Now available on Project MUSE - Canadian Theatre Review 159, Summer 2014 "Digital Performance"

[Greenwood, Audrey]

Canadian Theatre Review
Volume 159, Summer 2014
http://bit.ly/PMctr159
Also available at CTR Online<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/121522/>

Digital Performance
Edited by Peter Kuling and Laura Levin
CTR 159 focuses on the vibrant experimentations with digital technology that are taking place within the performance field. In line with CTR's interest in covering new directions in theatre, the issue explores how digital technologies are leading performance into new physical and virtual spaces. Plays are now routinely staged online and on social media platforms; site-specific shows use cellphone texting on city streets; and players engage in complex performances of self in the imaginative worlds of video games. CTR 159 stresses the social and political dimensions of theatrical encounters with "new" technologies and interrogates the role digital media plays in providing individuals from historically marginalized communities with DIY forms of self-expression.
Scripts featured in this issue include LANDLINE: From Halifax to Vancouver by Dustin Harvey and Adrienne Wong, a cellphone performance experienced simultaneously by spectators on opposite sides of the country, and How iRan: Three Plays for iPod by Ken Cameron, a shuffleable audio play on imprisoned Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan.
The issue also features excerpts from the theatrical experiments of Praxis Theatre-such as Section 98, an open source play that invites audiences to respond electronically to the show as it develops-and a slideshow surveying the use of digital technologies by theatre companies from across Canada.
This issue contains:
Digital Performance in Canada
Peter Kuling, Laura Levin
http://bit.ly/PMctr159a
No abstract
The New Intimacy: rihannaboi95 and Web Theatre
Jordan Tannahill
http://bit.ly/PMctr159b
"The New Intimacy: rihannaboi95 and Web Theatre" provides a summary of the creation and dissemination of Jordan Tannahill's live-streamed Internet play rihannaboi95 and contextualizes it within the broader, emergent practice of web theatre. He speaks of the play's origin within the "sissy boy dance/lip-synch" and "confessional" YouTube video genres, the rationale for choosing live-streamed video as a theatrical form, and the unique performance and directorial challenges that arose from the form. Tannahill goes on to discuss other artists creating performances that either exist entirely within Internet applications, such as Twitter, or substantially employ Internet applications within a theatrical production. Tannahill proposes that form profoundly informs content in web theatre and that as apps and devices are created, performance creators will generate content for and about them (the danger being performances that do not transcend technological gimmickry). Through the innovative use of free Internet applications, Tannahill suggests web theatre has the potential to be an affordable form of performance that transcends geographical barriers.
iTalk, YouListen, WePerform: Participatory Media on the Canadian Stage <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.mcleod.html>
Kimberley McLeod
http://bit.ly/PMctr159c
This article investigates how Theatre Replacement's WeeTube 5400 (2010) and Les Petites Cellules Chaudes' The iShow (2012) re-frame social media in a performance context. Through re-mediation, these productions explore the kinds of social relations participatory media catalyze. WeeTube 5400 and The iShow-using YouTube and Chatroulette respectively-ask audiences to consider the productive and unproductive conversations taking place via social media. In doing so, these companies go beyond simply critiquing the social web and use performance to imagine new modes of connection possible in digital spaces. While the theatre space transforms the possibilities for social media use, in both productions the interactive potential of the social web is limited as the audience remains separated from direct digital engagement.
Praxis in Practice: Digital Media and Social Design in Performance
Alison Broverman
http://bit.ly/PMctr159d
With savvy use of social media, the Toronto-based independent production company Praxis Theatre has become a cultural and political voice across Canada. This article offers a look at the history of the company and a case study of what they've done right with social media in developing new and challenging projects.
Highlights from Praxis Theatre's Encounters with Social Media <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.levin.html>
Laura Levin<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Laura%20Levin>, Aislinn Rose<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Aislinn%20Rose>, Tommy Taylor<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Tommy%20Taylor>, Michael Wheeler<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Michael%20Wheeler>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159e
No abstract
Decolonial Interventions in Performance and New Media Art: In Conversation with Cheryl L'Hirondelle and Kent Monkman <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.nagam.html>
Julie Nagam, Kerry Swanson<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Kerry%20Swanson>, Cheryl L'Hirondelle<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Cheryl%20L%E2%80%99Hirondelle>, Kent Monkman<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Kent%20Monkman>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159f
This article features interviews with Cheryl L'Hirondelle and Kent Monkman, two contemporary artists who move between traditional practices and contemporary art forms. Their multidisciplinary work unpacks both popular culture and traditional world-views. L'Hirondelle and Monkman are integrating Indigenous ideologies and embodied knowledge through interdisciplinary meetings of performance, painting, music, and new and digital media art, and they are actively using these media as decolonizing tools.
Patch Notes: Playing the Selves in Gamespace
Alan Filewod
http://bit.ly/PMctr159g

