⁉️What is this project?
Wayfinding: Introduction
This GitBook is both an archive of a point in theatrical history and, ideally, a living resource document that changes with digital theatre's evolution. Though digital media and tools have been integrated into theatrical and live performance stage spaces for decades, the pandemic added new perspectives and techniques which, in turn, have led to significant dramaturgical questions. ‘One key finding of both our quantitative and qualitative research was that one of the most important (and often overlooked) variables in digital success is quality’ . I hope this GitBook, as a guidebook, supports the increased quality of digital productions post-pandemic by helping digital artists, theatre makers, and those curious about the intersection of digital tools and performing arts find methods, praxis, dramaturgy, and plain practical tools to begin creating intentional, considered, high-quality shows – without ‘high-quality’ relying on glitz and glamour, special effects, or even expensive software. It shouldn’t.
How do we even talk about online and digital theatre? That’s such a massive term covering so many approaches. To quote digital theatre maker and multi-hyphenate artist :
Much like the terms “in the round”, “proscenium”, “thrust stages”, we need to develop a word bank that identifies different kinds of digital theater – “livestream”, “on demand”, “digital native”. We could call it all digital theater, and I think that the digital marketplace should embody all of those things, but we should distinguish between them.
, two of the godfathers of pre-pandemic digital performance production, collaborated on a pandemic-era digital project and subsequent book chapter, naming the overall genre: ‘This is theatre+: it is precisely not theatre but is enabling ways of being "theatrical" within a digital medium combining both analogue and digital affordances in order to create something that is neither theatre nor television, but an exciting hybrid that has its own aesthetic and ontology’. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Saltz in Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field. Creative Australia’s report, offers two definitions: online theatre, ‘streaming or recording live theatre performance and presenting them for online viewing’; and digital theatre, ‘a live theatre performance that incorporates digital technology as an essential part of the performance’. The report also separated out ‘traditional theatre’ from its more technology-driven and -focused offspring. Digital theatre's variety has only expanded post-pandemic, and the terminology and dramaturgy of this novel combination of theatre sensibility and digital technology/media is in constant flux.
Digital media has poked at the boundaries of theatre practice for decades, but the full incorporation of one medium into the other was rare – until Covid. ‘It is clear that many theatres consider digital methods to be antithetical to their artistic methods’, . backs up Lech's claim:
Within the performing arts, however, there seems to be a greater baseline of suspicion towards digital activities; the creation of works for online consumption in particular has often been regarded as somehow inimical to performance, or at least an awkward fit with it, not least because it problematises traditional notions of physical co-presence.
These sentiments come from post-pandemic writings speculating on pandemic-era digital, online tools’ wide use among many theatre makers, pondering why these tools seemed to be largely avoided in theatre practice before an international health crisis seemingly required the meld. But this combination isn't new. RnD Young-Howze Theater Journal : ‘What we critics had encountered though were villains we like to call “Flag Planters”. It’s a term we call colonizing organizations that like to declare their very normal live stream the “first, the best, or the only”’.
There’s no flag planting anymore: this GitBook demonstrates that digital theatre has an established foothold in the larger performance space dating back decades. It is a constantly evolving and changing creature, and after several years of placing performance onto a cyber-stage for a distanced audience, no one is the ‘first’ anymore. But how should we discuss the larger genre of digital theatre to continue encouraging learning and practice in this mutating form?
In hopes of clarifying the evolving forms of post-pandemic digital theatre, I have:
Created the terms First Wave Digital Theatre and Second Wave Digital Theatre to discuss how the Covid pandemic changed the integration of digital tools into theatre praxis.
Created a longer taxonomy of second wave digital theatre that dramaturgically navigates the most common forms I found during the research process and names them: Cinematic, Televisual, Virtual Reality, Interactive & Gamified, and Remix Theatres.
There is a further 'messy taxonomy' section called 'Other' which covers less prominent second wave digital theatre forms.
Offer guidance in the form of Tips & Tricks at the end of each section.
Develop Spotlights that cover cross-taxonomy issues and list Tools like hardware and software recommendations from theatre makers.
Discuss reasons why theatre makers might abandon second wave digital theatre praxis for more traditional approaches, which is important for avoiding gimmicks.
Integrate Dramaturgies from several decades of digital theatre production and scholarship, about 1990 to present.
Here are a few brief notes on how to navigate within this guidebook:
If there is an arrow beside the page listing, there are subpages there. This is true for most sections. You can also use the navigation buttons at the bottom of each page to go back the previous page (left button) or forward to the next page (right button).
Hyperlinks go to important external sources, but several of my sources are also listed in text annotations. . When you click on the link, a small text box will pop up with more information.
You are encouraged to skip around to relevant sections, and if you don't know what section might be relevant to you, try taking the Second Wave Digital Theatre Quiz to see where your areas of interest might be.
If you have any questions about this project, feel free to email me at nicol.cabe@flinders.edu.au.
That's it, onward with you!
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