Showing papers in "New Theatre Quarterly in 1998"
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TL;DR: Aleks Sierz as mentioned in this paper examines the rash of plays about sex, drugs, and violence by twenty-something authors, and asks whether they have anything in common beyond a flamboyant theatricality and the desire to shock.
Abstract: The appearance of a succession of controversial and attention-catching new plays on the British stage in the 'nineties has led to considerable public discussion – and not a little ostensible outrage. In ‘an interim report’, Aleks Sierz examines the rash of plays about sex, drugs, and violence – notably Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo , and Shopping and Fucking – by twenty-something authors, and asks whether they have anything in common beyond a flamboyant theatricality and the desire to shock. After showing how Cool Britannia's manifestation on the national stage has provoked arguments for and against this ‘in-yer-face’ drama, he outlines some of the common themes – such as the crisis of masculinity and the postmodern sensibility – that characterize much contemporary new writing. He argues that while these young writers are certainly gifted and mature, only subsequent theatrical revivals of their work will show whether it has anything lasting to say. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune , and currently writing a book about ‘in-yer-face’ drama.
36 citations
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TL;DR: The first production at Britain's first true repertory theatre under Annie Horniman's management was of a Shakespeare play: William Poel's staging of Measure for Measure, analyzed in detail by Richard Foulkes in Theatre Quarterly No 39 (1981).
Abstract: The first production at Britain's first true repertory theatre – the Gaiety, in Manchester – under Annie Horniman's management was of a Shakespeare play: William Poel's staging of Measure for Measure, analyzed in detail by Richard Foulkes in Theatre Quarterly No 39 (1981) Yet Miss Horniman's attitude both to Poel's experimental ‘Elizabethanism’ and to subsequent attempts at Shakespeare at the Gaiety remained ambivalent, and influenced by such personal tensions and disagreements as saw off Lewis Casson after his radical and political reading of Julius Caesar, in favour of safer stuff conceived as an alternative to Christmas pantomime The author, Viv Gardner, teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Manchester: she is a former Book Reviews Editor of NTQ, and currently co-editor of the Women and Theatre papers Here, she sets Shakespearean production at the Gaiety into the context of Miss Horniman and her colleagues' ambitions for the Gaiety and its intended role in Manchester's civic life
25 citations
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16 citations
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TL;DR: Cutler as mentioned in this paper proposes the potential body as a model for performance documentation, since, though difficult to translate into written forms, it offers a more effective communication of both the body and of live performance.
Abstract: In this article, the first of a sequence on the ways in which women's bodies are recorded in performance documentation, Anna Cutler offers a new conception and systematic definition of three performance documentations – the ‘Proper’, the ‘Processual’ and the ‘Residual’. She argues against traditional and literary forms of documentation (the ‘Proper’) as a means by which women and women's bodies have been and continue to be excluded from performance records, and proceeds to discuss two theoretical types of body in performance: the ‘Inscribed’ (which represents an ideologically shaped, constructed, and censored body) and the ‘Potential’ (which represents the creative and ongoing moments of change made by the body in performance). She proposes the ‘Potential Body’ as a model for performance documentation, since, though difficult to translate into written forms, it offers a more effective communication of both the body and of live performance. Given the continuing prevalence of the written word as the primary mode of performance documentation, the author makes a case for ecriture feminine to be appropriated as a writerly tool to document women's bodies and particularly the ‘Potential Body’ in performance. She concludes with a discussion of the theory and practice of Helene Cixous' writing in relation to women's performance methodologies. The debate is taken up by Susan Melrose in the article following this. Anna Cutler is currently producing events for the Belfast Festival, while completing her doctoral research in the Department of Literary and Media Studies at the University of North London.
11 citations
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TL;DR: Tyszka as mentioned in this paper records the progress of a movement and its moving spirit, who, disillusioned with democracy when it came, exiled himself to Paris to invent alternatives anew.
Abstract: Confronted with political opposition, an authoritarian regime predictably responds with force – but also with recognition of a knowable enemy. Confronted with anarchy and laughter, it can be caught wrong-footed – as happened in Poland in the aftermath of Martial Law, when a young surrealist, Waldemar Fydrych, self-designated ‘Major’, created what he called the Orange Alternative. In a series of published manifestoes and in the street happenings they proclaimed and recorded, the Orange Alternative tickled the soft underbelly of the Jaruzelski regime, and met with responses ranging from hostility to ostensible sympathy to simple bafflement. Juliusz Tyszka here records the progress of a movement and its moving spirit – who, disillusioned with democracy when it came, exiled himself to Paris to invent alternatives anew. Juliusz Tyszka is a past contributor on Polish theatre to NTQ, who teaches in the Institute of Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan.
