Live Performance and Video Games: Inspirations, Appropriations and Mutual Transfers

Narrative strategies, immersion, interaction, participation, identification, multimodality, characters and the connection between physical and fictional or virtual worlds: the fields of inquiry into the complex relationship between live performance and video games are numerous and diverse. For the first time, this collection brings together international researchers and artists to explore this relationship in a variety of essays. The contributors to this volume focus on reciprocal inspirations, appropriations and transfers applied by theatre artists, game designers and researchers. They analyze several artistic forms such as VR performance, immersive theatre, speedrunning or game theatre.

Réjane Dreifuss works as a dramaturge and project manager for the theatre company sonimage. Together with the author and director Igor Bauersima, she has written and directed theatre plays under the pseudonym Réjane Desvignes, in which digital technologies play a crucial role in the creation of narratives. Since 2016, she has been researching the influence of digitalization on theatre, with a particular focus on the generation of new narrative forms. She is a lecturer and researcher in the Department Performing Arts and Film at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.

Simon Hagemann is a lecturer in communication at the IUT of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges (University of Lorraine) and an associate researcher at CREM (Centre de recherche sur les médiations). He also holds a doctorate in theatre studies (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3). His work focuses on video games, theatre, history and media innovations.

Izabella Pluta is a researcher in the performing arts (PhD in theatre and cinema), theatre critic and translator as well as associated researcher at the Center of Theatre Studies (University of Lausanne). She has been granted advanced research fellowship Fernand Braudel IFER, Marie Curie Fellowships at Université Lyon 2 and ENSATT (2013-2014) et Directeur d'études associé (DEA) at several laboratory's spaces in France such as Atelier Art/Science or Studio Fresnoy.