New Media Dramaturgy: Performance, Media, and New Materialism by Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan, and Edward Scheer (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Abstract

New Media Dramaturgy is a collaborative work by three of Australia’s leading scholars in theatre and performance studies, Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan, and Edward Scheer. This book presents their vision of a new paradigm for theatre and performance scholarship. The authors examine notable contemporary artists working in performance, installation, theatre, and sound art that utilise video, projection, advanced sound systems, and robotics in order to articulate the coordinates and concerns of the important shifts of the last three decades. They position theatre maker and visual artist Kris Verdonck and his A Two Dogs Company and Japanese artist collective dumb type at the centre of their proposed notion of “new media dramaturgy” (NMD). In their works, and those of others they discuss in this groundbreaking text, technical and technological elements that are not merely scenographic, but central dramaturgical components, synergise with new approaches to dramaturgy to create new forms of bodies, movement, and spaces. The authors assert the value of the concept of NMD, contrasting it with the notion of the postmedial, which suggests that mediation has already infiltrated every aspect of aesthetic experience. For the authors, who propose an alternative model for understanding contemporary media culture, the NMD works they examine are not reducible to the postmedial state, as their elements refuse an absorption into spectacle.