Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology

Technology is now integral to theater, dance, and performance—not just a tool but part of our cultural ecology. These practices reflect broader technoscientific developments while offering creative interventions. This book examines diverse performances and technologies without imposing rigid categories.

Technology has become fully integrated into the ecologies in which we live, including our ways of making and making sense of theater, dance, and performance. While these practices have long histories of incorporating tools and instruments in live performances, from masks, to amplification, lighting, and stagecraft, technology today can no longer be understood as a tool complementing essentially non-technological behaviors or environments. Technologies and how they are developed and used are informed by ideas, assumptions, and practices that are culturally and historically situated and have material impacts. Whether implicitly or intentionally, we are always already operating in and requiring creative and critical means of engaging with technoscientific lifeworlds. Authors in this volume show how human-technology intersections within the performing arts reflect developments in the world at large and how artistic inquiry might contribute to or intervene in these tendencies. Together, the chapters in this volume offer a broad view that includes diverse types of performances and a range of technologies without imposing these as categories on a field that does not operate along the lines of such categorizations. This broad view also allows us to bring together discourses and subjects that have been discussed separately in relation to different genres or aspects of performance, different types of technologies, or from the perspective of different technology-related concerns, including interactivity, immersion, inter-, multi-, and transmediality, equity, futurisms, archival practices, and new dramaturgies.