🎛️Remix Theatre

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Remix Theatre

The category I have named Remix Theatre combines numerous digital techniques already discussed which derive from multimedia performance and transmedia art pre-pandemic. It is arguable that multimedia and transmedia performance art have already solidified their methodologies while post-pandemic creations are still in an early development process and are inclusive of these methodologies. Brendan Bradley commented in our interview that he perceived the current evolution of second wave digital theatre reflecting numerous types of ‘content stitching … And layering, compositing early Twitch culture, to me all of that has just scaffolded very, very elegantly’. The statement highlights post-pandemic digital theatre's hypermediacy to include pre-pandemic, internet culture-influenced multimedia.

: ‘A new media object is subject to algorithmic manipulation … In short, media becomes programmable’. Any kind of media can be combined through software into one work of art, including live performance like theatre. The multimedia combination of livestreamed performers, virtual production tools like greenscreens, integration of online cultures like memes and chat forums, and multiple channels of communication like text message, have all been mixed together during the past few post-pandemic years with theatrical aesthetics, praxis, and dramaturgy as the basis. Remix Theatre allows theatre makers in the postdigital, post-pandemic age of performance to combine media, programming them using the language of other digital media that has become trendy because of shifting cultural tastes in media, .

I have co-opted the term remix come from the music world. Remixed music came from sampling techniques combining two or more parts of songs in clubs and music venues starting in Jamaica in the 1970s, and rapidly spreading around the world; ‘the use of preexisting material to make something new’ and are considered one way for ‘a user of media to also make media’ in a postdigital society. TikTok, for example, relies heavily on users ‘remixing’ videos with users filming their own commentary on top of it (‘stitching’), adding a new music track, or otherwise layering and compositing videos to generate new meaning from old memes.

Figure 16: Screenshot of The Kiffness (a remix composer and musical artist) remixing funny cat videos to create electronic music. The video of the full song is linked in the paragraph above.

I apply Remix to second wave digital theatre and post-pandemic multimedia, mixed media, and transmedia works because theatre makers specifically are expanding their practices to play with digital tools’ affordances, creating TikTok-like layers of video and physical items, layering digital tools like messaging services alongside livestreamed shows, and even layering temporal experiences by drawing out the ‘show’ for weeks with anticipatory emails before the next ‘drop’, in internet parlance. They are playing with the ‘errors’ common to internet-based technology like static from poor video quality, sound loss or frozen images in lagging Zoom calls, even confusion around the liveness of a video stream. This remixed performance art is a dramaturgical reflection of our personal, daily experience living with digital tools. Considering the mediatisation of both tools and performance aesthetics, : ‘There is, for example, a correlation between fragmented, non-linear narrative and our sense of the world, space and time, or between unidentified speakers and our changing sense of subjectivity and identity in an age where we generate identities in the virtual world’. These works aim not only to tell a narrative or convey an experience from beginning to end, but to highlight the overlapping of media into daily experience, creating a collage of distortions as our minds multitask almost constantly.

I have identified three subgroups of Remix Theatre: Collage, Transmedia, and Glitch forms, discussed in the next subsections.