Category Archives: teaching

Theatre, Dance & Performance Online

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Updated: April 27, 2020

A regularly updating list of online theatre, dance and performances. Many are free or low cost, but your access may vary by location. I will continue to update whenever I have new information.

Recent Favourites

The Pina Bausch Foundation is making some full-length films available online for free. Palermo Palermo is available now with other films and links on her website. If you’re inside self-isolating, why not learn Bausch’s iconic NELKEN-Line?

Robert Wilson’s video portraits are available to view online. Gorgeous, meditative.

Canadian Content

For those of us in Canada, remember to check out all the offerings in Indigenous Films & Media from the National Film Board. Also, Telefilm Canada is making Canadian films available on CBC Gem without ads for the next 6 weeks and TIFF has launched TIFF-Stay at Home Cinema on Crave. (Apologies to those not in Canada, but more fun stuff for everyone below.)

Ontario’s Music Together program is helping musician continue to produce and get paid while live venues remain closed. Artists can apply and the rest of us can enjoy ‘live’ music while sequestered at home. (Donations gratefully accepted)

Lists & Collections

  • Dance Archives Online compiled by Rachel Carrico and Jarrod Duby
  • Dance Dispatches Dance at Home: list of sites, links and other resources for dance
  • Maria Delgado’s Latin-American Streaming Films List.  Thanks, Maria!
  • Ollie Jones’ google doc of Theatre Resources here. Thank you, Ollie! (twitter: @oelj)
  • Kalle Westerling’s (ever the excellent online resource) calendar of events here.
  • New York Theatre moving online here. Thanks to Jonathan Mandall for these!
  • Playwrights offering writing workshops online. More here.
  • Society of American Archivists Performing Arts Section google doc here.

Online Plays & Performances (collections, ongoing)

  • The Globe and Mail has a list here.
  • The Guardian has a list here. (Updated regularly)
  • The New York Times has a list here.
  • The Observer has a list here.
  • Pointe Magazine has a list here.
  • The Art Newspaper has a list of online & virtual exhibits here.

Individual Performances

Digital Reads & Audiobooks

If you’re sequestered with a theatre and performance library, you can support global theatre graduate students by scanning and sharing your personal library with grads through the Personal Library Loan site. Thanks to Chris Woodworth for this great initiative.

Other

 

Resources for Teaching Theatre & Performance Online

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TL;DR: overview of some readings, links and other resources for taking your theatre, dance or performance studies course online.

In response to the coronavirus and COVID-19, theatre and performance studies courses are moving classes online in a hurry. Welcome! Some of us have been hanging around here for a while and are happy to help. For those curious about what to read or resources for online videos and films, I’ve created a quick and dirty list of resources that I’ll update when I can. Here are some things to get you started.

I’ve created a few different lists. If you want to read about many of the same titles with more context (for you or your students), there’s a chapter in my book co-authored with Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and David Z. Saltz that outlines many of the key texts in detail. The book is Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015) and you want Chapter 2: Texts and Contexts. (If you need a copy of just this chapter, let me know.)

But if you’re here because you’re self-isolating and your classroom is now powered by zoom.us, you and your students probably aren’t interested in the history of technology on stage; you’re probably trying to figure out how to get through the rest of your semester with no actual theatre to attend.

At the risk of self-aggrandizement (too late; I already self-cited above), a practical essay to get you started is my “Theatre Squared: Theatre History in the Age of Media,” which you can download. Don’t let the history part fool you. This is mainly about how to watch and teach videos of live performance. It was written with teaching in mind and I’ve found that it teaches pretty well at multiple levels. The other essay I’ve written about this is “Unseen: Performance Criticism and Digital Recordings.” Unseen is – fittingly, enough – behind a paywall, but I imagine that if you don’t have access to the essay, the good folks at Yale and Duke UP probably wouldn’t mind if I shared a .pdf. So, do try to download, but if you get stuck, let me know. Both of these essays are about how to watch theatre online or on video. They’re fairly short and to the point.  As you think about the potential consequences of watching a whole bunch of theatre on video, I stand by my earlier manifesto: “Theatre is Media: Some Principles for a Digital Historiography of Performance.” Feel free to skip to the bullet points.

I wrote a couple of these at the invitation of Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Miriam Felton-Dansky, who co-edited some great issues of Theater on “Digital Dramaturgies,” “Digital Feelings,” and “Spectatorship in an Age of Surveillance.”

More recently, Lindsay Brandon Hunter has written “Digital theatricality: flickering documents in unsteady archives” for Amodern 7. Kalle Westerling has been writing about theatre, performance and the digital humanities for a long time and has shared a great reading list on his website.

Things to Watch When the Theatres Are Closed

Rather than thinking about how to watch, you’re probably more interested in what to watch. Happily, there are a lot of resources now available. My favourite, which I’ve noted else where is ontheboards.tv. Created by the Seattle venue On the Boards, this is a great collection of exceptionally well-filmed contemporary performances. Shows include Ralph Lemon, Young Jean Lee, Temporary Distortion, among others. I’ve seen shows there both live and in recordings and they’re fantastically different experiences, but equally great. Highly recommend. I’ve also mentioned Howlround Theatre Commons and Spiderwebshow, where “Canada, the internet, and live performance connect.”

