Surveillance Technologies in Performance and Migration: (Performance and Digital Cultures)

Reflecting on the violent impact of digital border systems and surveillance practices that dehumanises migrating bodies, this book draws parallels to similar harmful acts of identity marking in relation to performance and migration. Performance practice creates an opportunity for bodies reduced to data at digital border zones to reject the numerical label forced upon them, making a more human and multifaceted counternarrative. Leading with the original concept of 'choreographing evidence', the book applies Practice as Research methods to performance works created with artist and refugee Tom Tegento: Uninvited (2021) and Contagion (2021). This work disrupts surveillance technologies and their violence towards bodies at borders as well as using them in alternative ways within performance practice. It considers how choreography which utilises both overt optical tracking technologies and GPS methods embedded in smart devices can enable othered bodies to redraw borders, reclaim narratives and resituate the self. Alongside this PaR work, the book analyses contemporary performance which uses the body and/or technology to explore narratives of migration. It offers examples of UK and European works which critique the way migrating bodies are represented within performance, including Flight Pattern (2019), A Place to Sit (2021), The Walk (Little Amal) (2021) and Now is the Time to Say Nothing (2019). The insights gained offer a richer understanding of the power dynamics at digital borders, how they function, how they can be resisted and how they are felt and lived.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Series Editors' Preface Opening Provocation, Tom Tegento Introduction Intentions: Choreographing Evidence Chapter 1: Transcribing Bodies Into Data Introducing Data to the Body Histories of Data Bodies and Cyborgean Qualities Bodies as Data Recent Technology at Europe's Borders Capturing Bodies Dancing into Data Chapter 2: A Movement Perspective: Performances on Migration and their Implications Flight Pattern and Stolen Embodiment A Place to Sit and Dance with Strangers Walking with Little Amal Temporarily Entering Virtual Worlds in The Machine to Be Another Equal Exchange in Now is the Time to Say Nothing Pillars of Commitment Chapter 3: Re-mapping the Border Within Uninvited Introducing the Practice & Process of Uninvited Carrying the Border Reclaiming the Image Through Drone Intervention Choreographing Evidence by Re-Mapping Borderlines The Uninvited Guest, Spaces of Disallowed Arrival Evidencing The Between as a Site of Autonomy Chapter 4: Re-writing the Body-as-data across Global Spaces through the Contagion Mobile App The Contagion App and Productive Failures Shifts, Becomings and Glitches Evidence Left in Footsteps App Based Interventions Choreographing Evidence: (Re)organising Space and Time Conclusion References Index

About the Author :
Sidonie Carey-Green is Research Associate at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK. She is a dance filmmaker and practitioner-researcher based in the UK with more than 8 years of experience in facilitation, filmmaking and choreographic projects.