged for decades. The performative affectivity of the term woke functions to marginalize, exclude and ultimately erase those who search for a new language to "render imaginable, and thus tangible, alternative rearticulations" (Mercer 29) of identity. Drawing on critical theories that situate Enlightenment philosophy as an assimilationist regime of truth, I will consider how attacks on anything perceived as woke have become a foundational principle of democracy in reactionary rightwing networks. The capacity of performance to disrupt hegemonic discursive constructions of identity by haunting the margins of mainstream political discourse is discussed with reference to work by Alice Birch, Selina Thompson, Javaad Alipoor, and Jackie Sibblies Drury. These case studies will be juxtaposed against a discussion of how culture war discourse operates through performative acts of free speech based on my experience as an audience member at the Academy of Ideas' annual festival, the Battle of Ideas, in October 2022. The audience were invited to participate in a collective fantasy of persecution from the tyranny of environmentalism, "gender ideology", and critical race theory by speakers who represented what the festival excessively reiterated as "cancelled" subjects within contemporary culture. I will analyse how such performances of dissent against political orthodoxies are presented as signifiers of the only authentic systems of meaning to dissimulate alternative expressions of transgressive and non-conformist identities.
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This article examines the way that three of Javaad Alipoor's plays infuse the internet into theatrical performance, creating intersecting narratives that interrogate identity formation in the age of global interconnectivity.... more
This article examines the way that three of Javaad Alipoor's plays infuse the internet into theatrical performance, creating intersecting narratives that interrogate identity formation in the age of global interconnectivity.
https://howlround.com/how-javaad-alipoors-fourth-world-trilogy-disrupts-what-we-think-we-understand-about-history
https://howlround.com/how-javaad-alipoors-fourth-world-trilogy-disrupts-what-we-think-we-understand-about-history
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This article addresses how the coordinates of the real have altered during the Covid-19 pandemic through the interrogative lens of Internet theatre. The performance aesthetics that have emerged from the convergence of corporeal and... more
This article addresses how the coordinates of the real have altered during the Covid-19 pandemic through the interrogative lens of Internet theatre. The performance aesthetics that have emerged from the convergence of corporeal and virtual realities is explored with reference to To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2021). The analysis is contextualised from a historical perspective of the post-Cold War anxiety that cultures will succumb to technological automation in the absence of conflicting ideologies. The medium of Internet theatre enables audiences to experience themselves as data subjects that flow through the ubiquitous information environment. This signifies a shift in consciousness whereby bio-techno hybridity now represents cultural authenticity as distinct from fleshy, corporeal embodiment as ubiquitous interactivity between humans, machines and data augments reality.
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The chapter looks at Barker’s legacy in the context of East London’s cultural ecology. I returned to my PhD audiowalk ‘Voices from the Village’ to consider how versions of Joan Littlewood’s fun palaces can be created digitally to... more
The chapter looks at Barker’s legacy in the context of East London’s cultural ecology. I returned to my PhD audiowalk ‘Voices from the Village’ to consider how versions of Joan Littlewood’s fun palaces can be created digitally to transform public spaces into playful and theatrical environments. I also discuss these ideas with reference to work by ZU-UK.
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ABSTRACT The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality... more
ABSTRACT The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and virtuality structured by the materialism of the Internet. Internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a metonym for the transformation of the human subject from corporeal flesh to bio-techno hybrids. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2021) are used as case studies in this article to show how today’s informational environment augments perceptions of the real in performance through the convergence of media formats, including the fleshy human. This analysis is contextualised from the historical perspective of the post-Cold War period when anxieties about cultural homogeneity and assimilation were prominent themes in theatre and performance discourse in the absence of any viable alternative teleology to Western capitalism.
