Increasingly, my background and interest in live theater is becoming an anomaly in my life. It’s the one thing I’m passionate about which I’ve had trouble re-envisioning in light of my changing view of the world. No matter how I figure it, I just can’t see where theater can/should be going, how changes in society wrought by technology can be appropriately applied. All of the theory is still useful in other contexts, but the actual process of making theater has hit a dead end in my brain. I can think of good ways to direct productions, but nothing that would be a step forward from what I’ve seen, nothing even remotely revolutionary.

I just read Gregor White’s academic paper, “The Extended Logic of the Interactive Performance Space”, which is discussing the thought process leading up to some performance piece which incorporated the internet. All of these which I have seen have been interesting in theory, but horrendously boring to witness. Still, the paper gave me one thing to think about:

Given the operational nature of digital media the defining characteristic of digital performance spaces is not its objective environment but the operational environment, to create a meaningful space the significance no longer depends on how the space is perceived as much as how it is controlled.

He’s beating the same drum as the bloggers: the rise of content over form. In this instance it’s applied to location - how the location works is more important than what it looks like. I like this idea. In fact, it ties in nicely with the concept I’ve been waiting to steal for the right project: a performance space which constantly changes shape, size, and even location throughout the performance, forcing the audience to adapt. White is, of course, speaking of something more interactive than that, but it flows from the same stream of thought. I’ve just never seen overt interactivity work particularly well in theater. Any ideas for how to make it more valuable?

(via networked_performance)