Browsing by Person "Mastrominico, Bianca"

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A shift towards digital and participatory performance practice post-pandemic
(Open Library of Humanities, 2022-02-14) Mastrominico, Bianca; de Roza, Elizabeth
This perspective analyses and reflects upon the experience of conceiving, curating and participating in Bodies:On:Live Magdalena:On:Live, the first online multi-platform Magdalena Festival, bringing together digitally competent artists with creative roots in the immateriality of the internet, in dialogue about current shifts in performance making with performers, writers, and directors declaring their uneasiness towards online adaptations of live work. As part of the global reaction to the standstill brought about by the Covid pandemic, we argue that shifts in practice for women in contemporary theatre associated with the Magdalena network – whether as an attempt for immediate artistic survival or a conscious experimental choice – were not exclusively determined by the available sharing of technical knowledge, or by the need to increase awareness of the digital medium in order to gain experience of different working modalities, but served a participatory and social purpose. These conditions were surfacing due to the digital space manifesting as a specific format of gathering through the Zoom windows and other platforms, which framed the encounters within a democratic performance arena, making the boundaries between participation and spectatorship porous. Therefore, the shift provoked by the festival not only pertains to the aesthetic sphere, but it is dynamically and organically geared towards the recognition of new working contexts arising from the unsettling experience of ‘disembodiment’ – as an ontological paradox of the original in-person Magdalena festival - and the embedded argument of the creative use of new technologies for a more sustainable and accessible future of performance making, both live and digital.
Active spectatorship and co-creation in the digital making of Flanker Origami
(The Open Library of Humanities, 2023-02-14) Mastrominico, Bianca
How do spectators engage with, elaborate on and articulate the experience of a digital performance? What are the parameters that regulate the bodily interaction between performers and spectators, when the latter are ‘not seen to be seeing’ through digital screens? When and how does a spectator gain agency in a mediated creative encounter? This paper aims to re-construct the affective nature of the entanglement between the spectator’s body and the non-human, facilitated by the performer whose body is in collision with the technology. In my analysis, I will utilise first-hand responses by diverse spectators experiencing iterations of Flanker Origami - a live online and home-specific performance, originally devised with my company Organic Theatre for the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021, and currently developed into an ongoing practice research project. The documentation examined draws upon a mentorship meeting on Zoom with Odin Teatret’s Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley, alongside formal and informal feedback gathered through audience reviews, Q&As, notes, emails, citations and social media interactions, seminars and private conversations in person and online. While the digital performer’s awareness of the encounter is shaped by a praxis made up of their working strategies and creative choices, the reactions and commentary from apparently disembodied spectators shift the focus to a polyphonic reading of the digital work. This, I argue, carries the potential to change meaning, purpose and direction of the performance, which starts reverberating in and growing through the intersection with processes of ‘active spectatorship’, emerging as a tendency for spectators to generate alternative pathways of embodying the remote communication. My conclusion proposes that far from being disorienting or promoting detachment, in this fluid interchange technology itself constitutes the porous membrane through which digital spectators become co-creators of Flanker Origami, influencing the performance and its developments through the immediacy of their response to and levelled participation in the technologically enabled making process.
Bianca Mastrominico and John Dean: Flanker Origami
(2021-08-20) Mastrominico, Bianca; Dean, John; Moses, Caro
Bodies:On:Live – Magdalena:On:Line [Review]
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-01-24) Mastrominico, Bianca
Chapter 10: White is the colour of my name: anti-racism in theatre and performance praxis
(Critical Publishing, 2023-05-26) Mastrominico, Bianca; Marcus, Geetha; Van de Peer, Stefanie
Come together - connecting worlds apart
(2007) Mastrominico, Bianca
Digital HotSpot: virtual agencies in online performer training
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-08-23) Mastrominico, Bianca
In February 2020, while in lockdown, Edinburgh-based performance laboratory Organic Theatre embarked on a digital shift of their live performance processes halted by the Covid-19 pandemic through a series of explorative sessions experimenting with ensemble training on the Zoom platform. These digital encounters between remote performers from different backgrounds morphed into an open digital incubator researching how the technology itself could become an agential stimulus to continue training and practicing in a situation of confinement and isolation. From there, Digital HotSpot was created and is still evolving as a performance research collective working remotely to explore the potential of online training and practice, as well as the soft boundaries between performance, space and spectatorship on digital. Embracing technology and hybrid interactions, Digital HotSpot sessions invite performers to react to the initial sense of disempowerment induced by physical distance, and virtually connect by experimenting with their digital performance presence in an online studio environment. While testing the possibilities of the online space to increase the agential elements of performer training, Digital Hotspot participants are enabled by the technology and hybrid working conditions to find unpredictable working strategies, establishing collective agency through their shared attempts to understand how to communicate somatic practice through screen technology. This visual essay aims to analyse the extensive audio-visual Zoom documentation of Digital HotSpot sessions, following its developments through various stages of the pandemic and beyond, alongside the discussions and brainstorming by participants around their experience of self-determination through online training. While the initial stages of the pandemic-driven experimentation provided a fertile playground for emerging ideas of how to embrace the digital in our training practices, the focus of the sessions has now shifted towards building a professional toolkit for performers who wish to communicate and work together creatively through digital platforms. © 2023 Digital HotSpot.
