Faces between numbers: re-imagining theatre and performance as instruments of critical data studies within a liberal arts education

ABSTRACT

As information literacy and data-driven program evaluations have become growing obsessions within academic institutions, how might liberal arts and humanities programmes engage students in both critical and creative explorations of contemporary human-data relations? Inspired by the variety of metaphors that currently shape human-data relations and an analysis of two recent theatre productions that employ data as dramaturgical material, this essay offers a speculative model for such classroom-based explorations.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical data studies
• performance studies
• data Humanism
• human-data Interaction
• theatre studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Richard C. Windeyer, trained in electroacoustic music composition, theatre sound design and percussion, is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (University of Toronto). His research explores the integration of theatrical performance, prototyping and information design.

ORCID

Richard C. Windeyer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1044-6615

Notes

1. 100% Montreal is a recent iteration of an ongoing series of city-specific, participatory theatre productions by German documentary theatre company Rimini Protokoll entitled 100% City begun in 2008.

2. Through its Humanities Indicators project, (https://www.humanitiesindicators.org) a 2015 study by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, observed that the number of bachelor’s degrees in the humanities earned in 2015, was down nearly 10 percent from three years previously.

3. According to Kitchin (2014, 27), ‘big data’ is fine-grained and unstructured. It is continuously generated by online transactions and networked devices. Collected and processed at ever-accelerating speeds, its big-ness is simply a function of today’s computational capacity. Stored at ever-expanding scales of volume and variety and distributed across multiple physical and networked locations, big data’s imperative is threefold: to be exhaustive in detail (rather than selective); flexible and extensible in its ability to be combined or conjoined with other datasets through common fields.

4. In the public sector, for instance, thousands of disparate data systems effectively share data with each other, whereas in the private sector, the data is bought and sold. All of this is part of complex political economies that work to capture, analyse and reshape the world through data.

5. Simultaneously, the degree of a dataset’s reliability is always subject to error and bias – whether on the part of those who devise the means of data’s creation or the subjects of data’s creation themselves, such as the participants in a survey or study. Hence the evolution of confidence levels – a means of statistically calculating the extent to which one may be confident in a dataset’s ability to accurately represent the phenomena being studied.

6. 100% Montreal premiered at Festival TransAmériques, Montreal, on May 25, 2017. It was produced in collaboration with local artists, musicians and production staff. It was presented by BMO Groupe financier, with the support of Goethe-Institut Montréal + Ministère des Affaires étrangères d’Allemagne as part of L’Allemagne @ Canada 2017 – Partenaires : de l’immigration à l’innovation + Fondation Cole in association with Société de la Place des Arts. It was also part of the official programming of the 375th anniversary of Montreal.

7. A term initially coined by Rimini Protokoll co-director Helgard Haug (see Paterson 2016, 59).

8. On May 26, 2017 at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe. Presented as part of the Festival TransAmériques.

9. As exemplified in Canada, in the 2010 controversy surrounding the Harper government’s replacing of the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary national household survey and the inherent loss of data that resulted. For details, see Harris (2015).

10. Produced as the inaugural project of The Chimera Network – a UK-based organisation devoted to exploring the intersections between medicine and performance – this proscenium theatre production of Bloodlines has since been performed at the ‪Rose Theatre, Kingston University (2014), the Dana Centre (2013), the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama (2014), the Science Museum London (2014) and the Rose Theatre Kingston (2014), Omnibus in Clapham (2015), Ivy Centre in Guildford Kingston Connections (2015), Festival of Stories at the Rose Theatre (2015), Belgium Haematological Society (2015), Antwerp University Hospital (2014), among others (source: https://chimeranetwork.org/category/bloodlines/page/2/).

11. Taylor’s method involved deconstructing each worker’s task into a series of discrete actions or ‘working cycles.’ These would be studied, timed, and streamlined for maximum efficiency. The actions were then reassembled and the worker was retrained. It was through ‘Taylorism’ that Henry Ford developed the assembly line and revolutionised manufacturing by dramatically reducing production costs while increasing profits which in turn lowered the purchase price of the car so that every Ford employee could afford to purchase one.

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to acknowledge support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Doctoral Award) and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.