Research Interests: Globalisation and cultural change, Consciousness, Internet Art, Medicine, The Internet, and 8 moreContemporary Theatre, Forced Entertainment, Contemporary Performance Art in the Context of Digital Arts and New Media, The End of History, Post Internet Art, Coronavirus COVID-19, coronavirus outbreak, and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
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Research Interests: Engineering, Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage, Documentation, Psychogeography, and 15 moreCitizen Journalism, Digital Culture, Performance As Research, Audience Participation, Forced Entertainment, Immersive Theatre, Re performance and reenactment in performance art, Jeremy Deller, Blast Theory, London Olympics, Site Specific Performance, Conceptualising Olympic Legacy, Audio Walks, Olympic Legacy, and Antithesis
The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and... more
The pandemic is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness, which is not expressed in ideological terms, but is instead rendered as a fluid reality of corporeality and virtuality structured by the materialism of the Internet. Internet theatre created during the pandemic functions as a metonym for the transformation of the human subject from corporeal flesh to bio-techno hybrids. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (Javaad Alipoor Company 2021) are used as case studies in this article to show how today’s informational environment augments perceptions of the real in performance through the convergence of media formats, including the fleshy human. This analysis is contextualised from the historical perspective of the post-Cold War period when anxieties about cultural homogeneity and assimilation were prominent themes in theatre and performance discourse in the absence of any viable alternative teleology to Western capitalism.
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Where are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of... more
Where are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of government with a radical new form of network power where people discursively experiment with new political realities through aesthetic modes of social relations? This article proffers the term ‘networked participation’ to describe a conceptual model of citizenry centred on structuring meaning through the dialogic exchange of information in aesthetic environments. The political ideals of network politics inform my analysis of the complex web of connections that participants scaffold in the performances Operation Black Antler(Blast Theory and Hydrocracker 2017) and One Day, Maybe (dreamthinkspeak 2017) between identitarian ideology in Britain and competing narratives of democracy’s meaning in South Korea, respectively. This model of audience participation is proffered to develop a theory of social relations produced through a theatrical experience of digital interconnectivity.
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The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media... more
The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant epistemological source of the real in the twenty-first century. The atomisation of reality into the porous realm of the digital has spawned conspiratorial internet sub-cultures dedicated to immersing us all in a state of perpetual crisis. Conspiracy theories like crisis acting are thriving in this milieu. This theory was popularised by the host of InfoWars Alex Jones who argued high school shootings are events staged by the government. This article appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how the experience of living in media wreckage is performed on the intermedial stage of The Destroyed Room (Vanishing Point 2016). The performance is a semi-improvised conversation between three actors who debate the morality of watching videos depicting Islamic State executions, the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, the refugee crisis and scenes of natural disasters. Terror, social media and climate breakdown constitute the three pieces of media wreckage that are staged The Destroyed Room. It is argued that constructing narratives of reality with media wreckage turns us all into crisis actors who cannot imagine ways of performing in the world as political agents outside of digital spaces.
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Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed... more
Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed and transported to a dreamscape composed of childhood imagery and aerial cityscapes. This artistic position remixes the audience’s experience and the artistic processes of Good Night, Sleep Tight to proffer a critical engagement with the aesthetics of VR. Theories pertaining to VR and theatre are emerging but not yet fully established. The discourse between technologists and artists is key to understanding how VR is a new artistic medium requiring a language not solely redolent of gaming or theatre. The format of this article reflects ZU-UK’s contention that VR experiences are best designed as collaborations between artists and audiences who construct an imaginary world through interactive media. The seven scenes below concentrate on different aspects of the rehearsal process and the final performance from the perspectives of the ZU-UK directors, VR technologists, and participants. Interspersed throughout the article are fragments from the Good Night, Sleep Tight script and a description of the piece from the reader’s perspective, who acts as ZU-UK’s imaginary audience member.
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DocPerform is a multi- and interdisciplinary research project based at City, University of London. Led by members of the Department of Library & Information Science, it comprises scholars and practitioners from the fields of performing... more
DocPerform is a multi- and interdisciplinary research project based at City, University of London. Led by members of the Department of Library & Information Science, it comprises scholars and practitioners from the fields of performing arts and library & information science. The project concerns conceptual, methodological and technological innovations in the documentation of performance, and the extent to which performance may itself be considered to be a document.
The collection of papers in this special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy are selected from the second DocPerform Symposium, held at City, University of London, 6–7 November 2017.
The DocPerform team would like to thank the DOCAM editors and reviewers for their support for this publication.
The collection of papers in this special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy are selected from the second DocPerform Symposium, held at City, University of London, 6–7 November 2017.
