From Author to Data Processor in Postdramatic Theatre: Crash Testing the Classics?

Abstract

Despite the dominance of the model of the romantic Genius in individual and educational writing practices in dramatic theater, postdramatic theater is gradually changing the status, materialities and functions of the text and of authorship. Authorship is dispersed and relocated, opened up to a range of authorial models “from Author to Data Processor.” It is increasingly delegated to human and—still marginally—non-human coauthors. In a generalized “software culture” the theater auteur as Data Processor relies on three principles of “moving information”: the transcodability (1) and citationality (2) of text data and the resulting “kinetic” effect (3) of theatre texts on stage. Though the digital has not, historically, been a condition for repurposing text material and for citational poetics, I will focus on New Yorker Annie Dorsen’s “algorithmic” Hamlet appropriation A Piece of Work (2013), in which algorithms rewrite Shakespeare’s canonical text and metaphorically submit it to a crash test.