Forum theatre, technology and desire : an investigation of Headlines Theatre's online broadcasts

• Main Author: Konkin, Amanda Tamara
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/36949

This thesis investigates Headlines Theatre Company’s use of simulcast online video broadcasts of their forum theatre events through two case studies, Here and Now (2005) and after homelessness... (2009). I consider the place of these broadcast’s within Headlines’ Artistic Director David Diamond’s particular practice, Theatre for Living (TfL) and its aim to create community-based dialogue. Through digital performance theorist Steve Dixon’s four categories of interactivity, I explore how the online viewer’s participation in the forum event is filtered via the use of web-actors, and the complications this has had for the broader TfL mandate. I analyse the web-actors’ function using Dixon’s concept of “The Digital Double”, to explore how the role they have in the forum event is akin to that of avatars. This analysis draws primarily from David Diamond’s published works, personal journals and reports following each production as well as recorded broadcasts of the two case-study performances. Read together with current scholarship of performance and digital technology, I argue that these case studies suggest how technology both has and has not served the TfL mandate and consider how Headlines’ practice is complicated by simulcast online video broadcasts.