The REMAP/RITL Workshop for Digital Media, Theatre and Design in Formello, Rome, explored how emerging technologies, materials, and media practices can provide new theatrical languages for stage designers and theatre-makers.
A set of technology platforms and tools were chosen for their potential impact on scenography in its broadest sense, and their connection to consumer and industrial technologies that shape our lives. Technologies included Touchdesigner, Max/MSP, and common sensors. A set of dramatic techniques were chosen for their fluidity of structure, potential relationship to the selected technologies, and narrative, aesthetic and thematic connections to the world’s evolving use of technology—pulling from forms such as Commedia dell’arte and Chinese Opera. Through the pairing of performance practices with corresponding digital possibilities, the program interweaved creative processes and encouraged student participants to broaden their approach, seek new and wider audiences, and critically engage with the proliferation of new technologies in everyday life.
Participating designers and theatre-makers were trained by visiting professional artists grappling with the fusion of dramatic action and technology, leading to a collaboratively created performance in the courtyard of the Palazzo Chigi in the center of Formello.
The project was an initiative of REMAP and the Rhodope International Theatre Laboratory (RITL)—in association with the Open Media Cluster of the Telematics Park of Rome and the Municipality of Formello, Rome. REMAP was a contributor to the RITL in Smolyan and Plovdiv, Bulgaria each of its summer seasons (2005-2012). The Workshop was co-directed by REMAP Director Jeff Burke and RITL Co-director Jared J. Stein, also a REMAP artist-researcher.
Workshop faculty collaborators included Jed Allen Harris (Carnegie Mellon School of Drama), Peter Karapetkov (RITL Co-director), Alexander Iliev (National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts, Bulgaria), Alessandro Marianantoni (Italy), David Beaudry & Jonathan Snipes (United States), and Andrew Quinn (Australia). Students from Italy, the United States, Argentina, Bulgaria, China and South Korea participated.
Formello, Rome–June-July 2012.
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