In the context of the postdigital age, where technology is increasingly part of our social and political world, Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance traces how identity can be created, developed, hijacked, manipulated, sabotaged and explored through performance in postdigital cultures. Considering how technology is reshaping performance, this timely collection reveals how we engage in performance practices through expanded notions of intermediality, knotted networks and layering. This book examines the artist as activist and producer of avatars, and how digital doubles, artificial intelligence and semi-automated politics are problematizing and expanding our discussions of identity. Using a range of examples in theatre, film and internet-based performance practices, chapters examine the uncertain boundaries of networked 'informational selves' in mediatized cultures, the impacts of machine algorithms, apps and the consequences of digital legacies. Case studies include James Cameron's Avatar, Blast Theory's Karen, Ontroerend Goed's A Game of You, Randy Rainbow's online videos, Sisters Grimm's Calpurnia Descending, Dead Centre's Lippy and Chekhov's First Play and Jo Scott's practice-as-research in 'place-mixing'. This is an incisive study for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the wider conversations around identity-formation in postdigital cultures.

Covid-19 has been described as a 'digital pandemic'. But who might the characterisation of the pandemic as 'digital' leave behind? This timely book reconsiders the pandemic as 'postdigital', examining tensions between a growing postdigital attitude of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on adapted modes of online practice mid-lockdown in both performance-making and healthcare. What emerged amidst the pandemic restrictions was a theatre that was unable to show its face, instead adapting into a variety of 'covid-safe' remote forms of engagement, from 'Zoom plays' to self-generating experiences sent by post. This book explores the ways that both performances and healthcare practices found proxies for direct touch and face-to-face encounters, deconstructing the way that care and resilience were spectacularized by political actors online. Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and the repurposing of theatre spaces that were displaced amidst the mass migration online have been enabling as well as controversial. The variety of case studies assessed includes internet memes, online films, performances of everyday resilience through social media and participatory theatre productions, including Thaddeus Phillips' Zoom Motel, Coney's Telephone and Nightcap's Handle with Care.

This is a comprehensive overview of contemporary European theatre and performance as it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century. It combines critical discussions of key concepts, practitioners, and trends within theatre-making, both in particular countries and across borders, that are shaping European stage practice. With the geography, geopolitics, and cultural politics of Europe more unsettled than at any point in recent memory, this book’s combination of national and thematic coverage offers a balanced understanding of the continent’s theatre and performance cultures. Employing a range of methodologies and critical approaches across its three parts and ninety-four chapters, this book’s first part contains a comprehensive listing of European nations, the second part charts responses to thematic complexes that define current European performance, and the third section gathers a series of case studies that explore the contribution of some of Europe’s foremost theatre makers. Rather than rehearsing rote knowledge, this is a collection of carefully curated, interpretive accounts from an international roster of scholars and practitioners. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance gives undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and practitioners an indispensable reference resource that can be used broadly across curricula.

Experiential Theatres is a collaboratively edited and curated collection that delivers key insights into the processes of developing experiential performance projects and the pedagogies behind training theatre artists of the twenty-first century. Experiential refers to practices where the audience member becomes a crucial member of the performance world through the inclusion of immersion, participation, and play. As technologies of communication and interactivity have evolved in the postdigital era, so have modes of spectatorship and performance frameworks. This book provides readers with pedagogical tools for experiential theatre making that address these shifts in contemporary performance and audience expectations. Through case studies, interviews, and classroom applications the book offers a synthesis of theory, practical application, pedagogical tools, and practitioner guidance to develop a praxis-based model for university theatre educators training today’s theatre students. Experiential Theatres presents a holistic approach for educators and students in areas of performance, design, technology, dramaturgy, and theory to help guide them through the processes of making experiential performance.

Experiential Spectatorship offers a lens for analyzing audience experience with(in) a variety of contemporary media. Using a broad-based perspective, this media includes participatory theatre, video games, digital simulations, social media platforms, alternate reality games, choose your own adventure narratives, interactive television, and a variety of other experiential performance events. Through a taxonomy that includes Immersion, Participation, Game Play, and Role Play the book guides the reader to understand the ways mediatization and technics brought about by digital technologies are changing the capacities and expectations of contemporary audiences. In their daily interactions and relations with their technologies, they become mediatized spectators. By reading these technologies' impacts on individual subjectivity prior to acts of spectatorship, one gains the tools to best describe how the spectator creates forms of relational exchange with their experential media. This book prepares the reader to think in a digital manner so they can best recognize how performance and spectatorship in the twenty-first century are evolving to meet the needs of future waves of spectators brought up in a postdigital world.

