Theatre Journal

David Cameron, Michael Anderson, and Rebecca Wotzko have taken on an honorable task: linking digital spaces of performance and pedagogy to the art and practice of theatre. While there are some places where this volume could improve in terms of its link between research and practice, it serves as an excellent resource for theatre pedagogues looking for ways of connecting research and pedagogy in virtual spaces.

Writing about digital spaces is fraught with the danger of being outpaced by technology: as soon as you write about a virtual space, it is replaced with new technology that renders the previous one obsolete. The authors cleverly sidestep this issue by focusing on forms of virtual spaces and the theory that drives performance within those spaces, allowing readers to make their own connections between whatever updated version of the digital space is available. That focus on theory does not mean that the authors ignore contemporary apps that illustrate the theories, but it does mean that even outdated apps point to further spaces. In their chapter, “Playable Cities,” for example, the authors use Pokémon Go as the example app. While popular in 2017 when the book was published, the app has noticeably struggled since the book hit the shelves, losing 80 percent of its players by 2021.¹ The app is even used in scholarship as an example of how not to rely upon augmented reality when planning a virtual performance. The authors, however, use the app as an example of the way augmented reality calls us to play and activate our creativity, which they then map onto possible effects that performance within cityscapes can have through augmented reality. The conceit is clever: by using apps of their contemporary moment that are discussed solely in terms of the theoretical workings of the app, even outdated applications manage to seem fresh and relevant sources of inspiration for future performance.

The chapters cover a variety of theoretical topics: intermediality in arts and education, the intersection of those two disciplines, and digital creativity as it applies to devised theatre, archives, coding, augmented reality, and research. Two areas in particular offer exceptional research into the intersection of drama and digital cultures: the framework for considering drama within digital cultures and the chapter on the future of digital performance. They state that they created the framework to acknowledge the ways people have “adopted alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and creative discovery in both real and virtual spaces” (24), and, more specifically, to address the up-and-coming performers and scholars investigating the intersection of intermediality and performance.

In their framework, one of the more ambitious areas of the book, the authors attempt to categorize ways that performers and educators can consider intermediality, virtuality, and digitization for the classroom and performance. They offer four lenses to examine digital performance: creativity, performance, playfulness, and digital liveness. Of these four, the use of playfulness seems the most innovative and unexpected. While certainly not a new concept, the authors break the theoretical idea of play into seven categories that carefully dissects the usefulness of the concept. These seven categories— play as progress, fate, power, identity, imaginary, the self, and frivolous—help to categorize activities both in the theatre classroom and in performance. The most powerful example of this categorization is [End Page 405] in the discussion of identity and identity play. The digital body is a rich field of scholarship and performance, and the examples ranging from World of Warcraft to the Beowolf Sidney Project demonstrate the nuances of the theoretical arguments.

In the last chapter on the future of intermedial performance, the authors’ connection between theory and practice shows itself in its best light. While not denying the topical nature of the volume, the authors weave an almost timeless understanding of how digital performance can be a boon to both educators and practitioners. The chapter deftly interrogates years of research to demonstrate how digital performance enhances even the most minor of activities...