Members of the Performance & Integrated Media group participated in a recent CHAT Festival panel, "In the Process: Technology, Liveness & Stage/Screen Synthesis." They discussed recent technological developments that have altered the scope of the performing arts and changed the way it's made and who makes it.

Raquel Salvatella de Prada (Art, Art History & Visual Studies) and Torry Bend (Theater Studies) shared clips from their puppet show The Paper Hat Game. The blend of live action puppetry with video was hard to manage, they said, but in the end they were able to make it work. But that success created another challenge later on, when they were documenting the show using video — the mix of live and recorded elements that was so rich and exciting in Sheafer Theater tended to look too flat on the screen. Their interest was piqued by a suggestion from Randy Riddle (Office of Information Technology) that others on campus are looking into the potential of 3D cameras.

Tommy DeFrantz (Dance/African & African American Studies) showed clips of his terrific anime production at MIT, a collaboration with Ian Condry of MIT's Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. This was a perfect example of reaching across the humanities to make work that brings undergraduates into the performance experience. Jody McAuliffe (Theater Studies/Slavic and Eurasian Studies) and William Noland (Art, Art History & Visual Studies) presented clips from Wole Soyinka's play The Beatification of Area Boy (performed last year by undergraduates at Duke with Soyinka as collaborator), Now You See Me, by Neal Bell (Theater Studies)—a professional production coming to Manbites Dog Theater in March—and Mao II— McAuliffe's theatrical adaptation of the novel by Don DeLillo, presented by Theater Previews at Duke in 2002. Each in its own way was a provocative exploration of the interaction between live performance and video.