Blast Theory’s Karen

Abstract

The continual and rapid emergence of media technologies, predominantly since the digital revolution in the late twentieth century, has generated a new social, cultural and cognitive ecology. This new environment has shaped the landscape of contemporary theatre and performance, and has brought about new modes such as virtual theatre, multimedia performance and online theatre. These emerging performative responses to the mediatized ecology have heralded transformations in directing, performing and design, and, relatedly, a paradigm shift in the ontology of theatre and performance. The textual dimension of theatre – a strong aspect of British theatre tradition that is mostly associated with playtexts - has also adapted to the changing performance landscape. As a result of this adaptation process, new modes of texts have emerged. The texts that have emerged from practices, whose design and performance are partially or completely based on new technologies and their aesthetics, can be considered in this group. This article is an experiment in forging a vocabulary to identify such texts, which it presents as technotexts, and explore some of their ontological characteristics. It offers an attempt to start a conversation about the changing ontology of text in mediatized theatre practice. To this end, I investigate Blast Theory’s Karen (2015), a smart phone app-based, interactive performance, which illustrates an inventive textual landscape through multiple layers of writing, and invites questions regarding the changing form and role of text as a process and product in relation to performance, authorship and spectatorship, and textual object/archive.