The DocPerform team would like to thank the DOCAM editors and reviewers for their support for this publication.
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The foundation in 2007 of The Stanislavski Centre, the parent organization of the Stanislavski Studies journal, came about directly through the work of the late Professor Jean Benedetti (1930–2012) which originated when he was the... more
The foundation in 2007 of The Stanislavski Centre, the parent organization
of the Stanislavski Studies journal, came about directly through the work of the
late Professor Jean Benedetti (1930–2012) which originated when he was the Principal of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance from 1970 to 1987. Starting with the publication of Stanislavski: An Introduction in 1982, and culminating in the editing and translation of the new Routledge Stanislavski editions, published in 2008 and 2009, with much additional work in between, Benedetti became established as one
of the world’s most influential Stanislavski scholars. As founding Patron of The Centre,
Benedetti witnessed its inaugural event, the Stanislavski on Stage exhibition of photographic material from the Centre’s archives, at London’s National Theatre in 2008. To mark the 150th anniversary of Stanislavski’s birth in 1863, the exhibition was re-staged at Pushkin House in Central London, accompanied by a short lecture series. The opening night of this exhibition was designed to celebrate Jean Benedetti’s life and work. Under the chairmanship of the College’s current Principal, Professor Michael Earley, the Head of the Centre, Dr Paul Fryer, assembled a panel of leading Stanislavski experts and practitioners, several of whom had direct experience of working with Benedetti himself, and many of whom have contributed major publications to the current scholarship. Their discussions, debates and deliberations are published here for the first time,not only as a fascinating exploration of Stanislavski’s approaches and the way in which they are taught today, but also as a memorial to Jean Benedetti, whose pioneering work opened up an entirely new level of understanding for English-speaking readers.
of the Stanislavski Studies journal, came about directly through the work of the
late Professor Jean Benedetti (1930–2012) which originated when he was the Principal of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance from 1970 to 1987. Starting with the publication of Stanislavski: An Introduction in 1982, and culminating in the editing and translation of the new Routledge Stanislavski editions, published in 2008 and 2009, with much additional work in between, Benedetti became established as one
of the world’s most influential Stanislavski scholars. As founding Patron of The Centre,
Benedetti witnessed its inaugural event, the Stanislavski on Stage exhibition of photographic material from the Centre’s archives, at London’s National Theatre in 2008. To mark the 150th anniversary of Stanislavski’s birth in 1863, the exhibition was re-staged at Pushkin House in Central London, accompanied by a short lecture series. The opening night of this exhibition was designed to celebrate Jean Benedetti’s life and work. Under the chairmanship of the College’s current Principal, Professor Michael Earley, the Head of the Centre, Dr Paul Fryer, assembled a panel of leading Stanislavski experts and practitioners, several of whom had direct experience of working with Benedetti himself, and many of whom have contributed major publications to the current scholarship. Their discussions, debates and deliberations are published here for the first time,not only as a fascinating exploration of Stanislavski’s approaches and the way in which they are taught today, but also as a memorial to Jean Benedetti, whose pioneering work opened up an entirely new level of understanding for English-speaking readers.
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This article gives a brief history of the Beckett collection at the University of Reading archive and gives an indication of the scholarly disciplines it is most relevant to.
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In his 1992 essay Eftermaele: ‘That which will be said afterwards’ Eugenio Barba states that ‘[i]n the age of electronic memory, of films, and of reproducibility … performance … defines itself through the work that living memory, which is... more
In his 1992 essay Eftermaele: ‘That which will be said afterwards’ Eugenio Barba states that ‘[i]n the age of electronic memory, of films, and of reproducibility … performance … defines itself through the work that living memory, which is not museum but metamorphosis, is obliged to do’ (78). His mention of memory is an acknowledgement of a spectator’s implicit function as a legacy-maker in theatre. Memory, here, is valorized by its transformative and non-reproducible form, which to Barba’s mind better reflects the experience of attending a performance. The notion of a spectator as a living archive is undoubtedly alluring, but Barba inadvertently reveals the limitations of this schema in his later essay ‘The essence of theatre’ (2002) by describing this legacy as ‘action that cannot be communicated’ (p.18). Describing the afterlife of a performance as little more than an invisible trace is to denude a document’s capacity to produce new meanings of past performances. The meaning of a text is not static: the moment a document is accessed the knowledge it has contributed in the construction of becomes live. The Live Archive was programmed as part of Kantor Is Here, a series of events celebrating Taduesz Kantor’s centenary and the teaching of Kantor at Rose Bruford. The Live Archive was a piece designed to theatricalize the processes by which knowledge is constructed through the social interactions that libraries engender. The ‘live’ of the title denotes a medium that transmits information between different groups and peoples. This article argues that the library, as a concept encapsulating the sharing, exchange and interpretation of information, enables live performances to stretch beyond the event sphere into a distributed process of knowledge construction. Kantor’s legacy manifests in texts, artefacts, pedagogy and performance.
