DiGiTAL
DRAMATURGY LAB
Courses
June-August 2017
DRM398 “Theatre Criticism and Festival Dramaturgy in the Digital Age in the Context of Globalization. – A cultural-comparative approach”
Instructor: Prof. Antje Budde and Sebastian Samur (doctoral candidate)
The course will study the histories, artistic missions, funding models, creative productions, alternative post-industrial performance spaces, audience education and the impact of digital culture on the Toronto Fringe theatre festival in comparison with the international Festival d’Avignon (France).
Students will make themselves familiar with current challenges of theatre conception, production, performance and reception on an international scale. Through digital communication and documentation projects (blogs on theatre criticism, photo and video documentation, critical performance analysis) students will learn to identify major challenges of theatre and performance festivals in the contemporary context and discuss them in a critical, open-access and cross-cultural manner. Students are encouraged to engage with such research bi-lingually in English and in French.” (Budde and Samur, DRM398 Course outline)
Funded by the Faculty of Arts and Science' International Programs and Partnerships unit and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performances Studies at the University of Toronto.
Website and student works
May-July 2017
DRA 4093HY Energy, Dance, Globalized Motion - Astad Deboo's contemporary Indian dance dramaturgy and aesthetics of Sufi Dervish performance
Directed Research course with MA Student Berna Çelikkaya
Supervisor: Antje Budde
The course will critically engage with the Indian dancer Astad Deboo, who for decades has been a major artist globally. He works at the cross-cultural intersections of Indian Kathakali and Kathak traditions, modern European and North-American dance and Sufi traditions of the Middle East. This course will particularly focus on his adaptation dramaturgy and aesthetics inspired by Dervish circular dances and in particular with his performance of "Eternal Embrace", co-performed with the Japanese dancer Yukio Tsuji. At the same time the course aims at providing a deeper understanding and acknowledgement of Astad Deboo's work through online presentation of the course work. This is a course of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab
Spring 2017
DRA4095HS “(Re)searching the Human. Sci-fi theatre and its politics in the 21st century”
Directed Research course with PhD Student Sanja Vodovnik
Instructor: Prof. Antje Budde
This is a specifically designed research course supporting original research of a second year PhD student.
This course incorporated online publishing using a process-based website project (partially pw protected)
Fall 2016
DRA3907HF: Performing Garbage High and Low. – Body and Su(o)bject Ecologies in Politically Engaged Performance Practices/Philosophies
Instructor: Antje Budde
Research Assistant: Montgomery (Monty) Martin
Location: Luella Massey Studio Theatre, 4 Glen Morris Street (West of Robarts library)
Seinfeld famously stated in 2014, while performing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, that “All things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage. Your home is a garbage processing center.” The idea of “becoming” is central in/on stages of post-modern critical discourses. People steeped in binaries of low (pop) and high culture might consider Seinfeld’s art form as garbage as well. We will not. We will seriously and playfully consider our home, our university and our streets as a garbage-processing centre in motion.
In this course we will dive into critical theory/history, political economy and performing practices (physical, digital) surrounding everyday life, artificial, natural and abject/happy objects in an ecologically sustainable/distainable dramaturgy of bodies and ideas. We will engage in process-based, open-ended learning and critical making. The term digital dramaturgy is understood as a creative, integrative queer practice of conceptual and critical thinking. Students are expected to hands-on dive into the complex relationships between soft/hardware, humans, and material energy with intellectual sophistication and curiosity. Found objects will be lost, animated, re-animated, forgotten and re-cycled. Things will be performed. The matter of the heart is that it is an electrically firing muscle. This is a course of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab.
Keywords: Virtuality, actuality, political economy, affordability, becoming/stages, recycling, trash, animation, biomedia and bodies, border-crossing, su(o)bjects, power/order of things, fetish, objects/objectification, stuffed animals, puppets/robots, shadows of things, copied truths, artificiality, utopian landscapes, cross-cultural histories, queer feminist stuff, digital dramaturgy, popular culture, privilege culture, material culture and performance, things and theory, archive.
Example for student work see HERE
Sept. 2015 - April 2016
DRA4090Y Digital/Online Performances of Iranian Performance Artists in Diaspora (Nazli Akhtari)
Instructor: Prof. Antje Budde
Liminal life of immigrated artists has constructed a new paradigm in the performances they create. Liminality does not only liberate and push the individuals to claim a hybrid identity in diaspora, but also calls for new means of expression. Thus virtual space, technology, and telematics become significant elements in artistic expression. This has also led to an ongoing reciprocal cultural transaction and discontinuous cultural negotiations and translations, which brings up the notions of interculturalism and post-colonialism. Drawing on various concepts and theories that scholars of performance and post-colonialism introduce, ithis course contextualizes and studies how these concepts are manifested in the performative gestures and strategies of Iranian performance artists in diaspora.
Sept.-Dec. 2015
DRA3904 Performing Failure. - Theories on Perfection and the Sublime.
