Translating the Stage: Digital Theatricality in Live Broadcast Theatre

Lindsay Brandon Hunter (Assistant Professor, Theatre & Dance)

Professor Brandon Hunter's talk considers the process by which stage performances are rendered into digital video (as in the National Theatre's popular NT Live series), examining the potential of such products to translate theatre for a multifarious screen audience. Exploring how such translations act didactically to reify, conserve, or even construct notions of theatricality, Professor Brandon Hunter contends that they are inevitably grounded in a more fundamental making-clear of theatre itself, presenting not just a screened rendition of a staged original, but a subjective declaration of what constitutes theatricality and where theatre inheres.

Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Assistant Professor of Theatre. Her current book project, Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Mischief, takes on sites as varied as live-broadcast theatre, reality television, and alternate reality gaming to examine how theatricality and mediatization work both to enact and to interrogate notions of authenticity and realness in performance. Her writing appears in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, and Contemporary Theatre Review, and in a forthcoming special issue of the journal Amodern devoted to ephemera, archives, and performance.

Complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served.