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This article was published on Desearch http://www.desearch.co.uk/home/category-2013/22-the-archive-is-present-by-joseph-dunne
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BOOK REVIEWED: Performing Left Populism: Performance, Politics and the People, edited by Goran Petrovic Lotina and Théo Aiolfi. London:
Methuen Drama, 2023.
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Imagined Theatres collects theoretical dramas written by some of the leading scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. These dialogues, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary performance events that explore what might be... more
Imagined Theatres collects theoretical dramas written by some of the leading scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. These dialogues, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary performance events that explore what might be possible and impossible in the theatre. Each scenario is mirrored by a brief accompanying reflection, asking what they might mean for our thinking about the theatre. These many possible worlds circle around questions that include:
In what way is writing itself a performance?
How do we understand the relationship between real performances that engender imaginary reflections and imaginary conceptions that form the basis for real theatrical productions?
Are we not always imagining theatres when we read or even when we sit in the theatre, watching whatever event we imagine we are seeing?
In what way is writing itself a performance?
How do we understand the relationship between real performances that engender imaginary reflections and imaginary conceptions that form the basis for real theatrical productions?
Are we not always imagining theatres when we read or even when we sit in the theatre, watching whatever event we imagine we are seeing?
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From the Holodeck to the Metaverse: Interactive Speculative Narratives. Online, mixed reality, performing arts projects representing complex issues, addressing personal health and speculating about the future. Innovation Center of... more
From the Holodeck to the Metaverse: Interactive Speculative Narratives. Online, mixed reality, performing arts projects representing complex issues, addressing personal health and speculating about the future. Innovation Center of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, 10-12 November 2022
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Changing Perspectives on Live Performance symposium, Anglia Ruskin University (online), 8-9 October 2021
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IFTR Galway. Theatre Ecologies: Environment, Sustainability and Politics (online), 12-16 July 2021
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Staging Viral Theatres. Viral Theatres Project, Free University and the Humboldt University Berlin (online), 1 July 2021
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The DocPerform Project addresses issues relating to the ways performance can be considered a document and, more broadly, the performance cultures and practices that are emerging in the information age. Library and Information scholar and... more
The DocPerform Project addresses issues relating to the ways performance can be considered a document and, more broadly, the performance cultures and practices that are emerging in the information age. Library and Information scholar and co-leader of DocPerform Lyn Robinson foresees a plausible evolution in documents as entities which produce embodied experiences of information, a process ‘requiring neither an information place nor a specific information device’, giving the participant a feeling of ‘being immersed in the information conveyed’. These immersive documents render ‘reality…as unreality’ (Robinson, Multisensory, Pervasive, Immersive 2015). This argument reflects an evolution in the meaning of immersion from a term denoting spatial and scenographic arrangements to one that now expresses the inherent dissonance of living in today’s information society. Collective perceptions of reality are undergoing a significant re-orientation as the world becomes increasingly interconnected. The attendant discourses of ‘the digital’ – trans-humanism, network power, postmedia, etc. – exceed questions of technological communication by treating the digital as a paradigm shift in all realms of human activity. This paper explores how theatre is responding to these changes from a theoretical perspective I term immersive perspectivalism. I elucidate this theory of immersion with reference to the performances The Destroyed Room (Vanishing Point 2016), Operation Black Antler (Blast Theory and Hydrocracker
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2016-19) and One Day, Maybe (dreamthinkspeak 2017). The dramaturgies of these performances reflect the anxieties digital interconnectedness is inciting in the popular imagination by exploring, respectively, the fragmentation of authoritative media narratives; post-truth history; and the surveillance state. The interdisciplinary research underpinning this paper has been developed in the context of the DocPerform Project.
