Liam Jarvis – författare

Theatre-Rites are regarded as pioneers in the field of object-led and site-specific performance, creating ground-breaking work for family audiences since 1995. This book marks the company’s 25th anniversary, offering the first in-depth exploration of artistic director Sue Buckmaster’s visionary practice, in which anything can be animated. This book draws on original research, including five years of in-depth interviews between its authors, images from Theatre-Rites’ archive and Buckmaster’s private collection, detailed observations from the company’s professional training workshops and personal reflections on past productions. A timely and compelling advocacy for the importance of high-quality experimental arts provision for young audiences is made, distilling learning from decades of the company’s professional activities to motivate and empower the next generation of object-led theatre-makers.Theatre-Rites: Animating Puppets, Objects and Sites is an invaluable resource for any puppeteer, actor, dancer, visual artist, poet or student interested in expanding their understanding of how to incorporate puppetry and/or symbolic objects as metaphors in their work.

Theatre-Rites are regarded as pioneers in the field of object-led and site-specific performance, creating ground-breaking work for family audiences since 1995. This book marks the company’s 25th anniversary, offering the first in-depth exploration of artistic director Sue Buckmaster’s visionary practice, in which anything can be animated. This book draws on original research, including five years of in-depth interviews between its authors, images from Theatre-Rites’ archive and Buckmaster’s private collection, detailed observations from the company’s professional training workshops and personal reflections on past productions. A timely and compelling advocacy for the importance of high-quality experimental arts provision for young audiences is made, distilling learning from decades of the company’s professional activities to motivate and empower the next generation of object-led theatre-makers.Theatre-Rites: Animating Puppets, Objects and Sites is an invaluable resource for any puppeteer, actor, dancer, visual artist, poet or student interested in expanding their understanding of how to incorporate puppetry and/or symbolic objects as metaphors in their work.

In the context of the postdigital age, where technology is increasingly part of our social and political world, Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance traces how identity can be created, developed, hijacked, manipulated, sabotaged and explored through performance in postdigital cultures. Considering how technology is reshaping performance, this timely collection reveals how we engage in performance practices through expanded notions of intermediality, knotted networks and layering.This book examines the artist as activist and producer of avatars, and how digital doubles, artificial intelligence and semi-automated politics are problematizing and expanding our discussions of identity. Using a range of examples in theatre, film and internet-based performance practices, chapters examine the uncertain boundaries of networked ‘informational selves’ in mediatized cultures, the impacts of machine algorithms, apps and the consequences of digital legacies. Case studies include James Cameron’s Avatar, Blast Theory’s Karen, Ontroerend Goed’s A Game of You, Randy Rainbow’s online videos, Sisters Grimm’s Calpurnia Descending, Dead Centre’s Lippy and Chekhov’s First Play and Jo Scott’s practice-as-research in ‘place-mixing’.This is an incisive study for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the wider conversations around identity-formation in postdigital cultures.

In the context of the postdigital age, where technology is increasingly part of our social and political world, Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance traces how identity can be created, developed, hijacked, manipulated, sabotaged and explored through performance in postdigital cultures. Considering how technology is reshaping performance, this timely collection reveals how we engage in performance practices through expanded notions of intermediality, knotted networks and layering.This book examines the artist as activist and producer of avatars, and how digital doubles, artificial intelligence and semi-automated politics are problematizing and expanding our discussions of identity. Using a range of examples in theatre, film and internet-based performance practices, chapters examine the uncertain boundaries of networked ‘informational selves’ in mediatized cultures, the impacts of machine algorithms, apps and the consequences of digital legacies. Case studies include James Cameron’s Avatar, Blast Theory’s Karen, Ontroerend Goed’s A Game of You, Randy Rainbow’s online videos, Sisters Grimm’s Calpurnia Descending, Dead Centre’s Lippy and Chekhov’s First Play and Jo Scott’s practice-as-research in ‘place-mixing’.This is an incisive study for scholars, students and practitioners interested in the wider conversations around identity-formation in postdigital cultures.

Covid-19 has been described as a ‘digital pandemic’. But who might the characterisation of the pandemic as ‘digital’ leave behind? This timely book reconsiders the pandemic as ‘postdigital’, examining tensions between a growing postdigital attitude of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on adapted modes of online practice mid-lockdown in both performance-making and healthcare.What emerged amidst the pandemic restrictions was a theatre that was unable to show its face, instead adapting into a variety of ‘covid-safe’ remote forms of engagement, from ‘Zoom plays’ to self-generating experiences sent by post. This book explores the ways that both performances and healthcare practices found proxies for direct touch and face-to-face encounters, deconstructing the way that care and resilience were spectacularized by political actors online.Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and the repurposing of theatre spaces that were displaced amidst the mass migration online have been enabling as well as controversial. The variety of case studies assessed includes internet memes, online films, performances of everyday resilience through social media and participatory theatre productions, including Thaddeus Phillips’ Zoom Motel, Coney’s Telephone and Nightcap’s Handle with Care.