There’s also, kanopy, which has a performing arts section and is often accessible through your university or college library. Other resources include Digital Theatre and Drama Online, among others. For those interested in music concerts, the Berlin Philharmonic recently played in its Digital Concert Hall. They played a stunning concert recently to a similtaneously empty house and a diverse globally distributed audience.

And, many artists host videos of their work on their websites. Again, a personal favourite is Kris Verdonck, who makes interesting work with great video documentation. The Wooster Group now has short outtake videos and Big Art Group has short videos from all its performances. As noted in a twitter exchange earlier, The Theatre Times site also has tons of resources on contemporary performances and transmedia.

If you’re in the mood for an incomplete, top-of-mind lit review, here’s my reference bookshelf on such topics:

History and Theory of Media on Stage

  • Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre (1993)
  • Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (esp. chp. 1, 1999; rev. ed. 2008)
  • David Z. Saltz’s “Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre” Theatre Topics 11.2 (Sept. 2001): 107-130.
  • Susan Broadhurst and Josephine’s Machon’s Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity (2006)
  • Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt’s Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2006)
  • Matthew Causey’s Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness (2006)
  • Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art and Installation (2007)
  • Susan Kozel’s Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenologies (2007)
  • Chris Salter’s Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (2010)
  • Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson’s Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010)
  • Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s Cyborg Theatre (2011)
  • Steve Benford and Gabrielle Giannachi’s Performing Mixed Reality (2011)
  • Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer’s Multimedia Performance (2012)
  • Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz’s Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015)
  • Maaike Bleeker, Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance (2016)
  • Andy Lavender, Performance in the Twenty-First Century (2016)

These are mostly histories and theories of technologies on stage and in performance, but they can give you a good overview on what a lot of us have been reading for the past 2 decades or so. If you’re just getting started with your students, I recommend the first chapter of Auslander and dipping in and out of the intermediality anthologies. Especially Mapping Intermediality has some fun key words that you can follow around, depending on what you’re looking for.

I’m sure I’m missing tons of great stuff here, so feel free to post in the comments.

***BONUS

Since you’ve read all the way through this long, self-indulgent post, you deserve a bonus. So, here’s an online performance assignment I’ve been planning for a while. I won’t have time to teach it for a while, so it’s yours for the taking now.

Gather a collection of live theatre presented in films and use that as the basis for your exploration of theatre and media. What’s fun is that many of these theatre shows are made up or imagined, but they’re always interesting. As a suggestion, look at the use of theatre in Persona, Waiting for Guffman, and anything by Pedro Almodovar (he has the best theatre in his films, often totally made up). I’ve been wanting to work on an essay for a while about why films stage theatre within them and why. I don’t have any good answers, but I would be very curious what other people are thinking.

Happy watching!

Waiting for Social Media

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I’m very pleased to feature a guest post by Phoebe Thompson, a student in my Theater as Social Media course at Bowdoin College (spring 2016). She wrote this piece as part of the class and I liked her ideas so much that I asked if I could post her response here. I’d like to say that she’s studying theater, but sadly she has some idea about doing research to save the oceans. Go figure.

—

The term “social media” is an oxymoron that describes a popular form of communication today in which information is transmitted from one receiver to another though the two are not physically together. The term is ironic, because although social media like Facebook allows humans to connect with one another and be “social,” the very act of staring into a screen to check Facebook is antisocial in a physical context. This is evident any time one steps onto a subway car—people are packed into a space, facing each other, but they are all staring down at cellphones, usually checking some form of social media. This effectively destroys the opportunity for physical contact between humans in that car, even though the environment lends itself to conversation. Social media creates presence in one place, but destroys it in another.

In Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, it is possible to see this impact on society in its earliest form. At the time it was written (around 1949), the telephone had become a staple of communication. Beckett had served as a member of the Resistance in World War II, translating and typing information received about German troops. Communication had effectively changed from face-to-face into voice-to-voice. This impersonal, disembodied communication and the feelings it produces are translated in the character of Godot. He never actually appears in the play, but he does send several distorted messages to Vladimir and Estragon by way of a messenger boy. The cyclical quality of the plot created by this ineffective communication, combined with the paralysis of the characters and their feeble attempts to change make Waiting for Godot feel very similar to Twitter.com.

On Twitter, communication also produces seemingly endless cycles, just like the circular plot of Godot. Messages are limited to 140 characters, and sometimes become very distorted in an attempt to fit everything into a single tweet. When a person finds a tweet to be worthy of sharing with their followers, they can retweet it, for which the symbol is: retweet.jpg.