Instructor: Prof. Antje Budde
Teaching Assistant: Montgomery Martin
Student multi-media publication projects Performing Failure
“I hold on to what have been characterized as childish and immature notions of possibility…By exploring and mapping, I also mean detouring and getting lost.” (Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure)
“Transforming the frustration from failing into energy for learning is the key to success, that is to say, The Art of Failure.” (Pascaline Lorentz on Jesper Juul’s book on video gaming. Web June 2014).
In this course we will, in a culturally and historically comparative fashion, explore concepts and practices of failure in performance as an indication and a marker of underlying aesthetics and daily life concepts of perfection. While walking on a thousand plateaus we will look at the sublime as a utopian concept of becoming in pre-modern, modern and post-modern societies. And we will DO/MAKE things happen in the form of transmedia publishing, employing interactive dramaturgies. What makes practices of error, glitch, noise, accident, disruption, gaps, malfunction, imperfection, paradoxical contradiction and endgame situations productive for politically engaged and historically aware artistic production across histories, cultures, identities? How can we express and share the pleasures of learning, failing, becoming in transmedia practices of writing/performing. Based on the idea of critical making and in the wake of a dramatic shift towards interactive and transmedia publishing/dramaturgies in the digital humanities, we will learn-hands on- how to produce interactive transmedia scholarship using software such as Scalar, Popcornmaker, Cinemek composer, Isadora and online depositories such as Tumblr, Flickr, Vimeo, Pinterest, Reddit and Wix. This course is inspired and supported by the think tank creations of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab.
Keywords: thousand plateaus, interactive dramaturgy, transmedia storytelling, sublime, failure, perfection, Zeami, Schiller, Kleist, living machines, theatre anthropology, Kathakali, Chinese theatre, hybridity, indigenous performance, automata, Meyerhold, Artaud, body without organs, Brecht, Cage, post-colonial and post-modern critique, Marxist cultural studies, feminist intervention, queer celebration, affect theory, getting lost.
Sept.-Dec.2014/ Sept.-Dec.2015
DRM386H Dream. Utopia. Intermediality. – Performing Technology and the Future. (Fall 2014, Fall 2015)
Instructor: Prof. Antje Budde
Teaching Assistant: Richard Windeyer, Art Babayants and Montgomery (Monty) Martin
This course uses manifestos, declarations (artistic, political, eco- and technological) as well as plays and intermedial performance examples as source texts (in the semiotic sense) from across cultures and historical periods. It will both in academic and performative experimental ways explore visions, dreams and nightmares as both a medium and a performance of alternative thought and praxis. Our focus will be on embodied music and sound as a means of expression.
The DDL's Voice Exchange Lab will be involved.
Sept. 2014/ April 2015
VIC494Y (2014-15) Lost. Found. L@st. – Critical Investigations of the Virtual Neverland 2.0. - Senior Research Paper Course in Literature and Critical Theory. (Alena Sokhan)
Instructor: Prof. Antje Budde
The course critically explores challenges and opportunities of social communication, social change and theories regarding queer/feminist identities, difference, repetition, chance operations, appropriation, montage, virtual and material realities in social information and networking media (Web 2.0 and Web 3.0).
Jan.-April 2015
DRM486/DRA3907 Digital Dramaturgy in Performance
Instructor: Prof. Antje Budde
Teaching Assistant: Montgomery (Monty) Martin
This year we are teaching the course Digital Dramaturgy in Performance for the second time.
Thanks to the generous support by ITIF (Provost's Instructional Technology Innovation Grant) matched by the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at U of T we were able to invest in Digital Mobile Labs (3 backpacks filled with computer, software, sound- and video peripherals, two projectors etc.) This will make it much easier for our students to work more independently and experiment and innovate and have fun while learning both the hard and the soft stuff.
Monty Martin, research assistant, helped to purchase new equipment and installed the software on all machines.
Jan.-April 2014
Our first joint graduate and undergraduate course on Digital Dramaturgy in Performance has been taught at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto in collaboration with the course The Interactive Stage at the Digital Media Program, York University.
April - August 2013
DRM391H (2013) Digital Dramaturgy and politics of performance in the age of globalization (international research)
Conceptualized and facilitated by Prof. Antje Budde
Digital Performance Dramaturgies and Globalization - Reality/Virtuality/Intermediality, In-betweeness and the Politics of Theatrical Aesthetics”
A practice-as-research endeavour and a travel-and-research project for senior undergraduate and graduate students led by a senior researcher to gain hands-on knowledge and practice in contemporary, comparative theatre research.
This is a participatory research project by the Digital Dramaturgy Lab (DDL),
Participants: Art Babayants, Joseph Chico, Chelsea Dab Hilke, Myrto Koumarianos, Shelley Liebembuk.
“Digital Performance Dramaturgies and Globalization” is funded by the German/European Research and Study Fund of the Faculty of Art and Science, organized and co-funded by the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.
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