Dissertation ABSTRACT

 

 

Title of Document:	DIGITAL THEATRE:  A “LIVE” AND MEDIATED ART FORM EXPANDING PERCEPTIONS OF BODY, PLACE, AND COMMUNITY
	Nadja Linnine Masura, Ph.D., 2007
Directed By:	Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Franklin J. Hildy, Department of Theatre

 

Keywords: Digital Theatre, digital performance, dance technology, body, place, telematic, community, collaboration, agency, media, Internet, “live,” computer, theatre, cyberplace, cyberspace, multi-site performance, Access Grid, Virtual Reality, MIDI, Digital Performance Archive

This work discusses Digital Theatre, a type of performance which utilizes both “live” actors and co-present audiences along with digital media to create a hybrid art form revitalizing theatre for contemporary audiences.  This work surveys a wide range of digital performances (with “live” and digital elements, limited interactivity/participation and spoken words) and identifies the group collectively as Digital Theatre, an art form with the flexibility and reach of digital data and the sense of community found in “live” theatre.
I offer performance examples from Mark Reaney, David Saltz, Troika Ranch, Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, Flying Karamazov Brothers, Talking Birds, Yacov Sharir, Studio Z, George Coates Performance Group, and ArtGrid.  (The technologies utilized in performances include: video-conferencing, media projection, MIDI control, motion capture, VR animation, and AI).  Rather than looking at these productions as isolated events, I identify them as a movement and link the use of digital techniques to continuing theatrical tradition of utilizing new technologies on the stage.  The work ties many of the aesthetic choices explored in theatrical past by the likes of Piscator, Svoboda, Craig, and in Bauhaus and Futurist movements.
While it retains the essential qualities of public human connection and imaginative thought central to theatre, Digital Theatre can cause theatrical roles to merge as it extends the performer’s body, expands our concept of place, and creates new models of global community.

Conference Publications

• Presented a paper at ASTR:  “The Agency of the Digital Performer and the Body as Place,” in Seattle, 2010
• Presented a paper at ATHE:  “Performing Community, Memory and Self: A Woman’s Perspective on Digital Performance,” in New York, 2009
• Presented a paper titled “Embodied Place As Community: The Live & Digital Performance of Real Places and Landscapes of Memory” at the International Arts and Humanities conference in Waikiki, 2009
• Presented three papers at ATHE:  “The Questioning Spirit in Cyberspace,” “Rehearsing with Technology,” and “The Taxonomy of Digital Performance,” and chaired the “Body/Places” panel in Denver, 2008
• Presented a paper titled “Digital Performance Spaces” and was on the IFTR/FIRT Architecture working group at the Prague Quadrennial, 2007
• Presented a paper at ATHE:  “Interdisciplinary Digital Collaboration,” and chaired the Proof panel in 2007
• Presented a paper at the Planetary Collegium:  “Altered States:  Multisite Performance High,” in Plymouth, UK, 2006
• Presented a paper at ATHE on Interdisciplinary Technology Performance in 2006, and WTP working group Paper on Gender and Online Performance
• Technology and Documentation/ Performance and Technology “Online Research and the Digital Performance Archive,” ATHE 2005
• Presented a paper titled “Citizen Artists of the Grid:  Multi-site Community, Performance Collaboration, and Place” at IFTR 2005
• Presented a paper titled “Shifting Places of Interculturalism:  Place, Placelessness, and Multi-layered Space in Digital Collaboration” for ATHE, for which I won the American Theatre and Drama Society Emerging Scholars award, 2004

Publications

• Nadja Masura, “Performance Review of Continuous City.”  Theatre Journal 61 (2009):  463-464.
• Nadja Masura, “Altered States:  Multisite Performance High,” Technoetic Arts 4 no. 3 (2006), 203-210.
• Nadja Masura, “The Search for Digital Theatre,” http://www.digthet.com (a Digital Theatre research website hosted for three years by MITH).
• Research featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education and SRI Consulting Business Intelligence’s Explorer.
• Pending Publication Nadja Masura, “Digital Theatre and the Neo-Bakhtinian Body:  The Agency of the Digital Performer and the Body as Place” to appear in Theatre Journal.

Pending Publications

• Nadja Masura, “A Place for Memory:  Re-Membering Harmony, A Site-specific Performance Revaluing the Local” to appear in Contemporary Theatre Review
• Nadja Masura, “Digital Theatre and the Neo-Bakhtinian Body:  The Agency of the Digital Performer and the Body as Place” to appear in Theatre Journal

Writing sample: Global Citizen Artists

For a complete list of Papers and Publications please visit my teaching pages. There you can also read more about my research in Digital Theatre, place & community, etc.

List of Resources and Current projects in process