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2016-19) and One Day, Maybe (dreamthinkspeak 2017). The dramaturgies of these performances reflect the anxieties digital interconnectedness is inciting in the popular imagination by exploring, respectively, the fragmentation of authoritative media narratives; post-truth history; and the surveillance state. The interdisciplinary research underpinning this paper has been developed in the context of the DocPerform Project.
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The ubiquity of the internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. This paper appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political... more
The ubiquity of the internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. This paper appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how interacting with media forces us to affiliate with communities and distorts perceptions of reality to conform to the cultural, political and/social norms and precepts of those communities. Media wreckage denotes the fragmentation of political, social, economic and cultural narratives occasioned by the internet acting as the dominant scaffold of human relations. I use this critical framing to argue that the corrosive effects of immersive online networks are performed in Vanishing Point’s The Destroyed Room (2016). The performance is a semi-improvised conversation between three actors who debate the ethics of watching videos depicting IS executions, the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, the refugee crisis and scenes of natural disasters. Crisis acting is a conspiracy most famously propagated by the alt-right propagandist Alex Jones, host of the online broadcaster InfoWars. Jones spread a disinformation campaign that survivors of high school shootings in the US are government agents working for the New World Order. Conspiracies act as information contagion in public discourse. Crisis acting in the New World Order imaginary is a narrative of control and dominance by omnipotent forces. The narrative is created by re-purposing extant media content into believable (if entirely fictitious) versions of reality. I invert it’s meaning in this paper to explore how The Destroyed Room stages a collective failure to establish global empathetic relationships in digital spaces with media content, a process I describe as ‘crisis acting’. Terror, social media and climate breakdown constitute the three pieces of media wreckage that are staged as dialogue in The Destroyed Room. Each piece of wreckage is exhumed in my paper to argue that constructing narratives of reality with media wreckage turns us into crisis actors who cannot imagine ways of performing in the world as political agents outside of digital spaces. Online interactivity elides our identities with the media content we share, comment and re-purpose in our networks to construct communal perceptions of reality. This process that fails to produce a cogent political dialectic. Theories of the ‘postdigital’ (Bay-Cheng, 2016; Causey, 2016) provide a conceptual framework for exploring how online interaction is performed in The Destroyed Room as a series of competing narratives. These narratives interweave the identities of each character with the subjects of the media wreckage that become staged through their dialogue. The consequence of constituting the human subject as an ‘inforg’ (Floridi 2014) is to limit visions of humanity’s future to the mediated versions we create online.
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I gave this paper at the DocPerform 3: Postdigital Symposium The real world, as we experience it today, is intimately connected with technological mediation. Drawing on theories of post-humanism, onlife, the infosphere, and audience... more
I gave this paper at the DocPerform 3: Postdigital Symposium
The real world, as we experience it today, is intimately connected with technological mediation. Drawing on theories of post-humanism, onlife, the infosphere, and audience participation, this paper addresses how the cultural, social and political beliefs of participants in immersive theatre can be trans-ed. The relationality inherent in the term trans- refers to the complex web of connections participants navigated and created in the performances Operation Black Antler by Blast Theory and Hydrocracker and One Day, Maybe by dreamthinkspeak. The dramaturgies in both pieces were experienced as a network of bodies, times, historical and national narratives. In this paper I will explore how trans- offers a strategy of performative political discourse where (sexual, gender, racial, etc.) identities become dramaturgically fluid and unfixed, and if such a mode of participation can effectuate a form of dialectic that is contingent on participating in acts of empathy rather than of conflict. A corollary to this process can be found in Luciano Floridi’s conceptualisation of contemporary technological environment, which he terms the infosphere (2014). The production and dissemination of media acts as the diffuse infrastructure of the infosphere and replicates our presence across platforms and communication networks. The compulsion to connect with realities and experiences outside of our everyday life allows us to stretch our real self and play identities as a means of establishing empathetic relations with histories, ideas and people; this is the core principle of trans-participation. I contend that audience participation in the context of the infosphere and onlife – where the digital and the real worlds become a seamless experience – complicate rhetorically crude conceptions of post-truth and fake news by allowing people to play identities drawn from media.
