Pixilated performances: Embodying theatrical space in the digital age.

摘要

The advent of digital media and its incorporation into the theater world has necessitated altered approaches to the theorization of performances, spatiality, and the body. These notions are interrogated in this dissertation, which seeks to analyze the various shifts that digital performances enact upon traditional understandings of the staged body and the stage itself. I seek to develop a reading that intrinsically connects performance bodies to the digital spaces they inhabit. I treat a variety of elements as performing, including the performance document, "live" theater that incorporates digital media on the material stage, performances that take place entirely in virtual realms, topological interfaces that seamlessly blend the virtual and the material, hypertexts, and gaming environments. I draw from a wide range of performances for this study. The first chapter, which investigates the status of the performance document in the digital age, looks at the development of Virtual Vaudeville in comparison to the Wooster Group's interactive CD-ROM performance Where Where There There Where. The second chapter focuses on the modes of bodily signification on the digital stage of the Big Art Group's performance Flicker. Moving from the tracking of the body in Virtual Vaudeville by motion-capture technologies to the digital camera surveillance of the actors' bodies in Flicker, the trope of surveillance and tracking is further developed in this chapter and connects to my study of a computer virus that was spread as a performance art piece. Together, these works comment on the status of the body in the digital age of fluid global borders and the "posthuman" body. The final two chapters focus on the ways several performances prompt the spectator-user to navigate through digital space and, once bodies are established in these spaces, how improvisation is enacted in such highly scripted environments. Drawing from examples such as Downstream's Bring Your Own Body to the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, this portion of the study seeks to develop theories that point to the ways we are embodied in digital performance environments and go on to explode the frame of the screen through improvisational relationships to the digital media.