Stanford Drama

This dissertation is a "manifesto and casebook" attempting to formulate a new poetics for the theater at the end of the twentieth century; a poetics responding to the radical perceptual and epistemological shifts being engendered by developments in electronic information technologies. This project is not simply an elaborate instruction manual on how these technologies should be employed on the stage, but rather an examination of some of the thought processes created by such developments and how these can be utilized, filtered and employed for artistic practice.

Specifically, the shifts discussed not only involve the kinds of technologies produced but also how such technologies are putting into question our long-established notions of order and disorder, centralized and distributed control, the nature and creation of events, indeterminacy and randomness, change and stasis and external and internal experience; in short, how these shifts are changing the way we see, hear and experience the world itself.

Based from practical working experiences, this project then explores what some of these shifts are and how they are reconfiguring the ways in which we are able to experience live performance in a "digital" culture. Using elements and ideas from a wide range of disciplines (architecture, acoustics, mathematics, physics, biology and other art forms), it examines both how newly developing visual and aural media challenge and thwart embedded ways of understanding and experiencing live theatrical events as well as how new models and experiences of "belief" or engagement are created as a result of such media colliding with human presence.

The work is organized into five main essays, each a separate term of the proposed poetics. The first three parts set out key terms and lay the foundation for later discussions. The fourth part, in diary form, deals with the production process of the Frankfurt Ballet's 1995 music theater work Eidos: Telos. The fifth and final essay deals hypothetically with so-called "interactive," computer-based technologies and how they might contribute change to a theater on the verge of complexity.