My current book project, Playing Real:  Media, Mimesis, and Mischief, explores the integration and interaction of mimetic theatricality and representational media in some carefully chosen sites of performance:  live-broadcast theatre (like the National Theatre's NT Live series), reality TV, and alternate reality gaming. Central to the project is a concern with the ways theatrical practices and media compete and collude to represent the real to audiences--especially given these performances' tendency to occupy murky areas in which the boundaries separating actual from virtual, truth from fiction, and genuine from artificial are difficult to discern. The book is also devoted to characterizing an uncertain real not in terms of loss or threat, but as a fertile site for productive and pleasurable mischief, including the playful reconfiguring of audience and participant relationships to (or negotiations of) realness and authenticity. The book is currently under contract at a major university press.

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My interest in the mediatization of live theatrical performance recently led me to London and Stratford-upon-Avon to research the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company’s broadcasts of live theatrical performances. This research, which was funded by UB's Techne Institute for Emerging Arts and Technologies and a competitive grant from my university's interdisciplinary Humanities Institute, was the subject of my plenary talk at the 2016 American Society for Theatre Research conference, an essay in Amodern's special issue on ephemera and ephemerality, and an essay in a forthcoming issue of Theatre Topics. 

 

A second research project, on live-streaming, informed my plenary talk at the 2017 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Performance Studies Focus Group Pre-conference, titled "Witnessing the real: Periscopic spectacle and peri-televisuality." Facebook members can view a recording of the talk, which I streamed live, here. I hope to bring my practice and research closer together in this project, and have begun sketching a performance project with collaborators that will make use of live-streaming technologies. 

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This fall, I will be presenting a paper on the Wooster Group's record album interpretation The B-Side at the American Society for Theatre Research annual conference in San Diego.

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Selected publications: 

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“Digital theatricality: flickering documents in unsteady archives.” Amodern.  Special

Issue:  Ephemera and Ephemerality:  Media, Archive, Performance.  ed. Priti Joshi and Susan Zieger. October 2017.

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“Devised Theatre." The Director as Collaborator (Robert Knopf), Routledge, 2017.

 

Performance review: "Backstage in Biscuit Land" by TourettesHero. Theatre Journal,

69:2, June 2017.

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“Integrating Realities in Immersive Gaming.” Reframing Immersive Theatre: The

Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance. Ed. James Frieze, Palgrave, 2016.

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Performance review: "My One Demand," by Blast Theory. Theatre Journal, 68:1, March

2016.

“This is not a threat:  Conspiracy For Good.”  International Journal of Performance Arts

and Digital Media. Special Issue:  Surveillance Technologies in Performance, ed. Elise Morrison. 11:2, November, 2015.

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Book review: Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies,

Resistances, Robin Nelson. Contemporary Theatre Review, 24:3, July 2014.

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Book: An Actress Prepares: Women and "the Method", Rosemary Malague. Theatre

Survey, 54:3, September 2013.

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 “To be, or to be recorded: the Burton Hamlet, The Wooster Group, and the Miracle of

Electronovision.” Text & Presentation. Ed. Stratos Constantinidis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

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