ICFAR Ideas and Aperitifs, Bonnie Marranca

'Ideas and Aperitifs' were regular evening salons for UAL fine art staff. They offer insights into the research processes and activities of key members of UAL research staff

Blast Theory’s Karen: exploring the ontology of technotexts

The continual and rapid emergence of media technologies predominantly since the digital revolution in the late twentieth century has generated a new social, cultural and cognitive ecology. This new environment has shaped the landscape of contemporary theatre and performance, and has brought about new modes such as virtual theatre, multimedia performance and online theatre. These emerging performative responses to the mediatised ecology have heralded transformations in directing, performing and design, and, relatedly, a paradigm shift in the ontology of theatre and performance. The textual dimension of theatre – a strong aspect of British theatre tradition that is mostly associated with playtexts - has also adapted to the changing performance landscape. As a result of this adaptation process, new modes of texts have emerged. The texts that have emerged from practices, whose design and performance are partially or completely based on new technologies and their aesthetics, can be considered in this group. This article is an experiment in forging a vocabulary to identify such texts, which it presents as technotexts, and explore some of their ontological characteristics. It offers an attempt to start a conversation about the changing ontology of text in mediatised theatre practice. To this end, I investigate Blast Theory’s Karen (2015), a smart phone app-based, interactive performance, which illustrates an inventive textual landscape through multiple layers of writing, and invites questions regarding the changing form and role of text as a process and product in relation to performance, authorship and spectatorship, and textual object/archive

Odin Teatret’s The Tree: performing in the interstices

Abstract: This article aims to critically engage with Odin Teatret’s most recent addition to the repertoire, The Tree (2016), in order to investigate the ways in which Barba’s dramaturgical decision-making processes create a performance field that metaphorically comments on the status of the group today whilst critiquing contemporary geo-politics. Importantly, we argue that notions of interculturalism - which have often been employed by scholars to critique the Odin’s work - do not address the full complexity of the embodied concatenation of the group’s practice, and we employ the term interstitial to more effectively articulate the complex space produced by the group’s training and performances.</jats:p

Les métaphores théâtrales dans le discours militaire

Marranca Bonnie. Les métaphores théâtrales dans le discours militaire. In: Les Cahiers du GRIF, n°41-42, 1989. L'imaginaire du nucléaire. pp. 114-118

La performance comme design. La médiaturgie de Firefall de John Jesurun

Depuis plus de deux décennies, John Jesurun travaille à New York en tant que dramaturge, metteur en scène et artiste médiatique. Avec Deep Sleep, Snow et Slight Return, il a créé des productions théâtrales incorporant la vidéo et le film dans des performances en direct, tandis que, simultanément, il revisitait des classiques avec Faust et Philoctète. Pendant ce temps, il a également écrit et monté plus de soixante épisodes de son œuvre fleuve, Chang in a Void Moon, appelant celle-ci un « livi..