New media dramaturgy

Abstract

We coined the term new media dramaturgy (NMD) to investigate the transformations underway in live performance in relation to and in response to new media and vice versa. New media constitutes a turn to visuality, intermediality, and dialectical moves between performance and installation arts that show these expressions embodied or visualized in live and virtual performance spaces. We are interested in how these expressions might be understood compositionally and dramaturgically. This is a field of performance that is situated inbetween theatre, dance, music, and visual arts. In this project we engage with a range of works by artists and companies such as: dumb type, the iCinema project, Back to Back Theatre, Kris Verdonck and A Two Dogs Company, Kornel Mundruczo, and Hotel Modern. New media dramaturgy is a concept linking dramaturgical innovations in the globally distributed field of contemporary theatre with theories and practices in media/visual arts. We focus on the key word dramaturgy. Understood as a transformational, inter-stitial, and translation practice, dramaturgy bridges ideas and their compositional and embodied enactment. We understand what Eckersall has called “an expanded dramaturgy”1 to be one that in the production of art is always showing expressions of the idea or trace of its process, something that performs a relation between idea/ concept/statement and form/enunciation/reception. Thus it is a dialectical process of creativity that is also practical and based in an understanding of performance as a process of and in work. Interactivity is a key concern of NMD. This is not, however, a superficial ideasuch as audiences “interacting” in the development of performance by choosing story arcs using screens or pushing buttons in the theatre in realtime. Nor do we mean experiments using visual-screen headgear and interactive software to create a more porous sense of space and time in theatrical form (although this is a more fruitful area of investigation than the push-button theatre, above). Instead, as Rosie Klich and Ed Scheer argue, contemporary performance uses new media as a means of aesthetic innovation. It is what they call “a training regime for the exploration of contemporary perspectives” on “AV and information technologies.”2 New media is a potentially destabilizing force in their summation but so is live performance – “they are continually reframing and colonising each other.”3 NMD is not aboutworrying about the status of the live in performance – or about the virtualization of theatre. Rather, questions of destabilization, colonization, informational economy, and affective and ethical understandings of communication are considered as NMD material. It is about the technologies and techniques of new media in relation to the dramaturgical function of translating ideas into practice and compositional awareness. It is a nexus between context, content, form, and audience, what Marianne Van Kerkhoven calls “listening to the bloody machine” of theatre4 or, as Yukiko Shikata describes in relation to dumb type’s work, media performance as “image machine.”5