New Media Dramaturgy: Theatre across Technology

Antony George. K, Research Scholar

Central University of Kerala, India.

antgeok@gmail.com

The complex relationship between modern drama and technology used to create huge
controversies in the past but the recent developments in dramaturgy accommodate even
robotics and new media as natural elements of theatre. New Media Dramaturgy is a recent
coinage in performance studies to indicate the transformations in performance related to new
media. Digital technology‟s immense potential for creating interface has been widely used in
contemporary theatre. Projections, animation, robotics, augmented reality, and virtual reality
are now in the glossary of theatrics. The experience of see through, one of the defining
features of augmented reality is not restricted to the screen devices but attainable on stage
through the use of new media devices in live performance. When the efficacy of live
performance is questioned these days due to the overwhelming presence of mediatisation in
almost all fields of art, the necessity of theatre without mediatisation is challenged. In this
context, the use of see through on stage by deploying a vivid scenography that reengages the
experience of spectatorship is an innovative practice in contemporary performance. Yet there
are traditionalists who vehemently stand for only the unadulterated theatre of director, actors,
and spectators with a bare poor stage of human bodies. This paper attempts to locate and
contextualise the place of new media dramaturgy in the field of contemporary theatre and
performance.

Lev Manovich has clearly distinguished the new media from the old by pointing out
the most essential feature of computational mediation as that determines the life of printing,
photography, film and music now. In short, anything that comes through a computer program
in any stage or process falls in the category of new media. Apart from this computational
mediation the element of user interface is the quintessential feature that materialises
augmented reality and distinguishes new media from the old. One may first find it odd to see
an extract from The Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal, the Latin American
dramatist, in the MIT published The New Media Reader (2003) because of his theatrical
experiment involved audience interaction, indirectly suggesting the concept of interface. Boal
formulated the notion of spect- actor who is both an actor and a spectator. Yet it is no wonder
that the sophisticated user interface followed cultural interfaces set through ages, especially
with regard to embodiment. “Through concepts such as ubiquitous computing and
multimodal interaction, the space of new media has crossed over workstation boundaries and
into the space of our bodies” (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 339). The rallying point of
technology and body interestingly involves a theatrical space also. Yet as an emerging field,
early research on AR focussed exclusively on technological development efforts rather than
its aesthetic potentialities (Liao and Humphreys).

Augmented reality can be easily understood as the technology that mixes the real
environment with the virtual one (Liao and Humpreys) or the technological overcoding that
forms a mixed reality. The skilful and deliberate interventions to configure sensory
perceptions with inputs from both hardware and software and the use of goggles, vision
helmets, mega pixel cameras, microphones, HD displays, holographic displays and other
devices to manipulate sensory experience are the most tangible features of AR. However the
ubiquitous access to smart phones and numerous apps on them made AR easily accessible
and handy. On the level of cognition augmentation is the result of live hybridization that
affects the real environment of humans in real time for instance, a look through the electronic
view finder (EVF) of your mobile/ camera at your skin tells the extent of augmentation. As a
result of advancements in cyber augmentation human cognition augmentation and human
body augmentations have become realities. One of the defining features of AR is the
experience of see through that makes the medium transparent. The difference between virtual
reality and augmented reality is that of creating a rebus of multiplicities or layers of sensory
experience so that the onlooker disorients oneself. Unlike virtual reality, where a user is
immersed in a simulation, augmented reality adds data on top of the user‟s real-world vision.
While the idea of augmented reality dates back more than 50 years, it has gained more
attention in recent years because of the well-publicized release of Google Glass and the
Microsoft HoloLens (Moderc).

