This book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre', metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world.

"With Cyborg Theatre, Parker-Starbuck has created a rigorous and engaging resource for scholars, practitioners, pedagogues, and students of multimedia performance... [The book provides] a valuable model of performance studies scholarship that can serve to guide future investigations of cyborg performance." - Elise Morrison, Contemporary Theatre Review

"Cyborg Theatre is essential reading for all those interested in the complex and multiple intertwinings between bodies and technologies, in theatre and performance, and in life overall, in an environment within which technology claims increasing degrees of agency." - Maria Chatzichristodoulou, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media

Autorentext

JENNIFER PARKER-STARBUCK is a Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at Roehampton University, London, UK. Her essays on bodies, animality, and multimedia have appeared in a variety of books and journals including: Theatre Journal, PAJ, Women and Performance. She is an Assistant Editor of PAJ and an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

Klappentext

Cyborg Theatre, now available in paperback, investigates the role of bodies within the expanding field of multimedia performance. This innovative study articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre' that metaphorically integrates on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to radically reimagine subjectivity in our posthuman age. Parker-Starbuck covers a variety of provocative examples, both historical and contemporary, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world. She offers a compelling feminist-inspired argument for the ways in which a range of bodies appearing onstage with new technologies serve to challenge notions of identity and destabilize historical binaries. Through a variety of critical lenses, she considers the ways in which bodies are already integrated with technology and the questions this raises in and through performance. The focus on the body is a necessary theorizing of this emergent field, which is often understood solely through the technology on stage.

This new paperback edition of the book includes an added preface to the original text, for a useful contextualisation of multimedia performance in the present day.

Inhalt
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preface: Remembering Introduction: Why Cyborg Theatre? Backspace: Historical/Theoretical Intersections Shifting the Balance: "Abject" Bodies "Object" of Control: Framing the Fragments Entering the View: Triangulating "Subject" Bodies Conclusion: Remembering Bodies, Becoming-Cyborg Bibliography Index