9 citations
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TL;DR: Melrose as mentioned in this paper argued that the primacy of the word in documentation processes, though contested by Anna Cutler, has none the less caused her to overlook existing, effective forms of performance documentation, perhaps because they originate from and primarily serve the interests of performers rather than academics.
Abstract: Taking up the arguments set out by Anna Cutler in the preceding article, Susan Melrose here cautions against what she sees as the dangers Cutler fails to take into account of nominalization as an inherently conservative process. She suggests that the reification of the term ‘the body’ carries its own dangers, unless its complexities – as suggested by the title of this article – are recognized and assimilated. Arguing that many of the problems identified by Cutler are as applicable to the male as to the female performer, Susan Melrose concludes that the primacy of the word in documentation processes, though contested by Anna Cutler, has none the less caused her to overlook existing, effective forms of performance documentation, perhaps because they originate from and primarily serve the interests of performers rather than academics. Susan Melrose is Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she leads the MA course in Performance Studies. She is author of A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Macmillan, 1994), and a contributor to numerous journals and symposia in her field. Further contributions to the debate initiated in these articles are planned and invited.
6 citations
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TL;DR: The relationship between live theatre and the rapidly developing multimedia technologies has been ambiguous and uneasy, both in the practical and the academic arena as mentioned in this paper, and a few performance and production teams have entered the fray, deliberately pushing the technology to its limits to see how useful it may (or may not) be in dealing with the theatre.
Abstract: The relationship between live theatre and the rapidly developing multimedia technologies has been ambiguous and uneasy, both in the practical and the academic arena. Many have argued that such technologies put the theatre and other live arts at risk, while others have seen them as a means of preserving the elusive traces of live performance, making current work accessible to future generations of artists and scholars. A few performance and production teams have entered the fray, deliberately pushing the technology to its limits to see how useful it may (or may not) be in dealing with the theatre. One such team – comprising Lizbeth Goodman, Tony Coe, and Huw Williams – forms the Open University BBC's Multimedia Shakespeare Research Project, and on 4 September 1997 they presented their work as the annual BFI Lecture at the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. What follows is an edited and updated transcript of the lecture – which was itself a ‘multimedia performance’ – intended to spark debate about the possibilities and limitations of using multimedia in creating and preserving ‘live’ theatre. Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, where she chairs both the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project and the new ‘Shakespeare: Text and Performance’ course. Tony Coe is Senior Producer at the OU/BBC, where Huw Williams was formerly attached to the Interactive Media Centre, before becoming Director of Createc for the National Film School, and subsequently Director of Broadcast Solutions, London. Together the team has created a range of multimedia CD-ROMs designed to test the limits and possibilities of new technologies for theatre and other live art forms – beginning with Shakespeare
6 citations
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5 citations
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TL;DR: The success of Mitchell's production of The Mysteries for the Royal Shakespeare Company has again demonstrated the appeal of the plays for a modern audience as mentioned in this paper, but Mitchell and her dramaturg, Edward Kemp, more calculatedly addressed the problems of updating not only the texts, but also the acting style and attitudes towards the dominant issues.
Abstract: The success of Katie Mitchell's production of The Mysteries for the Royal Shakespeare Company has again demonstrated the appeal of the plays for a modern audience. Most revivals trim and otherwise adapt the texts of the original, sprawling cycles: but Mitchell and her dramaturg, Edward Kemp, more calculatedly addressed the problems of updating not only the texts, but also the acting style and attitudes towards the dominant issues – notably those of gender representation. The original cycles often intriguingly juxtaposed religious faith and local politics in an assertion of civic pride which none the less also acknowledged the dominance of the established Church: and in the following article Katie Normington assesses the relevance of Mitchell's production for the secular, depoliticized society of the 'nineties. Katie Normington is a freelance fringe theatre director who is currently researching the role of women in the mystery plays and lecturing in drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
4 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, Min Tian suggests that the fashionably derided universality of Shakespeare may still tell an intercultural truth that transcends stylistic and chronological distinctions, and suggests that such productions can, paradoxically, help us to re-invent Shakespeare in fuller accord with our own times, notably by exploiting the potential of stylized gesture and movement, and the integration of music and dance.
