OVERCOMING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: TECH KITS AVAILABLE FOR VIRTUAL ART-MAKERS
The digital boom within the performing arts world over the course of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 as performing venues largely remain closed has highlighted the realities of technological disparities and inequities. In response to these challenges, cultural institutions have recognized and moved to fill the need for access to technological art-making equipment, both for rent and for free.
Acting through the Avatar: Reimagining Theater through Gaming Technology
Virtual productions conducted through video game platforms reimagine what theater can look like in cyberspace. Celine Song’s The Seagull in Sims 4 and Stellazzio Virtual Theater troupe’s Phantom of the Opera over Final Fantasy XIV convene theater and gaming audiences through gaming technology and reinvent audience interaction on the cyber-stage.
Tuning In: an Audio Resurgence
Audio storytelling allows for safe and lively theater in a screen-free setting, popularizing the form again amidst the surge in virtual theater brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. We track the rise in audio’s popularity, its use by theaters in 2020, and the benefits of the form.
Post-Human Theater and Digital Dramaturgy
As theater moves onto the cyber-stage, it engages in a dialogue with decades of scholarship and research about post-humanism, and necessitates an inquiry into the entanglements between humans and machines.
Across the Catwalk: Performance Innovation in the Fashion Runway Show
Performance comes in many forms, faces, and fabrics. Much as theater necessitates not only a creative work, be it a play, musical, or improvised work, but also performers and an audience, so does the fashion world, coming to a pinnacle in the runway show where clothing, models, and spectators intersect. The audience, like in live theater, is crucial to the art form, as much a part of the experience as the garments themselves, with celebrities in attendance and reaction photographs splashed across tabloids as the models sashay past their voyeurs.
Japan’s Drive-In Haunted Houses and their Global Inspiration
The horror entertainment company Kowagarasetai produces and creates horror events throughout Japan and recently created a drive-through haunted house in a secret garage.
Tools for Magic-Making: On Green Screens and Magic Shows for the Cyber-Stage
The transition to online virtual performance has led to a reimagining of spectacle on the cyber-stage. In particular, the green screen has become a new landscape for illusion-making and exploring three-dimensionality on the two-dimensional Zoom stage. Magic shows during this pandemic have also continued to explore how to create spectacle on the screen.
Commemorating and Acknowledging the Current Moment on 3Views
How do you memorialize an ephemeral art form when it moves online? In a recent interview with American Theater magazine, Sarah Ruhl and Melissa Crespo considered the role of the 3views criticism website in the current moment. At the beginning of the interview, Sarah Ruhl shares that the website was refocused during the pandemic because the survival of artists and performance houses is at-risk and that it is currently more important to nurture artists and theaters to ensure their survival.
Susan Sontag on Theater
In a Tulane Drama Review article in 1996, scholar Susan Sontag questions the lines between theater and film, a question that remains pertinent to our research for this project and for the broader world. Sontag disagrees with the distinction that “theater employs artifice while cinema is committed to reality”