In Saskatchewan, Common Weal Community Arts, born in the 1990s under Rachael Van Fossen and subsequently led by Marnie Badham, used the community event to promote social and cultural understanding between diverse communities in rural and urban settings to promote social change. Since 2002, Knowhere Productions Inc. has used site and community to investigate physical and conceptual space through large-scale performances that explore the relationship between people, memories, landscape and the anachronism of performing one’s place in the world in the age of hyperconnectivity. Through collaborative and non-matrixed performances, both companies address the meaning(s) of belonging by amplifying the multiplicity of voices from certain places and cultures across rural / urban differentiations through new media and innovative processes. This article explores aesthetic and communal practices within a socio-historic context and grounded in a perception of the land as a potent and persistent actant in place making and playmaking.
This paper looks, with two pairs of eyes, at a Montenegrin translation of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad produced by Toronto-based April Productions for the Purgatorio Festival / 2012 in Tivat, Montenegro. The two perspectives are presented in turn by Dragana Varagic, the director and producer, followed by Kathleen Irwin, the set designer.
This paper interrogates the claim made by many users of supertechnologies in the field of theatre entertainment that these trappings redefine audience perception in entirely new ways.What this explosion fails to address is the relationship between technology and the spectating body and how interactivity poses questions that address the specificities of the spectator in the twenty-first century. In relative magnitude, The Bus Project described here, was low tech. Nonetheless, it illustrates the use of interactive technologies in integrating performance into our everyday lives, how new audiences may be reached and how preconceived notions of spectatorship and identity may be productively troubled through locational and site-specific practices.
If, as Jon MacKenzie writes, the world is now a “designed environment in which an array of global performances unfold,” what does performance designed for that most global of stages, the Internet, look like? This shift has caused me, as a scenographer, to consider how what I do is made complex by understanding that stage and audience are now globalized. MacKenzie suggests that feelings and affects are dispersed globally through social networking practices that communicate with a speed and intensity never before known. Here, such an experience is foregrounded: The Wilderness Downtown exemplifies the affective and globalized turn in interactive performance designed for the Internet and meant to engage each viewer “where they live.” The Wilderness Downtown elicits, through memory and sophisticated technology, a global feeling that is immensely “affective.” It succeeds in creating an awareness of being both local and global, unique but interconnected. Is this the future of scenographic representation?
This article discusses “Crossing Over,” a pedagogical art / performance project linking university students around the world that investigates the notions of cosmopolitanism and mobility as ways to constitute meaningful social networks by exchanging virtual performances—and suitcases—over the internet. The questions that the project asks are critical in light of the globalization of information that the World Wide Web and other crossing over points represent. While globalization opens borders to all manner of material exchanges (including people), endless digital data stream through the Internet portal providing opportunities to trade on personal information. We explore and share our identity at our peril. “Crossing Over” also explores the idea that there is an intrinsic relationship between embodied presence and one’s place in the world. Performing or representing who we are is indistinguishable from the place from which we come. The Internet shows us that the experience of presence is manifold and strongly manifest in virtual environments. Cyberspace is not a non-place—it is the ever-mutable backdrop, the mirror held up to a virtual spectator—who will always see something more than a mere reflection—will see differently based on his/ her place in the world.
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