Augmented reality and its aesthetic potential with a deep influence on the visual field
have given birth to new media dramaturgy (NMD). The art of drama has undergone a sea
change thanks to the digital technology and the incursions of various other forms of art on
theatrical space especially the performance art and installation. As a result scenography has
become more important in performance and dramaturgy has been “understood as a
transformational, interstitial, and translation practice” that can bridge ideas and their
compositional embodied enactment (Eckersall et al 375). Projections, screens, and media
materials become primary components of a play like the actors of it, and even robots and
object figures enter the scene. Live characters and virtual characters share space to create a
mixed reality on stage blurring the traditional division between the live and the mediated
(Eckersall 123). Similarly “it is also indicative of how today‟s advanced technologies behave
more like humans than mechanical constructs, a paradoxical situation which results in the
blurring of the boundary between the „real‟ and the virtual” (Fernandez). The work by EDT
(Electronic Disturbance Theatre), CAE (Critical Art Ensemble), A Two Dogs Company,
Back to Back Theatre, and Hotel Modern pioneered a linkage between new media and
theatrical performance and a few scholars trace the integration of robotic theatre and the use
of augmented real objects even to the days of Wagner and Brecht. Edward Scheer sees the
works of Mari Velonaki and Kris Verdonck as new media dramaturgy‟s turn into a robotic
phase. Interestingly, since its inception NMD moves divergently, sometimes with robotics
and at times with AV devices. The advent of artificial intelligence and the non-organic
elements on stage delve deep into a combination of human and non-human in some
performances as in the case of Jeremiah Project (2001)in which the human and digital co-
exist and combine each other efficiently promulgating the new intersubjectivity. Similarly
Kris Verdonck‟s Box in which the viewers are provided with eye-protective glasses to
experience light as a threat to their own existence when faced with unbearable light in a box.
The inevitable conflict between the corporeal body and the technological “thing” (rather than
matter) is a contested area of theory now, especially in relation to techno cultures. The issue
is problematized in the works of AR artists like Tamiko Thiel, Helen Papagiannis, Alan
Sondheim, ReþPublic, and many others. Both the body and the technology colonize each
other and mutually enrich the action of communication that includes the merging of spectacle
and participation (Eckersall et al 376). In an interfusion of stories, time spans, virtual and real
spaces, live and mediatized performativity the performance landscape transforms into a
spectacle of overwhelming images constantly emanating contingent significations. “NMD
work can be unsettling or alienating in its attempts to prick the ethical consciousness of the
spectator, as in the production Hard to Be a God by Kornél Mundruczó in which a concern
with sex trafficking and political inertia animates the performance”(377). On the other hand,
KAMP by Hotel Modern force engages the spectator‟s eyes in a projection of puppets in a
concentration camp and an actual camp mapped on the performance space on which the
plastic figurines undergo every cruelty done on the victims of holocaust. The spectators get
moved by the performance and carry the suffering of the victims in mind and a process of
rehumanization of the victims starts.
As such NMD inevitably conflates with the new media that is intractably connected with the
visual culture‟s hegemonic role in present day world. There should be an attempt to locate
and illustrate the place, potentials and possibilities of augmented reality in the relatively
young field of new media dramaturgy with emphasis upon the element of see through that
forms the fundamental premise and characteristic of this new technological innovation that is
revolutionising visual cultures and visual arts in general.

Memes, doodles, emojis, emoticons, emojis characters like minions, and other icons
of today are too dramatic and their apparently melodramatic features are taken for granted.
Even the arduous haters of drama who dub anything they dislike as dramatic fall into this new
dramatic turn of communication. Once drama was something dishonest and performance or
acting a lie but now the masks of emojis tell truth perfectly! As a result of this appropriation
of drama, a new theatre heterotopia comes to exist in everyday space. On the other hand,
dramaturgy taking a new turn into technology and dramatic traditions simultaneously makes
use of new media for a new culture of performance. Space, time, perception, spectatorship
and performance in theatre culture go through rapid transition in these times due to
technology and ideological changes. Hotel Modern‟s KAMP is one of the best recent
examples of theatre crossing the borders of drama even though it relies on a tradition of
puppetry, one of the oldest forms of theatre and at the same time it uses the latest technology
for sound, lighting, and projection.

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Age of Digital Anxiety”. Web www. tcjournal.org nd.np.
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