This book is for those of you who may have wondered, “why should I use digital technology in the production of live theatre?” It is not a how to manual with technical specifications. It is a why to use manual for digital technology in theatre. New technologies enhance and enliven perceptions of what is expressively possible. This book is also intended for the teachers, technology artists, and performance practitioners as a tool to begin discussions for the creation of new works and collaborations.

In this book you will find primary examples of Digital Theatre presented in a way that makes them accessible and identifies solid creative reasons for using technology to speak to audiences and expand the theatre experience in new ways. There are many more practitioners and examples that could be added to this expanding field. Consider this a record of an era of artistic exploration and a tie between theatrical currents past and present, and as an invocation for future creative innovation.

Above all, this work is a starting place for the contemplation of what type of new works we want to make and call Theatre. It asks, “Who do we want to be in the future?” Because the future, like Theatre, is continuously becoming.

Theatre must meet its new audience where they live, but we must never give up the core ideas which make the art form speak the truth of the human experience. With this in mind, this work provides both performance examples, historical grounding, and discussion prompts. The book stems from five years of research into the Digital Performance Archive (DPA) and other resources, interviewing practitioners, viewing productions, and from my own experience as a practitioner. Because it is intended to be a teaching tool and production resource for creating theatre, the content is parsed into chapters based primarily on the effect that digital technology has had on existent theatrical roles.

In this book I have included a breadth of performance examples to demonstrate a range of performative possibilities. There is no one ideal example of Digital Theatre, instead the sum total of these works demonstrates the reach and potential value of this rising art form.

There are examples of media integration and satellite broadcasts dating back into the 1970s, however this study primarily examines works occurring from the 1990s forward. This is an era coinciding with the PC/Internet boom and the rise of public digital literacy. In the early 1980s, video, satellites, fax machines, and other communications equipment began to be used as methods of creating art and performance (Randall and Jordan 2001). John Cage and the group Fluxes were among the early leaders in expanding what was considered art, technology, and performance.

With the adoption of personal computers in the 1980s, new possibilities for creating performance communications were born. Artists like Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway began to transition from earlier, more costly experiments with satellite transmission to experiments with the developing Internet. Online communities such as “The Well” and interactive writing offered new models for artistic creativity. With the “Dot Com” boom of the 1990s, telematic artists including Roy Ascott began to take on greater significance as theatre groups like George Coates Performance Works and Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre established partnerships with software and hardware companies encouraged by the technology boom. Researchers such as Claudio Pinanhez at MIT, David Saltz of The Interactive Performance Laboratory at the University of Georgia, and Mark Reaney, head of the Virtual Reality Theatre Lab at the University of Kansas, as well as significant dance technology partnerships, including Riverbed’s work with Merce Cunningham, led to an unprecedented expansion in the use of digital technology to create media-rich performances which included the use of motion capture, 3D animation, and virtual reality. These boom days were captured in the Digital Performance Archive, an online research database which provided information on digital performances from multiple countries from 1990 to 2000, and became the starting place for many of my investigations.

This movement occurs within the context of Theatre’s continuing tradition of utilizing new technologies to enhance stage spectacle and communicate ideas (Hilton 1991, pp. 55–57). Because the history of digital performance is recent, I will be looking toward the past to give context to our developing present. Through acknowledging aesthetic ties to theatrical precursors exploring similar theatrical effects through the technologies of their day, Digital Theatre becomes part of the tradition of theatrical innovation.

Early use of mechanical and projection devices for theatrical entertainments have a long history tracing back to the mechanicals of ancient Greece and medieval magic lanterns. But the most significant precursors of Digital Theatre can be seen in the works of the early twentieth century. In the ideas of artists including Edward Gordon Craig, Erwin Piscator, Josef Svoboda, and with the Bauhaus and Futurists movements in which we can see the strongest connections between today’s use of digital media and live actors. In the words of Oskar Schlemmer, “The theater, which should be the image of our time and perhaps the one art form most peculiarly conditioned by it, must not ignore these signs” of technology (Schlemmer 1961, p. 18).

