Black Feminist Video Game
Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s Black Feminist Video Game, written with intimate understanding of its internet venue, explores feminism through the eyes of Jonas, a biracial autistic teenager, who live-streams his video-gaming experiences. The piece integrates a Twitch-like setting, other social networks in the background, feedback from the live audience, and, most uniquely, a video game interface that Jonas plays through to learn about feminist history, all while keeping inclusion and accessibility at the forefront of the production.
Swell
Swell is a contemporary song cycle written by immigrants and children of immigrants, about their immigrant experience, which was presented live and online by New York-based HERE from March 17-21, 2021. Swell represents the voices and styles of ten composers with roots in countries all across the world, including Taiwan, Mexico, Russia, the Philippines, Israel, Japan, Trinidad, and India.
IGNITE
The Strides Collective’s self-paced virtual theater piece IGNITE puts control over a mystery in the audience’s hands. Viewers navigate the site and the elements of the unfolding story in their own time, guiding themselves through video, audio, and text as they put together the pieces of a mysterious fire on a college campus. Through its self-selective user interface and detail-rich world, the piece grants its audience the agency necessary to lose themselves in the story.
WILD
The Quantum Theater’s production of Wild is a truly timely piece, targeting both the political moment through questions of transparency, scandal, and isolation and the very means of theater-making through clever blending of aspects of both in-person and virtual theater-making. Wild illustrates the ways in which theater can find a purposeful setting in the online world, intentionally integrating the digital landscape with the traditionally theatrical.
EMAIL PRO
The ongoing live performance piece, Email Pro, long predates the pandemic, though it feels completely at home in the strange landscape in which we now find ourselves. The show exists at the intersection of stand-up comedy, talk show or podcast, and performance art, seeing Ivan Anderson write emails to strangers, both with and without the aid of the audience members, who remain a vital piece of the show.
1988: a Blast from the Past by Modern Means
1988 is a one-on-one immersive experience through Instagram Direct Messaging. Created by Brett Hughes and Denver Novelty Company, 1988 exists somewhere between the media of video game, short story, and participatory theater and is a product of its moment, rife in nostalgia and centered in the collective experience of the pandemic.
Speak of Me as I Am: a Celebration of African American Contributions to Shakespeare
The life cycle of virtual theater has progressed rapidly in the last few months, to the point that many theater enthusiasts may already find themselves, as our research team has, referring to “standard” or “traditional” Zoom theater. Yet, even as theater broadcast through teleconference platforms becomes mainstream and new, flashier innovations emerge, the benefits of the format remain clear. This past week, Houston, Texas’s Main Street Theater used the live video streaming format to continue the spirit of their educational offerings while the theater remains shuttered as they broadcast Speak of Me as I Am: a Celebration of African American Contributions to Shakespeare via Facebook Live.
a farm for meme
Virginia Grise’s a farm for meme is a story following the destruction of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, one of the largest urban farms in the US, a communal garden of 14 acres, built in a vacant lot after the 1992 LA rebellion. The piece takes organic aesthetics and non-linear storytelling and weaves them within a digital landscape.
September 7th, 2020
Cait S. Kirby’s COVID-19-inspired virtual simulation of a day-in-the-life on a college campus in the fall of 2020, though falling outside of the world of performance and theater, is honed for audience engagement and emotional impact.
the Method Gun
Originally created by Rude Mechs of Austin, Texas and re-devised by a Wesleyan University ensemble in a generative process led by Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl, The Method Gun explores the actor-training techniques of theater guru Stella Burden and her wildly-committed students. Burden was the creator of “The Approach” (referred to as “the most dangerous acting technique in the world.”)
A World Beneath the World
A World Beneath the World is an interactive, site-specific scavenger hunt about mortality. Audiences explore the Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia, PA, guided by clues, phone calls, and silent characters. Blending fact and allegory, history and mythology, A World Beneath the World opens up an alternate reality filled with mystery, wonder, and the ghosts of pandemics past.