The real world, as we experience it today, is intimately connected with technological mediation. Drawing on theories of post-humanism, onlife, the infosphere, and audience participation, this paper addresses how the cultural, social and political beliefs of participants in immersive theatre can be trans-ed. The relationality inherent in the term trans- refers to the complex web of connections participants navigated and created in the performances Operation Black Antler by Blast Theory and Hydrocracker and One Day, Maybe by dreamthinkspeak. The dramaturgies in both pieces were experienced as a network of bodies, times, historical and national narratives. In this paper I will explore how trans- offers a strategy of performative political discourse where (sexual, gender, racial, etc.) identities become dramaturgically fluid and unfixed, and if such a mode of participation can effectuate a form of dialectic that is contingent on participating in acts of empathy rather than of conflict. A corollary to this process can be found in Luciano Floridi’s conceptualisation of contemporary technological environment, which he terms the infosphere (2014). The production and dissemination of media acts as the diffuse infrastructure of the infosphere and replicates our presence across platforms and communication networks. The compulsion to connect with realities and experiences outside of our everyday life allows us to stretch our real self and play identities as a means of establishing empathetic relations with histories, ideas and people; this is the core principle of trans-participation. I contend that audience participation in the context of the infosphere and onlife – where the digital and the real worlds become a seamless experience – complicate rhetorically crude conceptions of post-truth and fake news by allowing people to play identities drawn from media.
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DocPerform is an interdisciplinary research project based at the Library & Information Science department at City, University of London. In asking how, in the context of digital culture, audiences read live performances as documents the... more
DocPerform is an interdisciplinary research project based at the Library & Information Science department at City, University of London. In asking how, in the context of digital culture, audiences read live performances as documents the project investigators are exploring the embodied qualities of information. In other words, the ways we experience information in offline reality. Virtual reality and pervasive devices are bringing human and machine closer and closer, to the point where we can now envisage – if not yet produce as technological devices – “immersive documents” (Robinson, L., Multisensory, Pervasive, Immersive: Towards a New Generation of Documents, 2015). The DocPerform symposia explore innovations in performance documenting, documentation systems and archiving practices. This paper argues that research into performance documents must attend to the growing interest from the public to interact with digital content as a tangible, self-sustaining reality. Interaction has the capacity to transform the reader into a participant who experiences the information an immersive document contains in such a way that they contribute to the creation of a new live art work. This raises fundamental questions related to the authoring and identity of performances – who decides what is the real performance? Moreover, we can now imagine how performance can exist as a transmedia event.
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It has been two years since the spectacle of the 2012 Olympic Games ended; the old industrial site in Stratford, East London, has been regenerated into the Olympic Village, comprising the E20 Village, the Westfield Shopping Centre and the... more
It has been two years since the spectacle of the 2012 Olympic Games ended; the old industrial site in Stratford, East London, has been regenerated into the Olympic Village, comprising the E20 Village, the Westfield Shopping Centre and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The Olympic Village reveals what the political classes consider to be an ‘ideal’ cityscape: cities made up of intensely monitored housing estates built around retail complexes. How, then, will the history of East London be remembered in the context of the Olympic Legacy? In this paper I explore what effect(s) regeneration projects have on a community’s memory of place. Using my audio walk Voices from the Village () as an example, I argue that documentation practices can engender mediated forms of interactivity for participants during a live performance. By documenting their walk and uploading the resultant material onto the Voices from the Village website, I am exploring how a participatory mode of performance can operate as a process of archival production. By this, I mean that the documents participants create allow visitors to the website to interpret the Olympic Village outside of the regeneration narrative. I link this with theories pertaining to the archive’s generative potential, where archival documents are not read as material which creates a totalising, ‘complete’ narrative of the past, but is instead understood as material which allows for potentially limitless versions of the past to emerge as a series of subjective interpretations. By re-sequencing the documents produced in Voices from the Village, the ubiquitous narrative of the Olympic Legacy can be re-written by participants in order to imagine alternative future cityscapes.
