Changing Perspectives on Live Performance: interrogating digital dimensions and new modes of engagement

The past year has brought changing circumstances to the performance scene. The impossibility of rehearsing and performing to live audiences has forced artists to investigate new alternatives. This has affected both the aesthetics of performance-making and the professional practices of performance-makers. Changes in formats have created new ways of reaching audiences which have more fully exploited an ever-increasing engagement with a wide variety of screen-based technology and digital platforms. 

This has significantly transformed live performances which have adapted to new ways of working and resulted in resourceful and imaginative alternatives and variations. Identifying the features of these changes will highlight pioneering directions for the future of live performance. This involves developments in the relationship between dance, theatre and film, offering digital innovations within liveness that this symposium wishes to identify and analyse.  

We welcome presentations, provocations, workshops, and performances as part of the proposals for participating in the symposium. The aim is to identify and analyse the transformations and generate new conversations among artists and theoreticians.  

Keynote speakers include:  

Anne Bogart (theatre director, SITI Company, USA) 

Prof Maria Shevtsova (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) 

Dr Mark Nicholls (University of Melbourne, Australia) 

Roundtable discussion includes:  

Charlotte Vincent (choreographer/director, Vincent Dance Theatre, UK) 

Workshop by:  

Parliament of Practices 

The symposium will cover but is not limited to the following themes: 

• integrating screen-based technology and practices into live performance 

• blurring the boundaries between the stage and the screen 

• preserving, enhancing, or degrading the actor’s performance via screen-based technology 

• delivering virtual performances - platforms and best practice 

• the role of recording live performances 

• theatrical adaptations of cinematography 

• choreographing the camera when recording live performances 

• streaming performance or recording performance 

• site-specific as the new theatre 

• evolving and enduring innovations  

• theatre developing its own cinematic language 

• expanding and diminishing theatrical markets 

• changing patterns in audience engagement and spectatorship 

• cognitive dimensions of engaging with emerging forms 

• impact on emerging artists and pathways into production 

• re-thinking notions of live performance 

• the digital hiatus altering the experience of live performance 

• the experience of the liveness in a digital context 

• digital dramaturgies within live performance 

• the gendered nature of the impact of digital and technological innovations 

• definitions of digital theatre 

• blended and hybrid modes in transmission of meaning 

NAZ YENI 

Theatre-maker, Movement Practitioner, Researcher, Lecturer (UK) 

naz.yeni@anglia.ac.uk  

Dr EVA AYAMAMI RENE 

Senior Lecturer of Dance, Cambridge School of Creative Industries,  

Anglia Ruskin University (UK) 

Eva.aymami-rene@aru.ac.uk 

Dr PATRICIA DI RISIO 

Lecturer in Media, Screen Studies and Journalism,  

Monash College (Monash University, Australia) 

Dr MELINA SCIALOM 

Research Fellow in Theatre and Performing Arts,  

The Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), (Brazil, CAPES-Print funding programme) 

View the final programme.