Performing Arts: Transitioning to the Digital Age

1.Workshop: When Theatre Meets Zoom + The "e-spect@tor" Experience

The workshop is aimed at performing artists, especially theatre actors and theatre audiences. It includes testing the prototype of the digital tool “e-spect@tor” and the performance of the hybrid play #WAR_DIARY, whose authors are actors from the Ukrainian Centre for Contemporary Art DAKH in Kyiv and the international Ukrainian festival Gogolfest. Croatian actors, participants of the workshop, worked on a textual template of the play, exploring the ways in which the Zoom platform can be used as a tool to enrich their performance.

2.Digital Theatre Studies: Crossing Perspective and Methods with Cognitive Science

The research projects in digital humanities and digital theatre studies “L’École du Spectateur” and “Visual Staging”, jointly led by La Rochelle Université, Université de Lille and Université de Poitiers, work in collaboration with cognitive sciences and neurosciences in order to define and/or analyse a number of characteristics of the performing arts that the traditional research methods have not been able to detect or measure, such as the importance of the venue where the performance takes place, the relevance of the joint presence of the audience and the artist during a live show or the involvement of the emotions felt by the spectator in the appreciation of a performance.

3.Theatre and Performance Studies Meet Digital Humanities – Possibilities and Challenges

This conference talk aims to outline the most important issues of the relations between theatre and performance studies and digital phenomena. Its primary goal is to give an overview of the possibilities that digital humanities can offer to theatre and performance studies. It also raises questions and depicts problems that this kind of approach implies, and it as well tries to offer tentative conclusions about the benefits that the encounter between theatre and performance studies on one hand and digital humanities on the other brings. Consequently, the goal is not to come to an obligatory conclusion, but rather to ask questions and provoke discussions that could help contribute to future studies.

4.Challenges of Archiving Performing Arts: Eurokaz Digital Archive

Eurokaz was a festival of new theatre that was founded in Zagreb in 1987 and took place until 2013 when it was transformed into a producing house that is still active today. Thanks to a grant from the Kultura Nova Foundation the process of digitization of the festival archive has begun last year. It is a big challenge and we have encountered many problems due to a wide time span which amounts to 27 years of the festival’s existence. During this period archiving technology was constantly changing and what we have today is a lot of material in different formats the content of which has to be adjusted to new standards. From press cuttings in paper form to CDs and DVDs and old websites for each year’s program which are not supported anymore (like with Adobe Flash Player), not to mention old video tapes with recorded performances. It is a hefty workload and we assigned an IT expert to create a separate segment on the Eurokaz website, where our archive will be visible to a wider audience.

5.Three Project Challenges: Italian Theatres and Archives Registry, Research Centre “IDOS_ARTS” and PhD in Data Science on Digital Humanities

In the framework of the DARIAH-EU WG Theatralia compilation project of the International Theatrical Registry, I launched the RADATMAS project at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in February 2022. This is a randomized research study of the little town of Macerata and its surrounding area. Thanks to the RADATMAS census thirty-one theatre archives have been discovered, while in the Ministry of Italian Culture (MIC) SIUSA database there are only three archives. The same goes for the theatres: the census found forty-one theatres out of the twenty-three reported by the MIC. The census of theatres and theatrical archives located in the Macerata area as well as the organization of the collected data was completed in the summer of 2022. In September, a colleague from the AI Department joined the working group to jointly design the database of the Italian Theatres and Archives Registry.

6.The Potential of Computer Music in Theatre

Since the first notion of the synergy between computer music and theatre in the 1980s, the potential of complementing these practices with each other has significantly grown along the steep trajectories of technical advancements and the influence of new media, generative art, and resulting aesthetics. In comparison to traditional musical forms, computer music allows previously unreachable levels of automation, control, interaction, and sonic diversity. Techniques like algorithmic composition (using formal rules to create music), data sonification (translating data into sound), live coding (writing computer code that generates music live in front of the audience), automation in multimediality, and various aspects of interactivity open novel opportunities in the context of theatre. This presentation gives a brief overview of predominant practices and trends in computer music with examples of their application to performing arts.

