New Media Dramaturgy ─ Performance, Media and New-materialism

This book illuminates the shift in approaches to the uses of theatre and performance technology in the past twenty-five years and develops an account of new media dramaturgy (NMD), an approach to theatre informed by what the technology itself seems to want to say. Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, NMD is practiced and performed in the work of a range of important artists from dumb type and their 1989 analog-industrial machine performance pH, to more recent examples from the work of Kris Verdonck and his A Two Dogs Company. Engaging with works from a range of artists and companies including: Blast Theory, Olafur Eliasson, Nakaya Fujiko and Janet Cardiff, we see a range of extruded performative technologies operating overtly on, with and against human bodies alongside more subtle dispersed, interactive and experiential media.

Peter Eckersall is Professor of Theatre at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York, USA. Recent publications include Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory (2013).

Helena Grehan is Professor in the School of Arts, Murdoch University, Australia. Her publications include Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (2009) and most recently, William Yang: Stories of Love and Death (with Edward Scheer, 2016).

Edward Scheer is Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is author of The Infinity Machine (2010) and is a former President of Performance Studies international.