Home-specific performance and the digital staging of the domestic in Flanker Origami

From Crossref journal articles via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2022-10-14, accepted 2023-07-15, epub 2023-07-31, issued 2023-07-31, published 2023-07-31Article version: VoRPublication status: PublishedFunder: Queen Margaret University; FundRef: https://doi.org/10.13039/10.13039/100010033Bianca Mastrominico - ORCID: 0000-0002-6827-7247 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6827-7247This paper discusses home as a stage and its intersection with new technologies through an autoethnographic recollection and analysis of practice research, whose processes and methods are entangled with both digital and domestic environments on the virtual stage of Flanker Origami, a live online performance on Zoom devised by Organic Theatre. Premiered as part of the digital programme of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021, the performance is discussed as a case study of shifts in practice driven by the COVID19 pandemic in the real home of the two devisers/performers. This enquiry introduces and discusses home-specific performance as a practice research methodology, which exploits the deep nexus between home, identity and gender in the digital staging of the domestic in Flanker Origami. Analysing online training, hybrid scenography and digital performativity specific to the performers’ home, this practice-based investigation evaluates the benefits and challenges of developing online theatre in a situation of social confinement. The conclusion evidences that home as a digital stage was instrumental in reconfiguring notions of self and authenticity in performance processes driven by the pandemic, while creatively reframing the familiar and the domestic to expand and innovate artistic practice at a critical point of social and personal vulnerability.Supported by Queen Margaret University through a Centre for Communication, Cultural and Media Studies research grant.pubpu

Active spectatorship and co-creation in the digital making of Flanker Origami

This is the abstract of a peer-reviewed paper accepted for submission by Body, Space and Technology. The paper is part of my current practice research project investigating Organic Theatre's online shifts of performance practice during the Covid19 pandemic, and more broadly how the notion of liveness is retained in digital performance making, and its potential impact on in person practice. It discusses and elaborates on the agency of digital spectatorship within the process and reception of Flanker Origami, a live online performance first presented by Organic Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021, which toured internationally. The research portfolio includes a variety of material, from Zoom recordings of digital shifts in training practice and online performances to book chapters, articles, conference papers, blogs and online visual documentation. Please also see the dedicated website page. https://www.organictheatre.co.uk/flankerorigami/How do spectators engage with, elaborate on and articulate the experience of a digital performance? What are the parameters that regulate the bodily interaction between performers and spectators, when the latter are ‘not seen to be seeing’ through digital screens? When and how does a spectator gain agency in a mediated creative encounter? This paper aims to re-construct the affective nature of the entanglement between the spectator’s body and the non-human, facilitated by the performer whose body is in collision with the technology. In my analysis, I will utilise first-hand responses by diverse spectators experiencing iterations of Flanker Origami - a live online and home-specific performance, originally devised with my company Organic Theatre for the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021, and currently developed into an ongoing practice research project. The documentation examined draws upon a mentorship meeting on Zoom with Odin Teatret’s Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley, alongside formal and informal feedback gathered through audience reviews, Q&As, notes, emails, citations and social media interactions, seminars and private conversations in person and online. While the digital performer’s awareness of the encounter is shaped by a praxis made up of their working strategies and creative choices, the reactions and commentary from apparently disembodied spectators shift the focus to a polyphonic reading of the digital work. This, I argue, carries the potential to change meaning, purpose and direction of the performance, which starts reverberating in and growing through the intersection with processes of ‘active spectatorship’, emerging as a tendency for spectators to generate alternative pathways of embodying the remote communication. My conclusion proposes that far from being disorienting or promoting detachment, in this fluid interchange technology itself constitutes the porous membrane through which digital spectators become co-creators of Flanker Origami, influencing the performance and its developments through the immediacy of their response to and levelled participation in the technologically enabled making process

Embodying Essence through Absence - Performance practice and pedagogy through digital platforms

This article is a written and visual critical appraisal of my current practice research project investigating Organic Theatre's online shifts of performance practice during the Covid19 pandemic, and more broadly how the notion of liveness is retained in digital performance making, and its potential impact on in person practice. This paper is part of an ongoing research project which currently comprises Digital HotSpot, a performer training research collective on digital, as well as three performance iterations: the first, Flanker Origami, was presented by Organic Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 and toured internationally. The research portfolio includes a variety of material, from Zoom recordings of digital shifts in training practice and performances to book chapters, articles, conference papers, blogs and online visual documentation. Both Digital HotSPot and Flanker Origami are discussed in this article. Please also see the dedicated website page. https://www.organictheatre.co.uk/flankerorigami/In this article Bianca Mastrominico focuses on how to embody liveness through digital platforms within the framework of theatre anthropology, looking at how remote performers and spectators interact through screen technology to discern principles and techniques that can guide online training, and creating work for a digital spectator. Her conclusions envisage a soft technology which fosters participatory practice and includes the non-human in creative processes.ASSaM Reseach Fundhttps://jta.ista-online.org/

