Abstract: The technology industry’s recent spatial turn presents new opportunities for theatre and performance in the twenty-first century. One such opportunity is augmented reality (AR), a technology that overlays digitally rendered assets onto the user’s physical space, giving the appearance that those assets populate the physical world. Through an analysis of The Builders Association’s Elements of Oz , which incorporated mobile AR into its stage production, as well as Bitter Wind , the author’s adaptation of Agamemnon for the Microsoft HoloLens headset, this essay analyzes the interpretive possibilities AR creates for theatre and performance.

Abstract: This essay takes as its central concern the historical transmission of Reza Abdoh’s performance works via their circulation in the artist’s retrospective exhibit at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. I analyze two interlaced defining features in the KW exhibition—archival remixing and viscerality—that the curators used to honor Abdoh’s artistic legacy. Focusing on the exhibit as a medium of performance historiography in diaspora, this essay argues that the multimedia installation of Abdoh’s archival work in the exhibition format utilized performance archives to create a haptic and visceral site of historiography and memory.

Abstract: Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933) is perhaps best remembered as one of the first Black opera singers, despite having never performed on the operatic stage. Exploring race and phonography as interlinking technologies of perception underlying and structuring the ability of audiences to perceive black performers, this essay analyzes the multiple Joneses produced through her archive—in reviews, promotional photographs and illustrations, and the absence of her phonographically recorded voice. Through this exploration, I argue that we must resist the drive to embalm the remains of performance in order to move toward a more multiple analysis of Black archives.