Embodying Essence through Absence - Performance practice and pedagogy through digital platforms
(Mimesis Edizioni, Milan, 2022-10-24) Mastrominico, Bianca
In this article Bianca Mastrominico focuses on how to embody liveness through digital platforms within the framework of theatre anthropology, looking at how remote performers and spectators interact through screen technology to discern principles and techniques that can guide online training, and creating work for a digital spectator. Her conclusions envisage a soft technology which fosters participatory practice and includes the non-human in creative processes.
Exploring learner and tutor experiences of Wimba in drama and the creative industries
(2010-05-12) Girdler, Simon T.; Peacock, Susi; Dean, John; Mastrominico, Bianca; Brown, Douglas; Murray, Sue
Nine-month funded project by PALATINE (the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music). Focus on online synchronous learning environments (OSLEs) such as Wimba in drama and cultural management.
Exploring Tutor and Student Experiences in Online Synchronous Learning Environments in the Performing Arts
(Scientific Research, 2012-11) Peacock, Susi; Murray, Sue; Dean, John; Brown, D. M.; Girdler, Simon; Mastrominico, Bianca
High levels of student dissatisfaction and attrition persist in blended and online distance learning programmes. As students and tutors become more geographically dispersed with fewer opportunities for face-to-face contact emergent technologies like Online Synchronous Learning Environments (OSLEs) may provide an interactive, connected learning environment. OSLEs, such as Blackboard Collaborate and Adobe Connect, are web-based, computer-mediated communication programs typically using video and audio. This article reports the findings of an exploratory, nine-month study in the performing arts in which tutors used an OSLE for dissertation supervision, pastoral support and performance feedback. Garrison & Andersons (2003) Community of Inquiry (COI) framework was used as the basis for evaluation of student and tutor experiences to explore in what ways learning could be supported when using the OSLE. Our findings indicate significant benefits of OSLEs including convenience, immediacy of communication and empowerment of learners, even for our rehearsal-based case study. For students, it was important to see and talk with each other (peers and tutors), share and discuss developing ideas and check understanding through the video and audio media. Tutors reported that OSLEs required them to re-think the design of the learning environment, re-visit how they facilitated discourse and re-examine their communication skills especially with regard to feedback on student performance. Technical limitations such as poor quality audio and video, lack of system robustness, and the need for turn-taking did impact on learning; however, it was accepted that OSLE-technology was improving, and rapidly so. Despite the limitations of the study, the evaluation using the COI framework demonstrated that learning had been supported and that use of an OSLE could support all three elements of the framework: social, cognitive and tutor presence. Also, it was apparent that the tutors and most of the students were extremely committed to using the OSLE believing it offered a lively, personal and dynamic learning space.
Home-specific performance and the digital staging of the domestic in Flanker Origami
(Informa UK Limited, 2023-07-31) Mastrominico, Bianca
This paper discusses home as a stage and its intersection with new technologies through an autoethnographic recollection and analysis of practice research, whose processes and methods are entangled with both digital and domestic environments on the virtual stage of Flanker Origami, a live online performance on Zoom devised by Organic Theatre. Premiered as part of the digital programme of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021, the performance is discussed as a case study of shifts in practice driven by the COVID19 pandemic in the real home of the two devisers/performers. This enquiry introduces and discusses home-specific performance as a practice research methodology, which exploits the deep nexus between home, identity and gender in the digital staging of the domestic in Flanker Origami. Analysing online training, hybrid scenography and digital performativity specific to the performers’ home, this practice-based investigation evaluates the benefits and challenges of developing online theatre in a situation of social confinement. The conclusion evidences that home as a digital stage was instrumental in reconfiguring notions of self and authenticity in performance processes driven by the pandemic, while creatively reframing the familiar and the domestic to expand and innovate artistic practice at a critical point of social and personal vulnerability.