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Prelude: Welcome Hello… I would like to welcome you to our disrupted landscape ...There is a sense of place, of topography, and identity, but through the passage of time, through the iterant nature of our experiences, we have all arrived... more
Prelude: Welcome Hello… I would like to welcome you to our disrupted landscape ...There is a sense of place, of topography, and identity, but through the passage of time, through the iterant nature of our experiences, we have all arrived here to this time and space. Present and absent we tell to you only an essence of our experience, of the traces we have engraved on the landscape and the traces the environment has impressed upon this body, our bodies, the body of a collective. It was a long journey, and still we are here and you are there. Along this path we have collected, re-patterned and re-organised forgotten memories. Attempting to translate these experiences into...into something else. We bring to you a few elements of our progress. An assemblage of thoughts and reflections. We don't pretend to present to you a completed history, simply we share an archive of memories... I will leave it up to you to create your own integral terrain … (Davies, 2010, p.3) Mads Tracing the Pathway is assemblage. We explore questions relating to live performance and the archive through studio and site-based workshop exercises and independent research. Examining the relationships between memory, site, body and documentation, our work is underpinned by notions of the archive as encapsulating experience, where, through embodied interaction, paradigms of performance aid the representation of documents.
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My PhD thesis examines how a performance that integrates documentation into it's dramatrugy can engender a type of participation that stretches the theatrical event into an open-ended discourse between audiences.
Research Interests: Theatre Studies, Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage, Documentation, Psychogeography, and 16 moreDigital Culture, Performance As Research, Situationism, Theatre Theory, Site-Specific Art and Performance, Audience Participation, 2012 London Olympics, Forced Entertainment, Immersive Theatre, Re performance and reenactment in performance art, Jeremy Deller, Blast Theory, Site Specific Performance, Conceptualising Olympic Legacy, Audio Walks, and Olympic Legacy
The war on woke is the latest iteration of a decades-long rightwing culture war. The performative affectivity of woke functions to marginalize, exclude and ultimately erase those who search for a new language to “render imaginable, and... more
The war on woke is the latest iteration of a decades-long rightwing culture war. The performative affectivity of woke functions to marginalize, exclude and ultimately erase those who search for a new language to “render imaginable, and thus tangible, alternative rearticulations” (Mercer 29) of identity. Drawing on critical theories that situate Enlightenment philosophy as an assimilationist regime of truth, I will consider how attacks on anything perceived as woke have become a foundational principle of democracy in reactionary rightwing networks. The capacity of performance to disrupt hegemonic discursive constructions of identity by haunting the margins of mainstream political discourse is discussed with reference to work by Alice Birch, Selina Thompson, Javaad Alipoor, and Jackie Sibblies Drury. These case studies will be juxtaposed against a discussion of how culture war discourse operates through performative acts of free speech based on my experience as an audience member at the Academy of Ideas' annual festival, the Battle of Ideas, in October 2022. The audience were invited to participate in a collective fantasy of persecution from the tyranny of environmentalism, “gender ideology”, and critical race theory by speakers who represented what the festival excessively reiterated as “cancelled” subjects within contemporary culture. I will analyse how such performances of dissent against political orthodoxies are presented as signifiers of the only authentic systems of meaning to dissimulate alternative expressions of transgressive and non-conformist identities.
Research Interests:
This article addresses how the coordinates of the real have altered during the Covid-19 pandemic through the interrogative lens of Internet theatre. The performance aesthetics that have emerged from the convergence of corporeal and... more
This article addresses how the coordinates of the real have altered during the Covid-19 pandemic through the interrogative lens of Internet theatre. The performance aesthetics that have emerged from the convergence of corporeal and virtual realities is explored with reference to To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (Dead Centre 2020), End Meeting for All (Forced Entertainment 2020) and Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (2021). The analysis is contextualised from a historical perspective of the post-Cold War anxiety that cultures will succumb to technological automation in the absence of conflicting ideologies. The medium of Internet theatre enables audiences to experience themselves as data subjects that flow through the ubiquitous information environment. This signifies a shift in consciousness whereby bio-techno hybridity now represents cultural authenticity as distinct from fleshy, corporeal embodiment as ubiquitous interactivity between humans, machines and data augments reality.