7.Modelling of Theatrical Archives: Use of Linked Data in the Machine-Readable Representation of Theatrical Information

The aim of the project was to create a virtual encyclopaedic source of theatrical knowledge using Linked (Open) Data in order to include it in a wider network of cultural sources that provide theatrical information, within the framework of the Semantic Web. Using the Digitized Archive of the National Theatre of Greece as the reference archive, I tried enriching it through its semantic interconnections with digital sources that provide relevant knowledge. Some of the most notable existing theatre archives and databases have been researched as well as the users’ informative demands influenced by the types of information that appear in each archive, such as biographies, productions, texts, and interviews. This talk introduces a conceptual model designed to be as adequate as possible to represent theatrical archives and to cover a sufficient range of offered theatrical information. The FRBR model was harmonised with the global CIDOC CRM cultural documentation standard to produce the FRBRoo object-oriented library ontology, with which the final model is partially compatible.

8.Open Data Production and Reuse in the Canadian Performing Arts Ecosystem

As the holders of information about various entities in the performing arts sector, industry associations, unions and national institutions have a pivotal role to play in the data-centric performing arts sector. Since 2020, the Canadian Association for the Performing Arts has supported more than 20 such “arts service organizations” in the implementation of best practices for data management and data sharing. As a result, information about 7,500 performers, designers, organizations and venues has been transformed from unstructured text into linked open data. This open data was then made available for reuse via an open knowledge graph called Artsdata and via Wikidata, an open knowledge base associated with the Wikimedia movement. This data-centric work has laid a foundation of data for reuse across performing arts archives and other performing arts applications. Although this information is not yet being used in performing arts archives, CAPACOA proved this concept with its LIVE Performing Arts Directory, a directory entirely populated by open data.

9.Offline vs/ & Online: Digital Theatre in COVID and War

Responding to challenges and turning crises into new opportunities have become the leading features of CCA Dakh / FCA GogolFest. Laboratory of Solutions in Digital, created at the beginning of the global Covid pandemic, began as simple attempts to combine theatre and digital reality in Zoom. Then, the team managed to create digital repertoires and become an example of digital theatre in Ukraine. Streaming ready-made performances and installations, implementing digital technologies in performances, and international online collaborations became the ways to survive when the theatre was impossible to visit and, consequently, became a development strategy. The theatre is becoming an intersection of different industries, science, literature, visual arts, education, and a voice of social challenges. In the reality of Ukraine, digital theatre is also becoming an important cultural element of the struggle.

10.Body Archives: Strategies for Documenting Dance

Departing from traditional archives based on the analysis of material artefacts as the only credible sources in reconstructing past events and the characterization of a dance performance that “becomes through disappearance”, bodily archives follow the idea that a dance performance does leave a trace, only leaves it differently: relying on perceptive and receptive mechanisms observers, interpreters, participants in the performance. Reliance on recollection and bodily tools such as observation, memorization, and evocation in the reconstruction of events are just as reliable or just as unreliable as reliance on archived material remains, because the material remains do not tell about what was excluded from the archive and why it was excluded, and are always in the service of construction, which implies an interpretation, a narrative, and not reconstruction of real events.

11.Processes & Practices: Understanding Dance Researchers and Dance Archivists to Develop Future Online Dance Archive Resources

The talk provides an introductory exploration of current PhD research being conducted into the information-seeking behaviours of dance researchers as well as the practice of dance archivists, to inform any future developments of online dance archives resources. This talk encompasses a UK-centric exploration of dance archives, dance archive professionals, and dance researchers, along with a careful outline of the methodological approach adopted within the project. The talk also explores the challenges faced in bringing both UK dance researchers and dance archivists together during a global pandemic, whilst providing a commentary on the impact the research could have on the transition to a digital future for dance archives.