Covid-19 has been described as a ‘digital pandemic’. But who might the characterisation of the pandemic as ‘digital’ leave behind? This timely book reconsiders the pandemic as ‘postdigital’, examining tensions between a growing postdigital attitude of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on adapted modes of online practice mid-lockdown in both performance-making and healthcare.What emerged amidst the pandemic restrictions was a theatre that was unable to show its face, instead adapting into a variety of ‘covid-safe’ remote forms of engagement, from ‘Zoom plays’ to self-generating experiences sent by post. This book explores the ways that both performances and healthcare practices found proxies for direct touch and face-to-face encounters, deconstructing the way that care and resilience were spectacularized by political actors online.Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and the repurposing of theatre spaces that were displaced amidst the mass migration online have been enabling as well as controversial. The variety of case studies assessed includes internet memes, online films, performances of everyday resilience through social media and participatory theatre productions, including Thaddeus Phillips’ Zoom Motel, Coney’s Telephone and Nightcap’s Handle with Care.

Reflecting on the violent impact of digital border systems and surveillance practices that dehumanises migrating bodies, this book draws parallels to similar harmful acts of identity marking in relation to performance and migration.Performance practice creates an opportunity for bodies reduced to data at digital border zones to reject the numerical label forced upon them, making a more human and multifaceted counternarrative. Leading with the original concept of ‘choreographing evidence’, the book applies Practice as Research methods to performance works created with artist and refugee Tom Tegento: Uninvited (2021) and Contagion (2021). This work disrupts surveillance technologies and their violence towards bodies at borders as well as using them in alternative ways within performance practice. It considers how choreography which utilises both overt optical tracking technologies and GPS methods embedded in smart devices can enable othered bodies to redraw borders, reclaim narratives and resituate the self.Alongside this PaR work, the book analyses contemporary performance which uses the body and/or technology to explore narratives of migration. It offers examples of UK and European works which critique the way migrating bodies are represented within performance, including Flight Pattern (2019), A Place to Sit (2021), The Walk (Little Amal) (2021) and Now is the Time to Say Nothing (2019). The insights gained offer a richer understanding of the power dynamics at digital borders, how they function, how they can be resisted and how they are felt and lived.

An investigation of how artists use data in creating performance and how data is visualised in researching performance.[ST1] Artists and scholars now use data in creative ways to make and investigate theatre and performance while critiquing the power relations inherent in data collection, analysis, and visualisation. This book brings together artists who use data to create performance with researchers who visualise data about performance. Each chapter is organised around a key idea about data as performance, dramaturgy, documentation, flow, and genealogy. They use a range of case studies from around the globe, including the Builders’ Association’s I Agree to the Terms (2022),The Haka Party Incident (2022) by Katie Wolfe in Aotearoa, Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City series (since 2008), Catalogue by Rawcus in Melbourne (2013), and Algorithmen by Turbo Pascal in Germany (2014), among many others.Demonstrating how live performance embodies data for social critique and improved data literacy, this book illuminates how artists generate data through dramaturgical processes. It also explains how sharing information about performance within a database enables broader investigations of touring patterns, long-term programming, and lines of influence between artists. Examples of data considered within this book include: play scripts, publicity material, videos and images of performance, live performing arts databases, geographical locations of performance venues, and networks of production cast and crew. By interweaving digital methods with creative research, this appeals to those looking for creative ways to engage with data and performance, and provides an accessible and engaging guide to working with performance data in digital cultures for artists, students, curators, and researchers.

By mixing text, 3D animation and a dynamic physicality, this play is a powerful look at the ripple effects of one man’s decision.

2011 Fringe First Award Winner"Henry, are you awake?”Henry lives each day like the last. Exactly like the last. Every day, he tries to make sense of the world around him; the girl sitting on the lawn outside his window, the pages of a book filled with the same sentence, the 80 year old man looking at him in the mirror.In 2009 Patient H.M.’s brain is dissected live on the internet to a global audience of 400,000 people, cut into carefully preserved slices: manuscripts of tissue like the pages of a book.In 1953 Henry Molaison emerges from experimental brain surgery without any recollection of the last two years of his life or the ability to form new memories.In 1935 nine-year old Henry is knocked over by a bike, leaving him unconscious for five minutes.Following Analogue's critically acclaimed Mile End and Beachy Head and inspired by the world’s most important neuroscientific case-study, 2401 Objects tells the remarkable story of a man who could no longer remember, but who has proven impossible to forget.

This book offers a wide-ranging examination of acts of ‘virtual embodiment’ in performance/gaming/applied contexts that abstract an immersant’s sense of physical selfhood by instating a virtual body, body-part or computer-generated avatar.