Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance

Shakespeare, national memory, and tourist place: Gyula's Várszínház Festival

“…Given that the curtain-screen hung on the visible castle wall, did the projection emphasise the historically suffused building as 'a framing device' and as the 'material support for the performance it had housed'? 74 Did spectators who recognized the Russian film make links between Hungary's Soviet colonizers and earlier Habsburg and Ottoman occupations? It is difficult to answer these questions definitively, especially given Bocsárdi's disavowal of topicality.…”

“…The director also used technology explicitly to facilitate the interplay between the selfconsciously present world of the platea and the fictional word of the drama's locus. This technology could enhance 'affect and presence', 81 as in the post-interval dance scene when glaring lights and loudly amplified music and voices intensified the impact of the performers in the present time and place. Yet Trill's Richard frequently controlled the technology that enhanced the emotions in the play's fictional world from outside it.…”

Innovating Shakespeare: The Politics of Technological Partnership in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest (2016)

“…6 I will explore elsewhere the practical complexities of this human-avatar relationship, and how it complicates dichotomised understandings of humans versus technology in performance. 7 For the rest of the 6For examples of the diversity of discussion of digital technology and liveness in RSC Shakespearean performance, see: (Aebischer 2019;Aebischer et al 2018;Sullivan 2017). digital mise en scène, I agree with Pollack-Pelzner's critique that literal interpretation is not necessarily novel or complex-it is an instruction or demonstration of what Shakespeare's words mean that sets boundaries on the imagination, ironically in contrast to the intention of integrating digital technology into the production.…”

Following Puck virtually in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream experiment: Live theatre and high-tech innovations

“…This was not the RSC's first foray into live motion capture technology: it had projected a 3D digital avatar above the stage in a production of The Tempest, directed by artistic director Gregory Doran in 2016, in order to transform Mark Quartley as Ariel into a 'live' animated character. 5 On stage, Quartley was wearing sensors that captured his movements, projecting them into the air and making him a character that changed (or 'morphed') into and out of human form. The audience saw two actors, Prospero and Ariel as was wont, but also rising above them a gnarled tree within which a seventeen-foot avatar of Ariel groaned in his suffering.…”