School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemA ‘standard’ Topic?: Theatre, Young People and the Everyday Postdigital( 2021)This thesis investigates how theatre examines and interrogates the integration of young people’s everyday experience of digital technologies into theatrical performance. Using a multimodal approach, I examine what I describe as everyday postdigital theatre across four contemporary Australian theatre productions involving young people aged 13-22 in different ways. These case studies engage with everyday postdigital theatre across five mechanisms: networks, replication and simulation, real and virtual, time and space and glitches and mess. These mechanisms are traced across an examination of changed approaches to storytelling, aesthetic innovations and theatre’s technical reconfiguration within larger networks of information and image production. The central contribution of this thesis is that theatre involving young people highlights fundamental shifts that are currently underway in the relationship between digital culture and theatre. These shifts point to the ways in which the digital is an increasingly everyday aspect of the way we perceive and realise theatre, rather than a spectacular feature in its own right. This study is significant because it recognises that theatre ‘post’ the digital does not negate digitality, but rather acknowledges that theatre is now made with reference to, and by often seamlessly integrating, the everyday digital environment surrounding it. By focusing on young people, the thesis provides concrete examples of successes in navigating contemporary digital manifestations. It is a close reading of the subtle pervasiveness of the digital beyond overt mediation and argues for the realness of the everyday digital in theatre.