12.The Journey of Halima

The Elementary School for Classical Ballet and Contemporary Dance at OŠ Vežica presented the world premiere of the dance-film fairy tale The Journey of Halima at Art-Kino, Rijeka on 11 February 2023. It was directed by Kate Foley, with visual effects and editing by Damjan Šporčić. It was filmed with 110 young dancers, six adults and eight choreographers during the pandemic in 2021. The original score by Zoran Majstorović features the musical traditions and instruments of the contemporary migrant trail from Mesopotamia to Northern Europe. The Journey of Halima is based on the children’s book of the same name by Nikos Kalaitzidis with Michalis Darnakis, Maria Laftsidou, and Andreas Mavridis, written to empower refugee children. This hybrid form of dance documentation marked a triumph over a difficult period of compromise in which dance education suffered from poor digital tools and inadequate space, 19 where Viber and Microsoft Teams clashed with poor reception in cramped hallways, bedrooms and kitchens. It also delivers this theatrical effort in a more durable and shareable form than the original stage production could have ever accomplished.

13.Costume in a Virtual Environment

Costume as an installation, costume as a performance, costume as the main protagonist in a digital environment – these are my artistic interests as a visual artist and costume designer. My presentation, therefore, is based on the overview of my artistic work in the field of costume design across various media, discourses, and contexts, advanced over the past twelve years as the result of merging ideas and experiences from different artistic fields, and of striving to overcome and expand the traditional approaches in costume design and drama theatre. The presentation is illustrated by a selection of my costume designs and projects created beyond the boundaries of mainstream theatre stages and productions, but the central part is dedicated to my most recent work, the series of video performances developed during the Covid pandemic and united under the joint title “Ivana Bakal – The Visual Theatre”, part one and two.

14.Performance Adaptation for Digital Platforms: The Process of Adaptation and Learning

Today, more than ever, the trend of digitization is noted. During the Covid 19 pandemic we have all turned to video content and communication over the Internet. For many independent artists in Croatia, the initial reaction to the new pandemic conditions induced fear and insecurity. After the initial fear and shock, adaptation followed. More and more independent theatre artists and troupes felt the need to digitize the theatre so that under the current conditions as many people as possible can still find a way to follow theatre programs. This presentation touches upon the acting processes that take place in the artist when they rely on digital media. This presentation is also a reflection of the past two years of learning and growth.

15.Fuzzy Temporality and What to Do With the Rest, lecture performance

In what form will performance art, a discipline that once strived to be present and ephemeral at the same time, survive the transfer into the digital? This lecture is a form of warning that tries to balance alarmist technophobia and radical instances of digital humanism. By using anti-humanist thought and (non)concepts the artist tries to reconcile his fears and his work into the new archival dynamic that is yet to come. Calling into question the remains, traces and spectres of immanence and ephemerality in performance art, the artist opens his own fears and wounds of time. Using his own artistic experience in durational performances, theoretical knowledge and some elements of lecture performance, the artist presents the fuzzy and indeterminate materiality of performance art as a means of survival within the digital.

16.Bits 'n' Pieces / A Reflection on My New Media Practice in Performing Arts

In this lecture, I am sharing some of my personal experiences and observations on the use of new media in performative arts. I am discussing the ways in which digital elements such as projections, sound, and interactive media can enhance and transform live performances. At the same time, I am exploring some of my doubts and uncertainties regarding the integration of new media into performative art practices.

17.Future of Lighting Design in Theatre

This talk is about how theatrical lighting design came to be from a simple shadow in a cave and where it is heading in the near future with new emerging technologies.

18.Extreme Schachtophone Parainstitute Indoš, lecture performance

Performers of extreme music theatre intensify agencements in configuration with different models of Schachtophones and media body effects. This electronicized voluptas is part of a lecture performance by DB Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo on the iconoclash of the remediation of live performance material for different dispositifs and the reproduction of the sources of performing presence in the dictatorship of telematics. What is left behind in a performer’s absence? Extreme Schachtophone Parainstitute Indoš is the working title of the site-specific project that we are currently working on – the interior Schacthophonic panzerism of two connected spaces of the Parainstitute Indoš into an interactive machinic display for collective rhizomatic work with Schacthophones’ databases, from the activation of built-in instruments, reconstructions and re-enactments of audio and video archives, collection of scores and texts, stage and sound sketches to the new politics of schachtophonisation of the community.