Australasian Drama Studies: Special Focus Issue October 2015

Digital Performance Futures in Australasia

Editors: Gorkem Acaroglu and Glenn D’Cruz

From computers to smartphones and 3-D televisions, digital technology is a ubiquitous part of everyday life for many modestly affluent people today, making it almost unremarkable.  The rapid dissemination of this technology has also had a profound impact on performance practices and has challenged long-held assumptions about the ontological status of performance.  It is an attribute of new media to make old media critically interrogate its verities.  Digital technologies challenge the performing arts to identify its unique qualities and articulate why it should survive in a new cultural order.  Does digital technology consign theatre to the museum, or will the form reinvent itself in cyberspace?  Categories such as presence, ‘liveness’ and corporeality are unsettled by cyborg technologies that blur the distinction between human and virtual performers, and confound conventional notions of the co-presence of performers.  While scholars such as Susan Broadhurst, Steve Dixon, Philip Auslander, amongst others, have produced extensive commentaries on the theory and practice of digital performance, there is a relative paucity of work on the way Australasian performance makers use new digital technologies and media to address questions of geography, antipodean identity, history, heritage, and locality.  These issues are especially important given the imminent arrival of the National Broadband Network (NBN), and the growing trend amongst elite international companies – such as the National Theatre of Great Britain and the New York Metropolitan Opera – to deliver their performances to a world-wide audience through digital technology.

This special issue of ADS invites contributions from Australasian scholars and artists who use digital technologies – motion capture, immersive 3-D projection, artificial intelligence, motion tracking, interactivity, robotics, augmented and virtual reality, webcams, haptics, screen technologies – to address the following themes: 

Virtual performance of national Identity; Interdisciplinary digital performance; Virtual and Real choreography; Telematic interaction in performance; Virtual scenography in Australasia; Body/technology integration; Borders of performance ontology; Postdramatic performance and the digital; Transforming conceptions of the political; Interactivity and narrativity; Digital delivery of performing arts events.

The editors are especially interested in papers that document and evaluate the work of people who have pioneered the field in Australasia (such as Hellen Sky and John McCormick, Julie Martin, Gideon Obarzanek), as well as work that otherwise has gone under the radar – cyber punk, hacktivism and performance art.  We also welcome theoretical papers that interrogate the political and ethical implications of digital technology in performance, contextualise its history in Australasia, and anticipate the future of digital technology in performance.  The editors will also include interviews with key international commentators and practitioners such as Susan Broadhurst, Harold Brown, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, David Saltz and/or Mark Reaney.

In 2013 Sydney will host the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA) for the second time.  At past ISEAs, Australia has been recognized as world leaders in electronic arts.  This issue seeks to address the relative lack of scholarship on the impact of digital technologies on the performing arts in Australasia.

Expressions of interest due 31 March 2014; deadline for full papers is 31 October 2014.

Gorkem Acaroglu:  gorkem_a@hotmail.com;  Glenn D'Cruz: glenn.dcruz@deakin.edu.au