Engaging Media in Performance

In recent times, digital performance has proliferated in both practice and theory, yet few studies have provided methodologies for analyzing this ever-expanding field. While Performance and Media encourages further discussion and exposure of digital performance through a taxonomic approach, Performance in the Twenty-First Century advances the post-dramatic theatre initiated by Hans-Thies Lehmann in the 1990s through the concept of intermediality. These studies deploy a range of case studies without significant overlap, the former using mainly North American examples while the latter is European in perspective. Read together, they provide a rich and varied analysis of the field.

Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field strives to provide a rapidly evolving field with analytical tools to create malleable models rather than rigid codes of classification in digital performance. With a Foucauldian awareness that language is power and that classifications insinuate hierarchies, privilege, and biases, they remind us that all labels and categories are not fixed. The first three chapters of the book provide a valuable overview of the field. “Texts and Contexts” surveys a wide range of materials from the earliest forms of digital performance up to today. Beginning with the early animated film, Gertie The Dinosaur, the chapter then moves to consider the work of Piscator, Black Mountain College, Josef Svoboda, The Wooster Group, The Builders Association, Robert Lepage, Eduardo Kac, and the Critical Arts Ensemble. Key terms are introduced and explained, including: multimedia performance, mixed media, cyborg theatre, intermediality, digital performance, and mediated theatre. Glosses are also offered on major critical studies, including notable works by Philip Auslander, Chris Salter, Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer. “Mapping the Field” offers examples of existing proto-taxonomies, such as Steve Dixon’s “body, space, time, interactivity” model or Gabriella Giannachi’s “Space–Time–Interaction–Performance Roles” model, earlier attempts to organize and codify digital performance that support the need for the project of the book. Finally, “Theoretical Approaches” provides an extensive list of crucial theoretical works in conversation with digital performance.

The book offers three new taxonomies as potential models. The first is Sarah Bay-Cheng’s “Taxonomy of Distortion: Along the Media Performance Continuum,” which uses three conceptual categories: space, time, and bodies. Her taxonomy is not so much a model as a method in that she creates three axes on which digital performance may be placed: material to mediated space; linear to mediated time; and physical to mediated bodies. Bay-Cheng convincingly demonstrates how three performances—Americano Kamikaze (2009), Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope (2007), and Kris Verdonck’s Dancer #1 (a robot installation)—can be understood fin terms of these three spectrums.

The second taxonomy, “Cyborg Returns: Always-Already Subject Technologies,” is written by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck. This taxonomy is an embellishment of the cyborg matrix from her book Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (2011). Parker-Starbuck focuses on the categories of abject, object, and subject, arguing that these categories “can interrelate, be put in opposition to each other, or at times signify hierarchical positionings, and they have gained theoretical purchase through philosophical unpackings around bodies, feminism, psychoanalysis, disability studies, and phenomenology.” She offers a fresh look at Kristeva’s work that has the potential to expand and enlighten our understanding of her foundational work regarding the abject.

The final taxonomy, given is by David Z. Saltz, elaborates an exhaustive catalogue of all aspects of digital performance culminating in a full-page chart featuring twelve different modes such as Virtual Scenery, Instrumental Media, Synesthesia, Diegetic Media, Virtual Puppet, Affective, and so on.

Performance and Media concludes with an application of these three taxonomies being applied to The Builders Association’s production of Continuous City. The taxonomy of distortion describes Continuous City as having “high space and body distortion, but relative low temporal distortion.” The writers conclude that “When we put multiple taxonomies into play, we allow...