Digital gaming is a theatricalized activity in the wider spheres of performance studies research. When we play games we trace out our personal experiences through digital participation, narrative simulation, enactment, and spectatorship. Traditionally thought of as dimensionally collapsed puppet play that assumes a direct relationship between player and avatar, player experiences in gaming have been transformed by social networks featuring online play. In MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), gaming becomes an embodied practice that projects corporeality into digital space. This is the expanding "atopian" realm of what Mackenzie Wark calls "gamespace," which supersedes Guy Debord's "spectacle" as the cultural logic of our time. Written from a gamer perspective, this article explores how the recent dominance of MMORPGS has shifted understandings of role-play in gaming. It critiques the models of player types proposed by John Bartle and Nick Yee for their inability to consider the multi-dimensionality of distributed selves in gamespace.
Outing Ourselves in Outer Space: Canadian Identity Performances in BioWare's Mass Effect Trilogy
Peter Kuling
http://bit.ly/PMctr159h
Throughout BioWare's Mass Effect 3, players confront a vast array of unexpected Canadian content in narrative dialogue, settings, and identity development choices. This article examines the overall effects of Canadian content in this immersive video game series. Beginning in Vancouver and ending in London, England, Mass Effect 3 immerses players in world-ending conflicts linked with historical Canadian wartime experiences, which are creatively disguised through inventive science fiction. This game evokes ideas of colonial duty and personal self-sacrifice; players also confront cultural eugenics similar to social Darwinism during World War II. Canadian and queer identities develop in tandem as players consider humanitarian and inclusive possibilities, performing with outer space races in conflict. Players can even personalize their own Commander Shepard by customizing his/her gender, race, and sexuality. During the game, players may pursue intimate relationships with other men, women, or alien non-player characters; these choices are developed as moments of "coming out" that parallel the Canadian content revelations in the game. All of these contemporary identity negotiations create a vastly complex system of video game user-generated performances as players help their Canadian Commander Shepard reshape the universe.
Voice of the Patriots: An Interview with Canadian Video Game Performer David Hayter <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.love.html>
Jamie Love<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Jamie%20Love>, David Hayter<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=David%20Hayter>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159i
This article presents an interview with David Hayter, a Canadian-American screen and voice actor best known for playing the voices of Solid Snake and Big Boss in the Metal Gear Solid video game franchise created by Hideo Kojima and published by Konami. Hayter is also a director and screenwriter responsible for scripts based on popular comic properties such as X-Men and Watchmen.
I, Patient: Performance Practices in Medical Simulation at Hôpital Montfort <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.samur.html>
Sebastian Samur
http://bit.ly/PMctr159k
This article compares the performative experiences of medical simulation participants who train with both standardized patients (SPs)-actors trained in patient simulation-and android patient simulators. Training participants may be doctors, nurses, or other medical personnel. A brief history of medical simulation is provided, covering both human and artificial patient simulation. Additional simulation elements, such as the training environment and medical moulage (makeup), are also discussed in relation to the heightened realism they bring to scenarios. A case study then follows, outlining medical simulation practices currently employed at the Montfort Hospital simulation lab, as well as individual staff roles. Practical and theoretical advantages and disadvantages of human versus android patient simulators are examined, as are the performative elements that each presents. The article concludes with a brief look at future developments in the field of medical simulation at the Montfort Hospital and abroad.
Inside Information: Ken Cameron's How iRan <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.finn.html>
Patrick Finn
http://bit.ly/PMctr159l

