Dear all,

You are warmly invited to the launch of Political Cyberformance: The Etheatre Project  by Dr Christina Papagiannouli. Published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015, Political Cyberformance is the first monograph to consider the political potential of online theatre, offering a historical account of online theatre and a detailed analysis of a range of online works, including productions by the National Theatre Wales, NTLive, Dries Verhoeven, Forced Entertainment and Rimini Protokoll.

The book examines the use of Internet platforms as theatrical, rehearsal and performance spaces and explores the interactive and political potentials of online theatre, questioning the boundaries of these in-between spaces and the spatial experiences they engender. Writing from a practice-based perspective, Papagiannouli looks at forms of cyber-adaptation, cyber-ethnotheatre and cyber-collaboration as directing methodologies for producing dialectical forms of political cyberformances (in Brechtian terms), with reference respectively to the productions of Cyberian Chalk Circle (2011), Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear (2002) and Etheatre Project and Collaborators (2014). 

To celebrate the publication the Creative Industries Research Institute at the University of South Wales will hold a book launch and research seminar on Tuesday 26 April 2016, between 5.30-6.30pm in the ATRiuM's Boardroom (CA A419). In addition to Christina's talk, the event will feature writer, theatre practitioner and digital artist Helen Varley Jamieson as a guest speaker.