Performing Data in Australasia

Performance Paradigm Volume 21

Guest Editors

Mara Davis Johnson (U of Wollongong), Benjamin Laird (Flinders U/Australian Creative Histories and Futures), Sarah Thomasson (Te Herenga Waka – Victoria U of Wellington/U of Queensland), James Wenley (Te Herenga Waka – Victoria U of Wellington). 

Call for Papers

This special issue invites contributions that explore examples of performance practice that engage with data or that undertake research into performance processes, infrastructures, flows, and networks across the region through data analysis and visualisation. 

Theatre and performance generate data through processes of making, spectating, and analysing. As Miguel Escobar Varela has observed in Theater as Data, “We live in a world that is made for data and from data, as data shapes us in more ways than one” (2021: 1, original emphasis). Artists not only use data in performance-making processes but also interrogate critical issues brought about by datafication through performance. Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein argue in Data Feminism that “data collection has long been employed as a technique of consolidating knowledge about the people whose data are collected, and therefore consolidating power over their lives” (2020: 12) with governments collecting data for surveillance, corporations for profit, and universities for science. Similarly, Kevin Guyan’s Rainbow Trap, calls attention to how ‘Classification practices masterfully organize our lives – determining what is possible and impossible, determining who is possible and impossible – while covering their tracks’ (2025: 7). Beyond numbers, spreadsheets, and demographic statistics, they suggest that “data can also consist of words or stories, colors or sounds, or any type of information that is systematically collected, organized, and analyzed” (14). Performing data, as defined by Thomasson, Wenley, Bollen, and Davis Johnson, are “units of information generated in performance and performance-making that are selected, collected and systemized to enable processing, analysis, visualization and presentation in digital, embodied or hybrid forms” (forthcoming). Performance, and research about performance, can “rehumanize data” (Bhargava et al. 2022: 104) through embodiment and affect, disrupting conceptions of data as neutral and objective, improving critical data literacy, and providing evidence for advocacy and collective action.

The harmonisation of the Theatre Aotearoa and AusStage live performing arts databases provides a valuable resource and dataset to investigate performance in the region in new ways. It also opens up possibilities for interdisciplinary connections, such as with the Kinomatics dataset, or to expand the geographical reach through collaboration with the Asian Intercultural Digital Archives project, for example. Contributors to this special issue will expand the scope of performing data in research and practice across the region by interrogating performance-related data, performance that explores data, or digital tools that allow for data to perform in new ways. We seek articles that engage with one or more of the five ideas outlined below:

• Data as performance – how we embody and enact data in performance and the role performance plays in interpreting, critiquing, and presenting data. Data as performance encompasses: innovations in the capture, processing, and analysis of audience data; use of social data and statistics on stage; technologies that process performer data; performance that engages with generative AI.

• Data as dramaturgy – how we use data to represent creative processes and how data analysis and visualisation help us better understand dramaturgical structure. This could include: accounts of rehearsal processes; practice research perspectives on working with data in the rehearsal room; the production of concept maps and character relations.

• Data as documentation – how we record information in documenting and archiving live performance. Inquiries could focus on: patterns in artistic programming; prevalence of individual works; dynamics of arts funding cycles; archiving and documentation practices, including those using analytical AI tools; the programming or coding of data.  

• Data as flow – how we follow the movement of performance in space. This could involve: analysis of touring practices; mapping methods; a focus on venues and sites where performance takes place.

• Data as genealogy – whakapapa – how we trace lines of influence from artist to artist through performance over time. This could include: analysis of repertoire, actor networks, artistic collaborations, performance training; artist biographies.

Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to Mara Davis Johnson (mara@uow.edu.au) by 26 June 2026. If successful, full papers of 6000 to 8000 words or shorter pieces of 3000 to 4000 words with images, visualisations or datasets will be due by 5 October 2026. Interested parties are invited to attend a working session dedicated to analysing and visualising data as part of the Performing Data Symposium hosted by Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, 25–26 August 2026.

References

Bhargava, R., A. Brea, V. Palacin, L. Perovich and J. Hinson (2022). ‘Data Theatre as an Entry Point to Data Literacy’, Educational Technology ＆ Society, 25 (4): 93–108. 

D’Ignazio, C. and L. F. Klein (2020), Data Feminism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Escobar Varela, M. (2021), Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Guyan, K. (2025), Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion. London: Bloomsbury.

Thomasson, S., J. Wenley, J. Bollen and M. Davis Johnson (forthcoming). Performing Data: Theatre Practice and Research, London: Bloomsbury.

