“My Hotel Medea: Audience as Document”
by Zecora Ura & Persis-Jade Maravala in collaboration with Joseph Dunne
An audience member and her memory are potential documents, and arguably the most eloquent ones. The Audience as Document is an opportunity to experience an intimate and reflexive encounter with someone remembering an overnight theatrical event. How is a show remembered? Usually it is captured by the opinions of the reviewers and critics and sometimes by academics studying the group’s work or the documentation prepared by the group itself. But it is not usually remembered in the form of the most important element, which is the collective memory of those that were there. The desire to reconfigure the relationship between theatre and spectators makes the presence of an audience absolutely crucial to the work of Hotel Medea. We believe that the audience’s memories are the most eloquent document that exists and we seek to capture it by inviting audiences to talk about their rememberings.
“Digital Stages: Is There a There, There?”
by Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X], University of Hull
This paper is concerned with an investigation into the spatial contexts of digital and networked performance practices. The focus is on practices that emerge from, reside, develop or unfold in a) virtual worlds or, b) hybrid locations that merge physical and digital spacetimes (such as augmented reality environments). In those cases, questions of space inevitably emerge: Where do such practices occur? Which are their stages, their environments, their natural habitats? How do those virtual or hybrid environments (re)configure, shape or affect the practices they host? How do practices develop in response to the emergence of new spatial contexts, that is, new performance stages? Following Henri Lefebvre the paper approaches space as ‘social morphology’ to examine the socio-political dimensions of those emergent stages.
Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X] is a cultural practitioner (curator, performer, producer, writer). Maria holds a PhD in Art & Computational Technologies from Goldsmiths Digital Studios, University of London. She is Director of Postgraduate Studies and Lecturer in Theatre & Performance at the School of Arts and New Media, University of Hull. Previously, Maria taught at the University of London Colleges Goldsmiths, Birkbeck and Queen Mary, and Richmond the American International University, and worked as a Community Officer at The Albany in South London. She was co-founder of the international media arts festival Medi@terra and co-director of Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (1996-2002, Athens, Greece). She has performed with Diplous Eros Ensemble and director Syllas Tzoumerkas, also in Athens, Greece. Maria is co-editor of the volume Interfaces of Performance (Ashgate, 2009) and the forthcoming volume Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance (Plagrave MacMillan), which follows the Intimacy festival and Symposium that Maria initiated and co-directed in London, 2007. She has lectured and published widely.
Topical Opticality by Alex Haw
Attenborough Centre Presentation by Sally Jane Norman
“Digital Stages and Performance Technologies”
Digital stages can mean conventional stages invested by digital technologies, which extend the ways we transform and creatively render human presence. They can also mean stages which themselves have been reshaped by digital technologies, expanded and multiplied across communications networks. This presentation will set 21st century digital stages in a wider historical perspective, to show how technologies have always been used both to strengthen the resources of predefined loci, and to outstrip such loci in order to demarcate new performance arenas.
Talk by Theatre Sandbox
How can theatre artists engage with pervasive media technologies in their work, why, and what might they create if they do? Theatre Sandbox set out to explore these questions through a national commissioning scheme for theatre artists and companies. This is a chance to hear about the six commissioned projects and the learning that the scheme and its evaluation generated.
Katie Day produced the first year of Theatre Sandbox for Bristol’s iShed. In 2010 she is also a theatre maker in her own right, and runs The Other Way Works a company making interactive and site-specific performance. Theatre Sandbox 2010 was produced by iShed in collaboration with Bristol Old Vic, Soho Theatre, Lyric, Hammersmith, mac, Contact and The Junction Lottery through Arts Council England.
Panel Discussion: ”Has Digital Technology Influenced Your Art?”
A panel of artists including Sarah Rubidge, Adrienne Hart, Clara Garcia Fraile, Sam Persson, Andrew Lavender, and moderated by Kate Sicchio, will discuss their work within digital performance across dance, theatre, installation and live art. They will explore and debate the influence of digital technology on their own work and the field of digital performance that has emerged with the ubiquitous use of technology.
Steve Dixon – Moderator
Brunel University Pro-Vice Chancellor for Development, formerly Head of School of Arts at Brunel. Prior to this Steve Dixon worked as an actor with leading directors including Nicholas Hytner, Steven Berkoff, Michael Blakemore and Richard Eyre; and with experimental theatre companies such as Incubus and Lumiere & Son.His theatre directing work includes productions in Mexico and Latvia, and in the UK at The Lowry, the ICA, and The Place; and he has produced an opera for Opera North. Steve Dixon is an internationally renowned researcher in the use of computer technologies in the performing arts, and is co-director of the AHRC-funded Digital Performance Archive, which established the largest online searchable database in the field.
Sarah Rubidge – Installations
Sarah Rubidge is a practising artist and Professor of Choreography and New Media at the University of Chichester. As a collaborative artist she develops choreographic digital installations that focus on the use of the somatic as the primary medium of communication (Sensuous Geographies, Fugitive Moments). Some of the installations initiate improvisational choreographies (formal and informal) that become integral choreographic elements of the installation. Others draw on the histories embodied in the fabric of old buildings.
Andy Lavender – Theatre
Andrew Lavender is Dean of Research at Central School of Speech and Drama. Andrew Lavender writes on contemporary theatre and performance, focusing particularly on intermediality, digital technologies in relation to cultural production, creative processes for theatre- and performance-making, and the work of contemporary companies and directors. He is currently working on a monograph on ways in which acting and spectating have changed over the past decade. Andrew is the artistic director of Lightwork, a multimedia theatre company that fuses live performance and digital technologies.
Clara García Fraile (Me and the Machine) – Live Arts
Me and The Machine is Sam Pearson (UK) and Clara García Fraile (Spain). Sam Pearson and Clara Garcia Fraile met while studying Performance and Visual Art at the University of Brighton and, since then, have developed an interdisciplinary collaborative practice as Me and The Machine. Their works combine groundbreaking uses of audiovisual technology and interactive media with choreographed performance, evocative text and distinctive imagery. Audiences are invited to engage performatively in unique immersive sensorial experiences, being dislocated into hybrid realms, somewhere in between reality and fiction.
Adrienne Hart – Dance
Adrienne Hart establish her cross media based dance company Neon Productions in 2003 in order to realize her ambition of creating diverse and exciting contemporary dance that incorporates original music and digital technologies. Adrienne Hart is an associate artist at Swindon Dance and has recently been selected as an Associate Artist for Dance Digital’s 2010 – 2011 Digital Environments research scheme.