Part I addresses spectacle. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the place of theatre, both imagined and real. Chapter 2 deals with how scenography is altered and made plastic by digital technology. It features the fluid scenography via the 3-D animated projectionist sets of Mark Reaney (The Magic Flute and Wings); 3-D Peter Pan; and Aladeen by the Builder’s Association.

Chapter 3 examines the effect of digital technology on the theatre building and how it begins to morph into set and character. Issues of scenic portability will be covered in the discussion of Studio Z. The idea of transformation will be explored in works by England’s site-specific devisors the Talking Birds (Undercurrents), as well as George Coates’ Blind Messengers, the 2006 staging of the Coventry Mystery Plays, and my own work Outside/In which experimented with opening up the theatrical space to dispersed outdoor environments. I also discuss other distance collaborations such as Alice’s Experiments in Wonderland which featured three separate university theatre departments in one show. I will also be discussing Intelligent Theatre spaces as seen at ASU, in David Saltz’s Kaspar, and the Digital Performance Group’s collaborative work Elements.

In Chapter 4, we move on to costuming. The body of the actor is often dressed in costumes, but when the cloth becomes a surface for projection, the edges of character blur and shift between multiple bodies and screens. This chapter will cover the movable screens and limited mobility projectionist costuming as seen in Mark Reaney’s The Magic Flute, which included a play between living actors and screen-characters who were both animated and live actors. It also included the projectionist costuming of the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre’s Making of Americans, which utilized robotic projectors to project images onto the bodies of live performers. The performers’ bodies became canvases for elements including set, props, and other characters. This chapter will also look at projectionist masks, and Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre’s layered actor’s bodies in UBU.

Part II addresses the actor. In Chapter 5, we will examine the ways in which the digitally enabled performer’s body is one of agency, blending the roles of actor and stage technician into one. We will be looking at works by Troika Ranch including Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Future of Memory utilizing their MidiDancer, and L’Universe by the Flying Karamozov Brothers with wearable computers tracking movements, the University of Georgia’s The Tempest where the body of the actor controls the animated scenery, and Mark Reaney’s The Magic Flute which allows the actor’s voice to create the visual scenery.

Chapter 6 deals with the question of what an actor is in the age of digital puppetry. What are the challenges and benefits of acting alongside projections of video others? Here we will discuss the way the “live” actor is “othered” by the use of nonhuman actors. Instead of highlighting the ways digital technology can give agency to the body of the human actor, we are substituting digital puppets, robots, and video projections to portray characters onstage. In a sense, agency is potentially being reassigned to the nonorganic actor.

There are three categories of digital actors that will be discussed: (1) projected video, (2) projected animation, and (3) mechanical. In this chapter we will review works by Yacov Sharir, Mark Reaney’s Dinasaurous, which allowed actors able to portray nonhuman shapes, and Blue Bloodshot Flowers by Susan Broadhurst, which involved the use of artificial intelligence or A.I. as a character. In addition to projected characters we will discuss mechanical players in The Ship’s Detective, and Lance Gharavi’s 2013 work YOU n.0. We will also look at a few examples of the more accessible video “other” in productions by Builder’s Association.

Part III addresses the creative authority and authorship.

In Chapter 7, we will further explore the possibility of multiple authors, directors, and audiences through my work with the online collaborative community, the Art Grid, and four years of InterPlay, in which we shared authorship and created a multiplicity of audiences and audience experiences. Then we will examine the prospect of digital dramaturgy through my work coordinating the Digital Performance Group as a collaborative act of interdisciplinary exploration. This process included composing and collecting materials via digital technology, scripting Compass Points, conceptualizing, visual assets, and much more. This chapter includes my devised piece, Re-Membering Harmony.

The eighth chapter looks at the overlap and competition for messaging and direction from a new source, the digitally enabled audience as author. Audiences are becoming ever more accustomed to performativity, interactivity, and becoming a part of the show through their words and actions. No more is the director, author, or dramaturg a singu...