Location: Room 409, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Sponsored by York University, Department of Theatre
Co-Convenors: Laura Levin and Kim McLeod
Participants: Michael Bergmann, Elisha Conway, Caroline Klimek, Thea Fitz-James, Derek Manderson, Jayna Mees, Parjad Sharifi, Michael Wheeler
XR and the Future Stage
The field of theatre and performance has recently seen an upsurge in experiments with XR (extended reality) as an artistic medium. A term used to reference virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, XR has allowed artists to shift to safe delivery formats during the COVID-19 pandemic; at the same time, it has also offered creators new tools for worldbuilding and spectatorship.
This session explores how XR performance challenges assumptions about what theatre is. We are inspired by provocations posed in the “futureStage Manifesto,” a text composed by the futureStage Research Group at metaLAB, which urges the performing arts industry to grapple with “new expectations for media, culture, and presence in a hyperconnected world,” while simultaneously accounting for the political effects of technological shifts. We will take up this challenge by featuring work addressing how XR theatre experiments align with, particularize, and critique the manifesto’s central tenets. Roundtable participants might consider these questions:
- Is physical co-presence required for theatre? Is XR leading to a new medium that is something else entirely?
- What are the limits of utopian thinking about intersections of theatre and new technologies?
- Do we push back against the manifesto’s claim that “performance isn’t a commodity,” or does it suggest a political orientation to this work to think through carefully?
- Is “liveness plus” a generative concept helping us to articulate new media affordances, or are we looping back to old binaries between liveness and mediatization that push against the emergent nature of this work?
Co-Convenor Bios
Bio: Kim McLeod is an artist-scholar whose research on political performance and participatory media has appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, Digital Performance in Canada, Performance Matters and Theatre Research in Canada. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
Bio: Laura Levin is Associate Dean, Research in York’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. Her books include Performing Ground and Performance Studies in Canada (edited with Marlis Schweitzer). In addition, Levin’s research-creation work explores intersections of political performance and digital technologies; most recently, she collaborated on SpiderWebShow’s VR project, You Should Have Stayed Home (2022).