This article examines Ken Cameron's multidisciplinary play How iRan: Three Plays for iPod. Author Patrick Finn argues that Cameron's play uses digital technology to intimately engage with one of Canadian theatre's most essential and intriguing themes: immigration. The play has three paths, each of which can be followed at any point. This creates a unique performance style that addresses how digital technology presents information to users. The play does not separate audience members with digital media; instead, Cameron's audience moves in close physical proximity, and they walk through individual narrative experiences. Cameron uses interviews with Iranian-Canadians with direct immigration and cultural experiences to create personal connections with his material. Designer Anton DeGroot structured installation art pieces at narrative stations to further embed the play with new world information. Iranian-Canadians who decided to remain anonymous because of fear of reprisals against their families for their involvement in Cameron's play have created several of the art stations in this play. This piece connects us with new and historical material through digital innovation.
Scripts
How iRan: Three Plays for iPod (Selections from the Green, White, and Red iPod Scripts) <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.cameron.html>
Ken Cameron
http://bit.ly/PMctr159m

Ken Cameron's How iRan is a shuffleable audio-performance, presented in a library, about imprisoned Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan. Audience members choose one of three coloured iPods offered at the show, each offering a different journey through the space and through the experiences of Iranian-Canadian immigrants. The performance is divided into three parts: green, white, and red. The reader is invited to select the colour of the script to read first.

How iRan: Three Plays for iPod (Part 1: Green) <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.cameron01.html>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159mpart1
How iRan: Three Plays for iPod (Part 2: White) <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.cameron03.html>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159mpart2
How iRan: Three Plays for iPod (Part 3: Red) <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.cameron02.html>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159mpart3
LANDLINE: Halifax to Vancouver <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.harvey.html>
Dustin Harvey, Adrienne Wong
http://bit.ly/PMctr159n

LANDLINE: Halifax to Vancouver, by Dustin Harvey and Adrienne Wong, is an intimate, roving performance for two participants situated in two different cities. Designed to relocate and connect different cities, the performance uses an audio track played over an iPod to guide participants on a walk through urban space. The participants are prompted to text message each other and share anecdotes, observations, and-possibly-secrets. At the end of the piece, the participants return to the start point, where they encounter their counterpoint via video link between the two cities. What happens next is up to the two strangers-who may be closer now than when they started. LANDLINE is a slow dance for two, with their arms wrapped around the nation.

The performance is one hour long and repeats every ten minutes for a maximum of four hours at a time. LANDLINE was first produced between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Vancouver, British Columbia, in September 2013 by Secret Theatre and Neworld Theatre.
Views and Reviews
Editorial <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.alvarez.html>
Natalie Alvarez
http://bit.ly/PMctr159o
How Can We Talk about Affect in Digital Performance? <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.tyber.html>
Sydney Tyber<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Sydney%20Tyber>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159p
A Dance Tribute to the Art of Football <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.evans.html>
Daniel Evans<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Daniel%20Evans>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159q
"The Body's Delicate": LEAR, a Collaborative Case Study in Contemporary Feminist Theatre <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.fitz-james.html>
Thea Fitz-James<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Thea%20Fitz-James>
http://bit.ly/PMctr159r
An Archive of Encounter: Travels beyond Borders with Madeleine Blais-Dahlem <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.raban.html> Alethea Tamarit Raban<http://muse.jhu.edu/results?section1=author&search1=Alethea%20Tamarit%20Raban>, Madeleine Blais-Dahlem
http://bit.ly/PMctr159s
Online Feature
A Photographic Journey through Digital Technology in Canadian Performances <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_theatre_review/v159/159.owen.html>
David Owen
http://bit.ly/PMctr159t

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