Death Is Obsolete: Staging Resurrection in the Age of AI (monograph in progress)
Is a mother’s grief eased or intensified by visiting her late daughter in virtual reality? What is the subject position of a non-Native visitor at digital depiction of tribal lifeways in situ? Would Whitney Houston have consented to performing as a hologram? Questions like these arise from the twenty-first-century phenomenon of “digital resurrection,” the use of spatial computing (AR, VR, and holograms) and artificial intelligence (AI) to bring back a person, community, or heritage site that has died or been destroyed. A deeper understanding of this phenomenon is vital to illuminating the multiple cultural functions digital resurrections serve, such as resisting mortality, preserving and shaping collective memory, and creating empathy through an embodied understanding of the Other. A scholarly monograph, “Death Is Obsolete: Staging Resurrection in the Age of AI,” argues that performance theory is requisite to the analysis of digitally resurrected bodies, from the corporeal to the architectural, and from bodies of work to bodies politic.
Reframing digital resurrections as performance illuminates two overlooked elements of this emergent practice: (1) their production choices, which reflect the biases and priorities of stakeholders, and (2) the dramaturgical roles into which they cast users, such as “guest,” “citizen,” “conqueror,” and others, which assign meaning to the user’s presence and imply a relationship to the bodies being resurrected. Identifying these two elements in any digital resurrection gives producers and users important insights into the beneficial or harmful impacts that experience might have on the people it engages, the place where it transpires, and the entities it depicts. Against the backdrop of an ever-increasing push for audience interactivity across sectors, “Death Is Obsolete” draws new attention to the powers and positionalities of the living who stage stories to raise the dead.
Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2025)
Audience participation in performance is on the rise. From physical theater like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More to augmented reality experiments like The Builders Association’s Elements of Oz, today’s playgoers are familiar with being part of the story. What does it mean when their participation has nothing to do with changing the unfolding narrative? From the perspective of a practitioner and theorist, I identify a dynamic of “enactive spectatorship,” which characterizes audience participation across contexts, from the physical to the digital.
Fostering this dynamic are four production conditions that ensure audiences play along as directed: the presence of a canonical source, a historically resonant site, an immersive space, and a production-specific economy that incentivizes some audience behaviors and discourages others. With these conditions visualized as a sound board with faders that can be amplified or dampened, Acting the Part demonstrates how a production’s “mix” encourages a distinctive kind of participation—the enactment of an archetype. In this dynamic, a participant’s willingness to enact “worshipper,” “sleuth,” “cinematographer,” or other archetypes plays a vital role in the dramaturgical aims of a production. By shedding new light on the ways in which productions shape audience participation in real time, Acting the Part will be relevant for scholars, practitioners, and patrons of performance in the twenty-first century.
Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays by theatre and performance scholars and scholar-artists that explores the emergent phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, invites audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenges preexisting ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. To explore these qualities, the contributors here examine a range of case studies including immersive productions by professional theatre companies, role playing games, theme park experiences, solo performance, and immersive programs in museums and cultural centers, as well as historical panoramas and department store displays. While previous books on immersive performance tend to focus on British and European-based immersive productions and experiences (such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More), Enveloping Worlds focuses on American examples of immersive performance and the ways they have emerged out of and reflect American experiences. This includes distinctly American phenomena like Disney Parks and tabletop roleplaying games, as well as immersive performance that takes on complicated aspects of American society and history, from anti-Black racism and violence to Indigenous claims to sovereignty. The collection also describes the opportunities for employment and creative work immersive theatre offered when the global COVID-19 pandemic closed most theatres, from one-on-one telephone performance to immersive Van Gogh attractions. Enveloping Worlds offers readers and scholars a vocabulary and critical framework to discuss this exciting direction in theatre and performance.
Articles and chapters
“Augmented Reality and Theatre.” Theatre Journal 76, no. 2 (June 2024).
“Theatre Majors and Immersive Technology: An Interview with HP’s Joanna Popper.” In Experiential Theatres: Praxis-Based Approaches to Training 21st Century Theatre Artists, edited by William W. Lewis and Sean Bartley. London: Routledge, 2022.
“Building Video Game Adaptations of Dramatic and Literary Texts.” In Research Methods for the Digital Humanities, edited by Lewis Levenberg, Tai Neilson, and David Rheams. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.