Contemporary performance, documentary work and media
This domain tests contemporary performance beyond the dramatic text: performance art, devised and participatory work, and new media. Questions may ask you to classify a practice, analyse an audience relationship, or assess the role of technology.
Practices
Performance art foregrounds presence, body, duration and the real. Happenings involve environment and participation. Fluxus produces event scores. Site-specific work treats place as a partner, not a backdrop. Immersive theatre moves the audience through space. Participatory work gives spectators an active role. Documentary and verbatim theatre use testimony and records. Devised theatre develops through a creative process that may be collaborative; it can also incorporate pre-existing texts and does not require identical authorship arrangements in every production. Postdramatic theatre (Lehmann) decentres text in favour of parataxis, simultaneity, media and spectacle.
New media
Video projection, live cinema, mapping, virtual and augmented reality, sensors, streaming and social media create intermediality. Key concepts: liveness, remediation, feedback loop and audience as co-creator. An analysis task may ask whether a work is still live when it uses recorded material.
Worked example
A performer stands still while a live camera projects her face onto a large screen. Reason: the audience sees two bodies, the mediated image and the live body, and the tension between presence and reproduction becomes the subject. If the camera operator is visible, the work exposes its apparatus; if hidden, it may encourage a different relation to the image; intimacy is one possible response rather than a guaranteed effect. A strong answer names the medium, the relation between live and mediated, and the effect, rather than saying 'it uses technology'.
Traps
Calling any experimental work postdramatic; ignoring the audience's role; assuming technology is automatically innovative; confusing representation with presence; forgetting access, consent and safety in participatory work.
Exam strategy
Define the practice, name its audience contract, and evaluate the specific device. A precise claim should describe the live feed and explain how evidence supports the proposed spectator relationship; a vivid label such as voyeurism is not proof by itself.