The Intermediality of Contemporary Visual Arts explores a range of topics within the field. The volume delves into the realm of intermediality within the visual arts. Each chapter explores a different aspect; from the evolution of Intermedial Studies over the past decades to the shifts in print typography and the emergence of “cut-ups” within a context of resistance against conventions, the concept of Visual Music and its relation to pioneering filmmaking, visual representations of intimacy as they evolve from painting to other visual formats like comics, film, and television, and finally the transmedial potential of cultural symbols in virtual reality, all of which involve greater multimodal and emotional elements that enhance audience immersion. The volume closes by highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to visual art education and pedagogical methods that foster creativity, emphasizing the intermedial aspects present in contemporary visual arts.

How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

Covering a wide range of different online platforms, including social media sites and chatrooms, this volume is a comprehensive exploration of the current state of sociological and criminological scholarship focused on online deviance. Understanding deviance broadly, the handbook acknowledges both an objective normative approach and a subjective, reactivist approach to the topic, putting into sharp relief the distinctions between cybercrime and online deviance on the one hand, and wider concerns of online communities related to online deviance on the other. Divided into five sections, the first section is devoted primarily to scholarship about the theories and methods foundational to exploring online deviance. The second section, “Gender, Sex, and Sexuality”, presents empirical research on expressions of gender, sex, and sexuality in online spaces considered deviant. The third section, “Violence and Aggression,” highlights scholarship on types of violent communications such as hate speech and cyberstalking. The fourth section, “Communities and Culture,” describes empirical research on online communities and networks that can be described as deviant by wider society. Lastly, the fifth section, “Regional Perspectives,” highlights research in which a terrestrial location is impactful to the online phenomena studied. Providing a window into future scholarship over the next several years and acknowledging the ephemeral nature of research on digital technology, The Routledge International Handbook on Online Deviance is essential reading for students and scholars of Criminology and Sociology focused on deviant online behaviour. It will also appeal to those working in related areas within Internet/Digital Studies, Media/Communication Studies, Psychology, and Cybersecurity.

Theatre-Rites are regarded as pioneers in the field of object-led and site-specific performance, creating ground-breaking work for family audiences since 1995. This book marks the company’s 25th anniversary, offering the first in-depth exploration of artistic director Sue Buckmaster’s visionary practice, in which anything can be animated. This book draws on original research, including five years of in-depth interviews between its authors, images from Theatre-Rites’ archive and Buckmaster’s private collection, detailed observations from the company’s professional training workshops and personal reflections on past productions. A timely and compelling advocacy for the importance of high-quality experimental arts provision for young audiences is made, distilling learning from decades of the company’s professional activities to motivate and empower the next generation of object-led theatre-makers. Theatre-Rites: Animating Puppets, Objects and Sites is an invaluable resource for any puppeteer, actor, dancer, visual artist, poet or student interested in expanding their understanding of how to incorporate puppetry and/or symbolic objects as metaphors in their work.

Adopting an innovative and theoretical approach, Greek Tragedy and the Digital is an original study of the encounter between Greek tragedy and digital media in contemporary performance. It challenges Greek tragedy conventions through the contemporary arsenal of sound masks, avatars, live code poetry, new media art and digital cognitive experimentations. These technological innovations in performances of Greek tragedy shed new light on contemporary transformations and adaptations of classical myths, while raising emerging questions about how augmented reality works within interactive and immersive environments. Drawing on cutting-edge productions and theoretical debates on performance and the digital, this collection considers issues including performativity, liveness, immersion, intermediality, aesthetics, technological fragmentation, conventions of the chorus, theatre as hypermedia and reception theory in relation to Greek tragedy. Case studies include Kzryztof Warlikowski, Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Katie Mitchell, Georges Lavaudant, The Wooster Group, Labex Arts-H2H, Akram Khan, Urland & Crew, Medea Electronique, Robert Wilson, Klaus Obermaier, Guy Cassiers, Luca di Fusco, Ivo Van Hove, Avra Sidiropoulou and Jay Scheib. This is an incisive, interdisciplinary study that serves as a practice model for conceptualizing the ways in which Greek tragedy encounters digital culture in contemporary performance.