Abstract: Especially during the later decades of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for production in many of the major Asian traditional theatrical forms – prompting some western critics to suggest that such forms, with their long but largely non-logocentric traditions, can come closer to the recovery or recreation of the theatrical conditions and performance styles of Shakespeare's times than can academically derived experiments based on scantily documented research. Whether in full conformity with traditional Asian styles, or by stirring ingredients into a synthetic mix, Min Tian denies that a ‘true’ recreation is possible – but suggests that such productions can, paradoxically, help us to ‘reinvent’ Shakespeare in fuller accord with our own times, notably by exploiting the potential of stylized gesture and movement, and the integration of music and dance, called for by proponents of a modernistic ‘total’ theatre after Artaud. In considering a wide range of Shakespearean productions and adaptations from varying Asian traditions, Min Tian suggests that the fashionably derided ‘universality’ of Shakespeare may still tell an intercultural truth that transcends stylistic and chronological distinctions. Min Tian holds a doctorate from the China Central Academy of Drama, where he has been an associate professor since 1992. The author of many articles on Shakespeare, modern drama, and intercultural theatre, he is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
4 citations
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TL;DR: This article explored the actuality of domestic kitchens and their occupation and preoccupations in the late 'fifties and early'sixties by using the metaphor of the kitchen sink.
Abstract: ‘Kitchen-sink’ drama was a term used (in the main by its detractors) of the drama of the late 'fifties and 'sixties located outside the drawing-room milieu then preferred by conventional West End playwrights. It was always an inaccurate term, in that many of the plays so described neither took place in domestic kitchens nor – more to Marcia Blumberg's point – addressed the issue of the place's usual attendant: a woman. Recognizing the dominance of the kitchen as an icon, and of its related domestic chores as traditionally the tasks of women, two performance artists have recently, and in very different ways, explored the actuality of ‘Kitchen’ occupations and preoccupations. Bobby Baker's Kitchen Show (1991) used ‘found’ environments of actual kitchens, including her own, to produce ‘new and often subversive significations’, while in Kitchen Blues (1990) the South African dramatist Jeanne Goosen constructed a ‘complex feminist bricolage’ through the voices and actions of a quartet of women, embodying ‘the multiple intersections of gender in a shocking tragi-comic evocation of personal upheaval during a period of flux in South Africa’. Marcia Blumberg, herself a South African, has recently been teaching in Britain with the Open University.
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TL;DR: Watson as mentioned in this paper analyzes the "frame" of television news broadcasting, and considers the events within that frame as elements of performance, and concludes that in the mediated present, the medium is indeed as much a producer as a reporter of an action which is pervasively shaped by its presence.
Abstract: When the ‘action’ at major news events is observed over days or weeks by television cameras, how far does the medium become, whether knowingly or not, a participant and shaper in the action it observes? How far does the action itself become, to some degree, a performance before the cameras? While not ignoring either the moral or practical implications of such questions, lan Watson sets out primarily to analyze the ‘frame’ of television news broadcasting, and to consider the events within that frame as elements of performance. He considers the six days of rioting in Los Angeles in 1992, sparked by the acquittal of police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King – itself caught on camera – as a case study, in which the often ignored role of the observer, whether the news anchor-man in the studio or the audience watching at home, comes in for corrective scrutiny. He concludes that in the ‘mediated present’ of the news event on television, the medium is indeed as much a producer as a reporter of an action which is pervasively shaped by its presence. An Advisory Editor and regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, lan Watson teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers, where he is Co-ordinator of the Theatre and Television Programs.
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TL;DR: Blackadder as mentioned in this paper examined the reaction of the audience to the 1889 premiere in Berlin of Gerhart Hauptmann's Before Sunrise, and examined the complex relationship between production and reception in early modern theatre.
Abstract: An acknowledged feature of the late nineteenth-century reinvigoration of theatre is the frequency with which new styles of writing – and, more often, innovative themes – affronted the public, both in print and performance. Yet the turbulent initial audience reactions to taboo- and ground-breaking plays have often been represented as self-evident confrontations between progressive creative artists and philistine theatregoers. By closely examining one apparently typical case of resistance to the new drama – the uproar at the 1889 premiere in Berlin of Gerhart Hauptmann's Before Sunrise – Neil Blackadder demonstrates the complex relationship between production and reception in the early modern theatre. He considers the behaviour of one offended spectator in particular, along with the response of the independent theatre society which staged the production, and a court's verdict on the validity of his protests. Beyond marking an important turning-point in the history of German theatre, the premiere of Before Sunrise encapsulates several key facets of the modern theatre during a period when its practitioners were becoming more bold and experimental, while changing norms of conduct were, paradoxically, rendering audiences more restrained. Neil Blackadder is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Drama at Duke University, curently visiting at Knox College. He is writing a book on modern theatre scandals.
