Sarah Thomasson – författare

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.

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these cities’ world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous staging of multiple events within Edinburgh’s Summer Festivals and Adelaide’s Mad March that generates the visibility and festive atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative event in which festivaldebates and controversies spilled out beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the festivalisation phenomenon.