Live or alive: a reflection on performance practice in pandemic (Digital) times
(Queen Margaret University, 2020-07-17) Mastrominico, Bianca; Dean, John
Not fewer resources, but different: Creative responses to practice and research during Covid-19
(2022-06-30) Bianchi, Victoria; Mastrominico, Bianca; Schrag, Anthony
The cultural and creative industries have been one of the hardest-hit by the international Covid-19 pandemic. In the wake of this seismic shift, there has been a proliferation of events and publications exploring how artists have responded to living and working in a pandemic. There exists a sense of lamenting those things that seem lost or, at the very least, placed on pause. However, while Covid-19 has undoubtedly had a lasting impact on practitioners, the temporary digitisation of artistic practice has resulted in new possibilities for practice and national / international collaboration. It was this sense of possibility that was the focus of a seminar series recently held at Queen Margaret University, which forefronted the potential positive adaptations within practice research due to Covid-19. Certainly, the cultural and creative domains have been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, but the series aimed to argue that creative practitioners are experts in exploring new ways of thinking and being and suggested that in these difficult times we don't have fewer resources; rather we have different resources. The central thrust of these seminars, therefore, was to reflect on positive changes to practice. Keywords: online performance, covid adaptation, practice research, media, performance
Postdigital Practice Research: Dance Plague with Flanker Origami
(Queen Margaret University, 2025-03-08) Mastrominico, Bianca; Dean, John; Smith, Phil
Dance Plague with Flanker Origami by Organic Theatre is based on the digitally born characters of Flanker and Origami who are trapped in a world of digital performance. According to Phil Smith they are ‘an ontological performance of characters in the face of existential threat, attempting to exist in fiction, emerging from a crisis of liveness in the backwash of a global epidemic’. (Phil Smith 2023) • Performed by myself as Flanker and by John Dean as Origami, the characters originally appeared at the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2021, then toured festivals in Europe and Asia digitally, performing in hybrid modality in a pop-up shop in Edinburgh, and in the iterations of Dance Plague in the backstages of UK theatres and cultural organisations. • Structurally, Dance Plague with Flanker Origami is a relentless, ritualistic, dopamine-dressed promenade, reminiscent of European carnival processions, and of the Cornish Helston Dance. It is a social event but not ‘in the usual modern sense, more like the Obby Oss or the Mari Llwd, the social meaning or purpose of which have been forgotten – or were never relevant – and yet which retain a tremendous drive to be done.’ (Phil Smith 2024).
Seminar Report: Not fewer resources, but different: Creative responses to practice and research during Covid-19
(Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, 2022-06-30) Bianchi, Victoria; Mastrominico, Bianca; Schrag, Anthony
The cultural and creative industries have been one of the hardest-hit by the international Covid-19 pandemic. In the wake of this seismic shift, there has been a proliferation of events and publications exploring how artists have responded to living and working in a pandemic. There exists a sense of lamenting those things that seem lost or, at the very least, placed on pause. However, while Covid-19 has undoubtedly had a lasting impact on practitioners, the temporary digitisation of artistic practice has resulted in new possibilities for practice and national / international collaboration. It was this sense of possibility that was the focus of a seminar series recently held at Queen Margaret University, which forefronted the potential positive adaptations within practice research due to Covid-19. Certainly, the cultural and creative domains have been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 crisis, but the series aimed to argue that creative practitioners are experts in exploring new ways of thinking and being and suggested that in these difficult times we don't have fewer resources; rather we have different resources. The central thrust of these seminars, therefore, was to reflect on positive changes to practice.
Toward a future theatre: conversations during a pandemic by Caridad Svich, London, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2021, 256 pp., £65.00 (hardback), £19.99 (paperback), £11.69 (ebook), ISBN: 9781350241060, 1350241067
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-12-13) Mastrominico, Bianca
Towards an Ecology of Becoming - Engendering Posthuman Assemblages through Digital and Hybrid Performance
(Routledge, 2022) Mastrominico, Bianca; Stefano Boselli and Sarah Lucie
This essay analyses and discusses digital and hybrid performance practices created in response to the online shifts driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. It focuses on an emergent theoretical framework which seeks to define the relationship between human and non-human as an ‘ecology of becoming’, using as a case study a 2-year practice research and performance project developed in two iterations – Flanker Origami, a home-specific digital performance for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 and Flanker Origami Go To Town, a hybrid performance pilot at Sook, a multi-purpose, high-tech venue in a newly built shopping centre in Edinburgh, performed in January 2022 for proximal and online spectators. The aim is to offer a critical perspective of the transition from a digital to a hybrid performance space, which intersects and identifies the liminal and interdisciplinary areas of creativity and processes that allow performers and technologies to enmesh, thus reconfiguring and repositioning performance practices in a posthumanist context. While the technologically saturated environments can be seen as influencing and enriching the agency of the non-human on both performers and spectators, through the support of technological devices in the digital home performance and its migration onto the screen technology at Sook, I argue that both processes and performance outcomes engender a posthuman assemblage which diffracts the performers’ identity and the perception of the spectators. I then evaluate how the combined effect of intermedial performances, social media interactions, original animations, digital cinema, hybrid use of screen technology and online platforms build towards the in-presence reveal of the two digital performers in the pop-up shop. The conclusion draws attention to the thresholds between material and immaterial, and the entanglement between the techne of the performer’s body and that of the technology, in a quest for soft boundaries between the post-pandemic human and non-human interaction.
Towards an ecology of becoming: digital performance research under covid-19
(Queen Margaret University, 2021-01-18) Mastrominico, Bianca