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.