Cyborg Theatre ─ Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance

Cyborg Theatre, now available in paperback, investigates the role of bodies within the expanding field of multimedia performance. This innovative study articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre' that metaphorically integrates on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to radically reimagine subjectivity in our posthuman age. Parker-Starbuck covers a variety of provocative examples, both historical and contemporary, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world. She offers a compelling feminist-inspired argument for the ways in which a range of bodies appearing onstage with new technologies serve to challenge notions of identity and destabilize historical binaries. Through a variety of critical lenses, she considers the ways in which bodies are already integrated with technology and the questions this raises in and through performance. The focus on the body is a necessary theorizing of this emergent field, which is often understood solely through the technology on stage.

This new paperback edition of the book includes an added preface to the original text, for a useful contextualisation of multimedia performance in the present day.

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck is a Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Roehampton, UK. In addition to Cyborg Theatre she is the co-editor of Performing Animality (Palgrave 2014) and her essays on bodies, animality, and multimedia have appeared in a variety of books and journals including Theatre Journal, PAJ, Women and Performance Journal, and Theatre Topics. Her essay, 'Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse' (Theatre Journal, October 2013) won the ATHE 2014 Outstanding Article Award.