CFP Performance Paradigm 19 Special Issue 2024:

Moving South - The Reconceptualisation of Dance Research in the 2020s

Co-editors:

• Erin Brannigan 
• Tia Reihana 
• Siobhan Murphy
• Emma Willis 

Perform or Else? Surveying the state of the discipline for the post-pandemic world

Edited by Emma Willis (University of Auckland), Chris Hay (University of Queensland), and Nien Yuan Cheng (University of Sydney)

Performance and Radical Kindness  

Edited by Emma Willis (University of Auckland) and Alys Longley (University of Auckland)

Kindness as a radical act is not just ‘being nice’ to one another; it is the core of articulating, recognising, and valuing the complexity and beauty of the human condition, and putting this into practice in order to dismantle harmful systems of oppression and subjugation. Radical kindness is the creation of space for vulnerability. (Burton and Turbine 2019)

Performing Southern Feminisms

Co-editors: Caroline Wake (University of New South Wales) and Emma Willis (University of Auckland), and section editors (TBC)

From Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the United Nations to comedian Hannah Gadsby on Netflix—the women of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia have rarely been more visible on the international stage. Like their sisters around the world, the women of the Asia-Pacific raised their hands and voices in 2017 to say #metoo. However, regional differences mean that the movement has unfolded differently here. In Australia, strict defamation laws have stymied the naming of perpetrators and instead facilitated the effective “weaponisation” of the #metoo movement (Maley 2018). In China, women were using the hashtags #我也是 (#IAmAlso) and #MeToo在中国 (#MeTooInChina) until the tags were banned, at which pointed they switched to the user-generated nickname for the movement, 米兔, which translates as “rice bunny” but is pronounced as “mi tu” (Zeng 2018). In other instances, the movement served to reanimate previous efforts, for example the Australia Council of the Arts’ report Women in Theatre (Lally and Miller 2012) and in the Republic of Korea, Seo Ji-hyun’s complaint against her senior colleague in 2010 (Haynes and Chen 2018). Now, twelve years after Tarana Burke first tweeted #metoo, and one year after it went viral, women are also asking themselves—what next?

Performance, Politics and Non-Participation

Co-editors: Caroline Wake (UNSW, Sydney) and Emma Willis (University of Auckland)

I would prefer not to. —Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)

Like Bartleby, the legal clerk who famously decides that he would prefer not to, this issue of Performance Paradigm—an open-access, peer-reviewed journal now in its 14th year—investigates the politics and performance of non-participation. The figure of Bartleby appears everywhere in political theory and philosophy: in Gilles Deleuze’s “Bartleby, ou la formule” (1989); in Giorgio Agamben’s companion piece (1993; published in English 1999); in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000); and in Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View (2010). In performance, his spirit manifests in Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler’s project Museum of Non-Participation (from 2007). In performance scholarship, he recently appeared in Daniel Sack’s After Live: Possibility, Potentiality and the Future of Performance (2015). Perhaps we hear him in phrases such as “don’t do it on my account” and catchphrases such as “computer says no”. We might even see him, his slogan printed on a bag or a t-shirt. What are we to make of the fact that more than 160 years after Bartleby first appeared, both pizza ads and productivity coaches proclaim: “No is the new yes” (Huffington Post 2012; Kellaway 2017; Schwartz 2012)? And what is the difference between the “no” and the “non” when it comes to participation? One can choose not to participate (refuse) or one may be excluded from participation, which is altogether different. Is to refuse important in and of itself or should it build towards action; is it, in fact, more a type of action—a striking against—than non-participation?

Performance, Choreography and the Gallery

Edited by Erin Brannigan (UNSW Sydney), Hannah Mathews (Monash University Museum of Art), and Caroline Wake (UNSW Sydney)

This issue of Performance Paradigm takes the 2016 Biennale of Sydney as a starting point for a broader discussion about the relations between performance, choreography and the gallery. Of course, the appearance of performance in the gallery and in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector more broadly is not new. Indeed, the Biennale’s 2016 artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal and two of her ‘curatorial attachés’, Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki, have been working at this intersection for years. So too have scholars such as Claire Bishop (2012; 2014), Shannon Jackson (2011), and Susan Bennett (2009).

Performance, Technology, Intimacy

Edited by Caroline Wake (UNSW, Sydney) and Anna Scheer (University of New England)

Taking its cue from the title of Caryl Churchill’s recent play, this issue investigates the performance, politics and dialectics of “love and information”.

In his review of the play, Michael Billington observed that, “we live in a world where information bombardment is in danger of leading to atrophy of memory, erosion of privacy and decay of feeling.” Yet his criticisms are couched in binaries that the play itself, and contemporary performance more broadly, challenges, unsettles, disrupts and even refuses. In an age of big data, small screens, social media and algorithmic match-making, can we really separate liking and “liking”? Even if we could, are we comfortable with the implicit hierarchies of co-presence here? If technology has become, for better or worse, an “architect of our intimacies” how does performance respond to, reproduce or resist both those architectures and those intimacies?

Staging Real People: On the Arts and Effects of Non-Professional Theatre Performers

Guest edited by Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford

Performance practice since the 1990s has been characterised by an increased interest in the phenomenon of theatre without professional performers. Such performers are selected for a variety of reasons, including: their life experiences, their status as specialists in spheres of expertise other than that of art performance, and their connection to particular social categories such as economic class, field of work, ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability. In the work of companies such as Rimini Protokoll these performers are referred to as both ‘protagonists’ and ‘experts of the everyday’. In her recent study of participatory art, Claire Bishop gives the label ‘delegated performance’ to the tendency to hire such people to perform on behalf of the artist (2012: 219). The currently prominent modes of staging real people* recall, modify or challenge a diverse range of traditions and genres, from realist, documentary, and Dadaist experiments to popular entertainment forms including gladiator fights, freak shows, and most prominently today, reality television.