Tweets can go viral, spreading much like a disease, and sometimes can bring fame to the person who thought them up. However, this fame is most often parasitized, because there is nothing stopping other accounts from copying the tweet exactly and using it as their own. This happens so much that specific tweets will “take over” Twitter for a day or two, and then disappear for a while, only to resurface months later once people find them funny again. This is very similar to the kind of humor and behavior seen in Godot, where Gogo and Didi seem to forget their repetitive actions, like looking in their hats or talking about suicide, only to restart them like they were new a little while later. In both Twitter and Godot, memory is short and patterns are cyclical.

There is also an existentialist element to Twitter like the one found in Godot. As Gogo and Didi sit idly and make pointless small talk, they make small attempts at leaving or even changing themselves, but it never results in action. This is very similar to the kind of superficial navel-gazing that occurs on Twitter, where users can build a persona based on their original content and retweets without ever actually following through in real life. Just as we see in Godot, this disembodiment and divide between people gives no motivation for real change.

~Phoebe L. Thompson

Updating Modern Theatre

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As I wrote to my friends on Facebook this morning, I’m doing something different with my Sources of Modern Theatre class this semester. In the past, this 400-level course has included a mix of theatre history, theory, and plays from the 20th century. It’s aimed at seniors and almost always offered in the second semester. TH 468 used to be required for the BFA programs in my department, but over the years these programs have cut this requirement in favor of more practical courses. Traditionally, it’s been one of the few dramatic literature seminars in the department small enough for extensive reading, writing, and discussion.

Perhaps I do not need to add that this has not made the course popular.

So, this semester I decided to do something different. The idea came from this article in Wired. If it students in Mexico as pursuing their own ideas in math, why aren’t my university theatre students doing the same? Do I really know better than them what they need or want from my course? Well, maybe. But, it seemed like a useful question to ask them rather than tell them. Rather than assign work I think the students should read and dictate the outcomes I think they should get, I asked them to define for themselves what they want. On the first day we discussed as a group: What do you want from this class? How will you get it? How will you know if you’ve got what you wanted? And then we took the first two class sessions to write the syllabus together. There were a few guidelines. They had to write at least 20 pages over the course of the semester, they needed to define a metric for regular class participation, they had to select one theoretical reading and one play per week, and there had to be and oral presentation, and they needed to define some kind of final project/performance/paper that would synthesize ideas from the work over the course of the term.

Here is their outcome and assessment grid (structure required by the university):

OutcomesBy the conclusion of this course, students will: Methods of Assessment 
create a model for an original work of theatrical innovation final oral presentation of individual theatre models; B or better demonstrates mastery
identify critical moments of theatrical transformation in-class discussion; class-generated online timeline; B or better demonstrates mastery
analyze diverse forms of drama and theatre practice, and evaluate their impact on contemporary theatre craft in-class discussions; 2 5-page critical essays, each revised and rewritten at least once each. B or better on revised version demonstrates mastery
articulate the social, historical, and biographical contexts for the texts studied and their authors in-class introductions to the authors, including background, history, and relevant information to understand the text presented (will be presented by two students each Monday). B or better demonstrates mastery.
  Specific evaluation rubric for each assessment noted in Course Evaluation.

This initial exercise was valuable at the very least because it demystified the construction of the assessment grid and turned what can be an onerous and rudimentary exercise into a real conversation about why one takes a theatre class, specifically this theatre class. We also voted on the requirements for attendance, the criteria for these assessments, and whether our aims should be proficiency (C+ or better) or “mastery” B or better. I’m pleased to say we went with mastery. (Now, we’ll see how many of us achieve this.)

Although we vote and my vote is supposedly only one among many, it’s clear I have a power advantage in the class and I’m very happy to own this. As the only one who had read all of the plays and theories before, I made suggestions, recommendations, and gave brief teasers on selections that students weren’t sure about. At the same time, I actively resisted the impulse to make their choices “better,” and this was not easy. I wince, for example, that we are reading no Brecht this semester–a significant oversight. We are reading less from the first half of the 20th century than the latter and I would critique our selections as devoted overwhelmingly to works first published in English.

At the same time, however, we constructed some wonderfully wacky pairings that I would have never dared. Rather than reading Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man” with Death of a Salesman, we’re reading it with Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (aka, “Death to Salesmen”?). Appia’s “Organic Unity” sits with Six Characters…, Langston Hughes is together with Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre. My favorite is Marinetti’s “Futurism and the Theatre” with Chekhov, for which some students are reading The Cherry Orchard and others are reading The Seagull (based on previous exposure). Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sarah Ruhl are present together with a range of theoretical writings. Wilson’s Fences goes with Yeats’s “The Tragic Theatre.”

It’s not the syllabus I would have written. It doesn’t have lots of things I think are essential and the pairings, though potentially inspired, worry me. But, it’s not my syllabus; it’s their syllabus. Whether or not they’re happy with it by the end of the semester, only time will tell. For now, though, we’ve already had more engaged discussions about the purpose of the class and what we’re reading than many other classes I’ve taught. I’m cautiously optimistic, even as my OCD goes a little nuts.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress this semester.