Presence is a fundamental yet highly contested aspect of performance, and performance has come to be a key concept in many different fields. Notions of presence hinge on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions of immediacy, authenticity and originality. This project will bring together leading researchers from Drama, Computer Science and Archaeology, in collaboration with internationally known performers and artists, to advance an understanding of the performer's presence in live, electronically mediated and simulated performance. The project will result in authored and edited books, articles, a project DVD-ROM, an international conference, an exhibition and catalog (to be negotiated) and archived electronic resources important to a range of disciplines.
PRESENCE
Debates over the nature of the performer's presence have been at the heart of key aspects of theatre practice and theory since the late 1950s and are a vital part of the discourses surrounding avant-garde and postmodern performance. These debates explore terms essential to the theatrical event, addressing the spectator's encounter with the performer, the actor's 'authenticity,' 'aura,' 'authority' and self-awareness and relationships between 'live' performance and its mediation, documentation or trace. Experimental theatre's engagement with video and new media has further heightened the importance of these issues.
Archaeology is increasingly understood less as the discovery of the past and more in terms of different relationships with what is left of the past. This foregrounds anthropological questions of the performance and construction of the past in memory, narrative, collections (of textual and material sources), archives and systems of documentation, in experiences of place. Concepts of "presence", "aura" and the "uncanny" return of the past accompany an emphasis upon encounters with the cues or prompts of "site" — with the sign or trace. Such thinking has led to radically new forms of archaeological investigation and documentation that draw on and advance theatre theory and practice.
In Computer Science, 'presence' is a key concept and goal in the construction of Virtual Environments: complex interactive projections that simulate three-dimensional environments including representations of humans (avatars). The effectiveness of these representations is not simply a matter of rendering accuracy, but of understanding how specific aspects of behaviour, postures, gestures, glances, head-turns, and expressions impact on real human participants: how the signs of performance effect a sense of 'presence'.
The Presence Project will combine expertise from performance and drama theory and practice, anthropological archaeology, and computer science to investigate means by which "presence" is achieved in live and mediated performance and simulated environments. The project aims to explore how exchanges of practices, concepts and methodologies between academic disciplines and between live, mediated and simulated performance may deepen an understanding of the performance of presence.
An evolving description of the project as a whole is available as a brochure-copy
Target audiences: academic research communities in Theatre and Performance Studies, Media Arts, Visual Art, Computer Science, Archaeology; theatre practitioners and visual artists; postgraduate students
