Digital Performance in Canada

It is difficult to write about the digital in performance without falling prey to a number of clichés about the role of information and communication technologies in the contemporary moment. One of the most pervasive is the declaration that the digital is something new, something part of a fundamentally different epoch in human history—an assumption underscored by the language of “new media,” “new technologies,” and related terms that imply a radical break with the past. It appears, however, that the digital revolution has been in process for quite some time now. As several historians have pointed out, there are fundamental continuities between the age of digital technology and the changes that were wrought by the Industrial Revolution, Gutenberg’s printing press, and the constant stream of technological inventions that have defined Western culture’s transition to modernity.

Most immediately, this means that all declarations of the “new” in the context of this issue of Canadian Theatre Review (CTR) are problematic or, at the very least, quite provisional. They are, moreover, ghosted by similar prophetic speech acts that appear in two previous CTR issues that addressed related topics. Our Digital Performance issue follows exactly twenty years after CTR’s 1994 issue entitled Computing Theatre (no. 81). Groundbreaking in its time, that issue explored how computers were beginning to change the form of theatre and, correspondingly, how theatre was changing how computers might function or behave. Special issue editor Jill Tomasson Goodwin then mused, “In twenty-odd years, computers have entered the theatre in ways teenage programmers like me could never have envisioned, becoming communicative, interactive, virtual. In short, dramatic” (3).

Roughly a decade later, it was equally urgent for CTR editor Catherine Graham to return to this set of questions. At the time, in 2006, the field of theatre and performance studies was embroiled in debates on whether digital technologies—technologies of recording and capture, technologies of the virtual—could be compatible with live performance, the latter often thought of as a medium of the ephemeral (or uncapturable) and of fleshy materiality. Graham’s issue, fittingly titled Liveness and Mediatized Performance, asked us to think beyond these binary oppositions and refocused the discussion around “audience-performer relationships” that could be created through intersections between performance and digital media.

For those familiar with the previous CTR issues, the collection of articles assembled here may seem like a return of sorts. Certainly, our use of the term “digital performance,” as defined by performance theorist Steve Dixon, is meant to engage similar artistic terrain as it refers to “all performance works where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, technique, aesthetics, or delivery forms” (3). Yet despite this common ground, it is remarkable how dated some of the preoccupations in previous CTR issues might seem to today’s readers. For example, one author in the Computing Theatre issue describes a dial-up connection to the Internet and later goes on to define what an e-mail is. He writes, “The notion of electronic mail (e-mail) is fairly straightforward—simple one-to-one communications. E-mail offers obvious benefits of time and cost efficiency, but probably deserves no greater place in history than the fax machine or the telephone” (Hewitt 43).

If these kinds of statements feel quaint (those with endlessly jammed inboxes will strain to imagine e-mail as a great time-saving tool!), this is in part due to the dramatic speed with which new technologies are now invented, adopted, and discarded. As Jonathan Crary argues in his recent book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, the very notion of a “digital age” with “stable and enduring conceptual and functional parameters” misrecognizes the technological experience that defines our time: what he calls “the calculated maintenance of an ongoing state of transition” (37). The feeling that we are always in a state of flux with respect to “new” technologies is one shaped by the injunction to “non-stop consumption” that characterizes late capitalism. This social imperative follows a different kind of history—the “logic of economic modernization,” as described by Marx...