Come together - connecting worlds apart

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Towards an Ecology of Becoming - Engendering Posthuman Assemblages through Digital and Hybrid Performance

This is the abstract of a book chapter accepted for 'Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance' edited by Stefano Boselli and Sarah Lucie for Routledge, which discusses my current practice research and performance project in two of its iterations: Flanker Origami, a home-specific digital performance for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 and Flanker Origami Go To Town, a hybrid performance pilot at Sook, a multi-purpose, high-tech venue in a newly built shopping centre in Edinburgh, performed in January 2022 for proximal and online spectators. The essay investigates the notion of posthuman assemblages as a practice for engendering hybrid identities and liminal performance situations, which I propose constitute an 'ecology of becoming' through our entanglement with new technologies and private/public spaces.This essay analyses and discusses digital and hybrid performance practices created in response to the online shifts driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on an emergent theoretical framework which seeks to define the relationship between human and non-human as an ‘ecology of becoming’, using as a case study a 2-year practice research and performance project developed in two iterations – Flanker Origami, a home-specific digital performance for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 and Flanker Origami Go To Town, a hybrid performance pilot at Sook, a multi-purpose, high-tech venue in a newly built shopping centre in Edinburgh, performed in January 2022 for proximal and online spectators. The aim is to offer a critical perspective of the transition from a digital to a hybrid performance space, which intersects and identifies the liminal and interdisciplinary areas of creativity and processes that allow performers and technologies to enmesh, thus reconfiguring and repositioning performance practices in a posthumanist context. While the technologically saturated environments can be seen as influencing and enriching the agency of the non-human on both performers and spectators, through the support of technological devices in the digital home performance and its migration onto the screen technology at Sook, I argue that both processes and performance outcomes engender a posthuman assemblage which diffracts the performers’ identity and the perception of the spectators. I then evaluate how the combined effect of intermedial performances, social media interactions, original animations, digital cinema, hybrid use of screen technology and online platforms build towards the in-presence reveal of the two digital performers in the pop-up shop. The conclusion draws attention to the thresholds between material and immaterial, and the entanglement between the techne of the performer’s body and that of the technology, in a quest for soft boundaries between the post-pandemic human and non-human interaction.ASSaM Research Fun

Seminar Report: Not fewer resources, but different: Creative responses to practice and research during Covid-19

Bianca Mastrominico - ORCID:0000-0002-6827-7247 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6827-7247Anthony Schrag -ORCID: 0000-0001-8660-7572 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8660-7572The cultural and creative industries have been one of the hardest-hit by the international Covid-19 pandemic. In the wake of this seismic shift, there has been a proliferation of events and publications exploring how artists have responded to living and working in a pandemic. There exists a sense of lamenting those things that seem lost or, at the very least, placed on pause. However, while Covid-19 has undoubtedly had a lasting impact on practitioners, the temporary digitisation of artistic practice has resulted in new possibilities for practice and national / international collaboration. It was this sense of possibility that was the focus of a seminar series recently held at Queen Margaret University, which forefronted the potential positive adaptations within practice research due to Covid-19. Certainly, the cultural and creative domains have been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, but the series aimed to argue that creative practitioners are experts in exploring new ways of thinking and being and suggested that in these difficult times we don't have fewer resources; rather we have different resources. The central thrust of these seminars, therefore, was to reflect on positive changes to practice.https://doi.org/10.14439/sjop.2022.0701.087pubpub

Self-recorded video diaries in online synchronous learning environments

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Exploring learner and tutor experiences of Wimba in drama and the creative industries

Nine-month funded project by PALATINE (the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music). Focus on online synchronous learning environments (OSLEs) such as Wimba in drama and cultural management.div_MCaPApub2944pu

Chapter 10: White is the colour of my name: anti-racism in theatre and performance praxis

Bianca Mastrominico - ORCID: 0000-0002-6827-7247 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6827-7247Item is not available in this repository.https://www.criticalpublishing.com/anti-racism-in-educationpubpu

Bodies:On:Live – Magdalena:On:Line [Review]

From Crossref journal articles via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: epub 2022-01-24, issued 2022-01-24Article version: VoRPublication status: Published18pubpub