2009 ASTR Conference

Susanne Shawyer, Texas State University

For the past eight years, the performance group Improv Everywhere has experimented with guerrilla physical theatre in public locations around New York City. Part of the Urban Prankster Network, a loose organization of provocateurs who use flash mobs and guerrilla theatre to poke fun at contemporary [...]

David Savran, The City University of New York

Given the status of commercial theatre in the US as public amusement for audiences rich in cultural and economic capital, it is not surprising that the Internet has proven an indispensible promotional tool.  Websites and elaborate campaigns (both on- and offline) play crucial roles in [...]

Nick Salvato, Cornell University

Video-sharing Web sites, enabled by digital technologies and epitomized by YouTube, have created a fertile and fraught destination for the experience of nostalgia. Users can revisit, with startling and unprecedented ease, their favorite music videos of the 1980s, or television sitcoms of the 1970s, or variety shows of [...]

Emily Roxworthy, University of California – San Diego

I am the Principal Investigator for an NEH-designated “We the People” project that is in its initial planning stages. This digital humanities project is a 3D virtual environment and role-playing game called DRAMA IN THE DELTA: Digitally Reenacting Civil Rights Performances at Arkansas’ Wartime [...]

Lisa Reinke, CUNY Graduate Center

One of the more popular open games currently online is called Second Life, launched in 2003.  Between October to December 2008, around 1,420,000 people throughout the world logged on to Second Life.  Cyberformances in Second Life range from full Shakespeare productions, original play productions, play readings, story-telling performances, [...]

John Muse, Yale University

Somewhere in the wilds of cyberspace, the WikiPlay is growing. Although its composition was initiated by the Toronto-based UnSpun Theatre, the project can be assigned to no author or company, and it claims allegiance to no style, nation or language. Subtitled “A Theatrical Experiment in Global Collective Creation,” [...]

Katherine Mezur, University of Washington

In this paper I will examine several live/digital performances, which use different forms of technology in order to open up the possibilities of “digital intimacies” which suggest an evolving translation of our senses into a more radical and complex humanity. In many critical works of digital performance [...]

Brian Eugenio Herrera, University of New Mexico

During the first half of 2009, most television spectators in the United States likely witnessed one or another public service announcements heralding “The DTV Transition.”  In myriad PSAs, infomercial style mini-programs, and ubiquitous news “tickers” scrolling across the bottom of viewer screens, “DTV” quickly emerged as [...]

Jean Graham-Jones, The City University of New York

In the final chapter of my book-length study of performances of female iconicity in Argentina, I move away from the previous chapters’ focus on a single female figure understood through physical onstage and onscreen embodiment.  Instead, the book’s final chapter looks at Argentina’s many popular [...]

Sean J. Bliznik, Arizona State University

Considering theatre as one of the forms of representation, this paper explores the self-representation of adolescents on stage through the lens of the pop-culture phenomenon Disney’s High School Musical.  Disney’s High School Musical is a direct-to-cable-TV movie intended and marketed towards pre-teens and young adolescents.  Following the [...]

Sarah Bay-Cheng, University of Buffalo

Since Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), historians of diverse genre have wrestled with the relations between emerging technology and its implications for history. Perhaps one of (if not the) the most widely cited essays on the relations between [...]