Digital Theatre: Forms, Methods and Practice

When I designed this unit for DSM, I started from a pedagogical position that I feel strongly about: digital performance has to be taught as a medium in its own right. It has its own aesthetics, its own relationship to time and space, its own way of constructing an audience experience. If you teach it as a technical skill set bolted onto existing practice, students miss the more interesting questions entirely.

So the structure of the unit was built around two parallel tracks running simultaneously throughout. The first was critical inquiry: getting students to ask where performance lives in the digital landscape, who the audience is, what liveness means when there is no shared physical space, and how form shapes the meaning of what they make. The second was rapid practical making. Each session included a provocation that asked students to move quickly from idea to execution, working in duos and using whatever devices they had at home. The speed was a deliberate pedagogical choice. I wanted to reduce the anxiety around digital tools and build confidence through doing.

The sequencing of the six forms was also intentional. I began with camera and video because it is the most familiar entry point for most students, and because it raises questions about framing, perspective and the relationship between performer and lens that carry through the rest of the unit. Audio came next, asking students to think about performance without any visual element at all. Interactive and social forms pushed them toward thinking about the public as a space for performance. Distanced and at-home performance introduced questions of instruction and trust between artist and audience. Creative coding opened up the possibility of the machine as a collaborator. And hybrid forms, in the final week, invited students to combine what they had learned across mediums and think about the audience journey as a design problem.
A session on collaboration tools and digital rehearsal processes sat within this structure too, because I wanted students to have a practical grounding in how to work together remotely: not just how to make work, but how to organise and document the making of it.

The unit culminated in a scratch sharing where students presented their hybrid performance work to each other and to me as an audience. This was designed to give them the full experience of being digital theatre-makers, from conception and making through to sharing and reflection.