Editorial Comment:

Abstract: In the past century, film, radio, and video technologies gave rise to new forms of dramatic expression and a global entertainment industry. In the past decade, interactive media technologies have been producing an artistic and cultural revolution of similar, if not greater, proportions. Interactive media are giving birth to new art forms, and the practice and history of theatre has a great deal to contribute to these new forms.1 As I have argued elsewhere, the way that current digital artists valorise the concept of “interactivity” relates closely to the way theatre and performance artists have long valorised the concept of “liveness.”  Digital artists strive to define interactive experiences in much the same way, and perhaps for many of the same reasons, as did creators of Happenings and environmental theatre in the 1960s (Saltz, “Interaction”).

The primary focus of this paper, however, is not the role of theatre in interactive media but the role of interactive media in theatre - “theatre” here referring to the old-fashioned, non-participatory Western performance genre in which a group of live performers gathers before a group of live spectators to enact a scripted play. My central concern is not with the interaction between spectators (the “end users”) and media but rather the interaction between performers and media. Theatrical productions can define this interaction in a wide range of radically different ways. To illustrate the range of options, I will draw on examples from productions that I have directed over the past three years under the auspices of the University of Georgia’s Interactive Performance Laboratory. In the end, I hope to show not only that incorporating interactive technology into theatre opens dynamic new possibilities for theatre artists, but more deeply that it compels us to re-examine some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of theatre and the meaning of liveness.