“Acting as Technology: A Conversation”

Theatre, in some quarters, has the reputation of a Luddite institution. We are told it pits liveness against mediation, ephemerality against inscription, and the human body against machines and the mass media. Much recent scholarship, though, attests to the theater’s history as a proving ground for new media technologies. Performance is where we go to figure out technology’s impact—on our art, on our politics, and on our very humanity.

We want to ask not only how we act (and interact) with technology in performance, but also how the actor’s body and presence itself might be thought of as a technological construction. Undoing the opposition of the work of the human actor to the technological mediations that surround her might help formulate a posthumanist politics; it also injects new energy into the theorization of acting. A consideration of the actor and/as technology might be the theory of the neglected past and of the undecided future.

The University at Buffalo Humanities Institute’s Performance Research Group and the UB departments of Theatre and Romance Languages and Literatures invite you to join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Street in downtown Buffalo) on October 26^th at 7PM for Acting As Technology: A Conversation. We will be joined by Shonni Enelow of Fordham University, who will speak about “The Technology of Sweat in Tennessee Williams”; and Christopher Grobe, of Amherst College, whose talk is entitled, “Of TV Actors and Technodollies.”

Discussion and questions will follow. This event is free of charge and open to the public.