Navigating Digitally-Mediated Theatre with Intermediaturgy

• Author / Creator

  Battye, John

• Traditional dramaturgical practice does not adequately account for how emergent digital media can interact with elements of performance in intermedial theatre, leading to an art form that is critically and compositionally inaccessible. When live and not-live components interact on stage, how does that reflect a contemporary notion of the body? And how does theatre that grapples with this interaction speak to the digital beyond the stage?
  This thesis explores the impact of media on notions of the body, identity, and space through a new genre of theatre, called digitally-mediated theatre (DMT). The increasing reliance on media platforms as a form of social exchange and digital media saturation have created a society that is integrated, infested, and extended by the media. DMT artists criticize this media relationship and encourage mindful awareness of its influence by taking the self-same digital media technology, embedding it in performance.
  A selection of DMT performances will be analyzed using an intermediaturgical process to break down the mechanisms that are used to play with notions of body, identity, and space. As intermediaturgy is concerned with human perception and navigation of mediated environments, this will allow for an analytical framework that will be resistant to obsolescence as digital media technology continues to evolve. By demonstrating this method of analysis, the aim of this thesis is to help clarify a field at odds with itself, demystify the artists from their auteur status, and increase the accessibility of the form to new and emerging artists and students of the arts.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • mediaturgy
  • drama
  • digital
  • media
  • intermediaturgy
  • dramaturg
  • theatre
  • dramaturgy
  • intermediality
  • intermedia

• Graduation date

  Fall 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-jns4-pq95

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.