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TL;DR: The great classical Indian dancer and co-founder of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), Sanjukta Panigrahi, died in June 1997.
Abstract: The great classical Indian dancer and co-founder of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Sanjukta Panigrahi, died in June 1997. An outstanding exponent – and virtually the rediscoverer – of Odissi dance, Sanjukta Panigrahi was born in Orissa into a Brahmin family, and defied the prejudice of her caste as the first girl to pursue Odissi dance as a career. With the support of her family, she began studying at the age of five under the guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, with whom she worked for many years, and also trained in Bharata Natyam for six years with the master Rukmini Devi. Julia Varley, an Odin Teatret actress since 1977, knew and worked with Sanjukta for twenty years, and in the following article offers her memories and reconstruction of the experiences of apprenticeship, performance, technique, cultural exchange, teaching, and family and work relationships, both in India and within the multicultural context of ISTA. Sanjukta's own descriptions of her life and work, drawn from a wide variety of sources, are interspersed throughout the article, in an attempt to keep alive this remarkable actress/dancer's way of thinking and being, coloured by her particular female strength. Julia Varley was born in London in 1954, spent her childhood in Milan, joined Odin in 1976, and has been a participant in the ISTA sessions since their conception in 1980.
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TL;DR: In this paper, Rudolf Weiss argues that the quasi-Chekhovian stamp of Barker's work does not derive from influence but reflects the distinctive Zeitgeist of the turn of the twentieth century.
Abstract: Harley Granville Barker, the major innovator in the English theatre at the beginning of the present century, was long underestimated as a playwright, and misjudged as a mediocre imitator of Bernard Shaw. In more recent years major revivals of his plays, as well as new critical studies and editions, have witnessed a renewed interest in Barker as a dramatist, which, Rudolf Weiss here argues, testifies to the Chekhovian rather than the Shavian qualities of his plays. In the following article Weiss explores these qualities in the context of the early reception of Chekhov's plays in Britain, and on the basis of a reassessment of the existing records he offers a new view of Barker's originality as a playwright, concluding that the quasi-Chekhovian stamp of his work does not derive from influence but reflects the distinctive Zeitgeist of the turn of the twentieth century. Rudolf Weiss, who teaches in the English Department of the University of Vienna, has previously published on Arthur Wing Pinero, John Galsworthy, Harley Granville Barker, and Elizabeth Baker.
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TL;DR: Gargano as mentioned in this paper explores three new works that premiered in the 1995-96 New York City season and discusses the way these performances rely, consciously or unconsciously, on this paradigm shift and proposes that all three plays, while different in style, venue, and narrative, have at their base an assumption of a quantum universe.
Abstract: Today, argues Cara Gargano, we are at the cusp of a scientific paradigm shift which is having a profound influence on the way we construct our art and our identity. Like the shift from an oral to a literary mode of communication, or from a geocentric to a heliocentric world view, the movement from a Newtonian to a quantum world view has altered not only the way we understand our universe but the way we write and perform it. In recent years, critics David R. George, Natalie Crohn Schmitt, David Porush, and William Demastes have used terminology and concepts from the ‘new science’ to theorize about theatre. In this article Cara Gargano explores three new works that premiered in the 1995–96 New York City season – Rent, Interfacing Joan , and The Universe ( ie, How It Works ) – and discusses the way these performances rely, consciously or unconsciously, on this paradigm shift. She proposes that all three plays, while different in style, venue, and narrative, have at their base an assumption of a quantum universe – that is, they create a holistic mythology that gestures toward the theatre's origins as a ritual interaction with our world, and moves from a postmodern to a pre-millennial stance. Cara Gargano is Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has published in Modern Drama, L'Annuaire Theâtrale, New Theatre Quarterly , and Dance and Research . Her recent article in Reliologiques deals with the myth of Orpheus as a model for the quantum world.
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TL;DR: Poh Sim Plowright recently went to South Thailand and North Malaysia to examine the relevance of the ‘birdwoman’ folk tale to the lives of the villagers in those two regions.
