Bloomsbury Drama and Digital Arts Cultures (Methuen Drama Engage)

Drama and Digital Arts Cultures is a critical guide to the new forms of playful exploration, co-creativity, and improvised performance made possible by digital networked media. Drawing on examples from games, education, online media, technology-enabled performance and the creative industries, the book uses the elements of applied drama to frame our understanding of digital cultures.Exploring the connected real-world and virtual spaces where young people are making and sharing digital content, it draws attention to the fundamental applied drama conventions that infuse and activate this networked culture. Challenging descriptions of drama and digital technology as binary opposites, the book maps common principles and practice grounded in role, embodiment, performance, play, and identity that are being amplified and enhanced by the affordances of online media. Drama and Digital Arts Cultures draws together extensive original research including interviews with game designers, media producers, educators, artists and makers at the heart of these new digital cultures. Young people discuss their own creative practices and products, providing insight into a complex and evolving world being transformed by digital technologies. A practical guide to the field, it contains case studies and examples of the intersections of drama conventions and networked cultures drawn from the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Singapore and Australia.Written for scholars, educators, students and 'makers' everywhere, Drama and Digital Arts Cultures provides a clear understanding of how young people are blending creativity and learning with the powerful and empowering conventions of drama to create new forms of multimodal and transmedia storytelling. Review This has the potential to be a leading book in the field it is itself participating in defining. What they propose is a significant and unique contribution to a specific area of performance studies.... what [it]does and offers goes beyond the by now 'traditional' notions of what constitutes 'digital performance' and challenges the established boundaries of 'performance' itself.Mark Taylor-Batty, University of Leeds, UKThis is a compelling topic that is both timely and engaging. My sense is that the intersection of digital methods in education will continue at a rapid progression and the number of relevant programs will continue to expand. This makes the book both timely and likely to be durable in the long run.Sarah Bay-Cheng, University at Buffalo, SUNY, USAThis is a well-formulated and very timely proposal, and an ideal volume for the ENGAGE series. The coauthors have centered their attention on a compelling new way to think about the forms and conventions of drama as conventionally constructed in relation to the relatively new digital culture. Their multiple discussions range widely, moving on from elements of applied drama to consider the many ways these have been effectively and efficiently reformulated within learning practices, collaboration, performance art and a sometimes surprising number of other rubrics. What results is highly suggestive of the ways we might think of drama in a series of new contexts.Enoch Brater, University of Michigan, USA About the Author Michael Anderson is Professor of Education at the University of Sydney, Australia. His research interests include school transformation, creativity and technology. Michael is co-founder and academic leader of 4C Transformative Learning and presents internationally to schools and other groups on transformation, creativity and learning.