Abstract: When is a widely-known fairy tale more than a story? Poh Sim Plowright recently went to South Thailand and North Malaysia to examine the relevance of the ‘birdwoman’ folk tale to the lives of the villagers1 in those two regions. Here the local people still participate in a ritual dramatization of a story which for them represents a crucial renewal of life in their yearly calendar – a celebration of the roots of feminine magical power which goes back to the ancient historical south-east Asian practice by which a victorious ruler would carry back as booty to his kingdom the wives and dancers of the vanquished. Since most of the members of these royal harems were mediums gifted with special powers of healing and communicating with spirits, they were seen as valuable additions to a ruler's aura of divinity – and consequently to his terrestrial power. More importantly, the theatrical art form known as Manora, which enshrines the ‘birdwoman’ tale, is said to have been founded by two royal female trance mediums, regarded as primal healers and guardians of a life-renewing elixir: thus, each performance also serves as a shamanic and healing ritual. The performances here described by Poh Sim Plowright also have links with drama in China and Japan, and at the end of her article she explores the powerful connection with W. B. Yeats's celebrated ‘birdwoman’ play, At the Hawk's Well, which features a ‘Hawk’ Woman guarding a ‘well of miraculous water’ against male intrusion. Poh Sim Plowright is Director of the Centre for the Study of Noh Drama and Lecturer in Oriental Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
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TL;DR: The connections between film and theatre in Hong Kong have always been close, from the film adaptations of Cantonese opera in the 1930s, through the female movies of the post-war period and the western following for Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, to the present dominance of the cross-generic production company, Springtime, in the 1990s, with a creative interest in its own past which verges on the metatheatrical as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: From the run-up to its return to Chinese rule in July 1997 to the stock-market crash in October, Hong Kong has seldom been out of the news during the past year. But the attention paid to its political and economic provenance has not been matched by much interest in its cultural output – despite the existence in Hong Kong of a cinema industry with a prodigious output now approaching ten thousand films. Although a professional theatre has been a relatively more recent development, the connections between film and theatre in Hong Kong have always been close – from the film adaptations of Cantonese opera in the 1930s, through the ‘female’ films of the post-war period and the western following for Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, to the present dominance of the cross-generic production company, Springtime, in the 1990s, with a creative interest in its own past which verges on the metatheatrical. Frank Bren, who is presently living and working in Hong Kong, here captures something of the history and the distinctive flavour of the overlapping movie and theatre industries, and assesses why the relationship remains mutually profitable in artistic as well as economic terms.
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TL;DR: For King Lear: Text and Performance as discussed by the authors, three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear.
Abstract: As a companion piece to the foregoing study of Ophelia and /, Hamlet , there follows a full appraisal of a project discussed in the previous issue (NTQ53) as part of our feature on the Open University/BBC experiments in ‘multimedia Shakespeare’. For King Lear: Text and Performance – one of the pilot CD-ROMS which were the end-products of the experiment – three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear . The most innovative of these, in Teresa Dobson's judgement, was conceived and directed by the Canadian performance artist and writer Beau Coleman, who envisioned a female Lear – a woman who, having found success in a male-dominated world, comes to confront the nature of that power in the process of relinquishing it. Teresa Dobson, who teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, witnessed and here records the development of the project, also assessing how far it succeeded in its intention to ‘raise questions about the gender and power relations in King Lear , as well as questions about what happens when Lear himself is cast against gender’.
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TL;DR: The authors explored the social and cultural significance of two influential local productions, staged almost a decade apart, We're Hong Kong, shortly after the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, and Tales of the Walled City, coinciding with the moment of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese rule.
Abstract: The case of Hong Kong – acquired by the British under treaty, and restored to Chinese sovereignty in what some perceived as merely a shift from colonial to neo-colonial rule – always seemed a special case in the debate over post-colonialism. In NTQ53 (February 1998) Frank Bren looked primarily from an artistic and administrative viewpoint at the connections between film and theatre in the former colony: in the article which follows, Yun Tong Luk explores the social and cultural significance of two influential local productions, staged almost a decade apart – one, We're Hong Kong, shortly after the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the other; Tales of the Walled City, coinciding with the moment of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese rule. He points out the uniqueness of post-colonial experience in the territory, and examines the ambivalent attitudes of the Hong Kong people before and after the change of sovereignty.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss HTML and its performative characteristics, multimedia capacity, non-linear structure, interactive possibilities, real-time relationship with its readers and navigators, and potential interest to writers cum artists cum performers.
Abstract: GOOD EVENING Tonight I've been asked to talk to you about HTML – hypertext markup language – and its performative characteristics; its multimedia capacity; its non-linear structure; its interactive possibilities; its real-time relationship with its readers slash navigators slash audience; and its potential interest to writers cum artists cum performers