Setting the Stage: Scholars Propose ‘Interface Theatre’ as New Theatrical Genre

Our world is mediated by interfaces; from the apps we use to keep organized to the operating systems that run our devices, these technologies are an integral part of the fabric of our everyday lives. And with each moment that ticks by, our experiences and communications are distilled to become data that is used for corporate profit, state surveillance, and our own self-tracking.

This means we not only curate and perform our virtual selves online — how’s your social media looking lately? — but we play other roles that are being scripted by the data being accumulated about us. Media theorists call these characters ‘data doubles’ that, in ways economic, legal, and then some, may be more real than our real selves.

Artists and scholars have long been thinking about our vexed relationships with interfaces, along with how our collective data is being used to make a profit. 

But how do you depict a reality that is increasingly intermixed with virtuality and datafication — and why might the stage, which remains stubbornly analogue, be the perfect place to do so? 

By coining a new critical vocabulary and showing how embodied performance can resist, expose, or even mimic the operations of machine intelligence, Felton-Dansky and Gallagher-Ross offer a demonstration of how theatre remains one of the most powerful tools for understanding our data-driven present. — editors, Modern Drama

“There are so few instances in communal life now where we share the same object of attention in real time,” says Prof. Jacob Gallagher-Ross. He’s an Associate Professor and Chair of the department of English and Drama at UTM, and a graduate faculty member at U of T’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies.

“We may see the same cultural objects circulate online, but we’re not experiencing them together,” he points out. “Theatre offers that — it’s a much older way of being together that isn’t necessarily being commodified in the moment, that isn’t being turned into something abstract that then is for sale.”

His collaborator, Dr. Miriam Felton-Dansky, an Associate Professor of Theater and Performance at Bard College, agrees. 

“Theatre is a kind of interface,” she explains, “but it’s one that functions very differently than digital, where we don’t see what’s happening underneath by design.” 

Felton-Dansky and Gallagher-Ross's longstanding partnership began at Yale School of Drama, where they edited each other’s work as part of a theatre criticism course with American theatre critic Elinor Fuchs. They’ve been each other’s first readers ever since, working together as critics at The Village Voice in New York City and writing for outlets like The New Yorker. 

Their scholarly collaboration includes the Digital Dramaturgies project, a longitudinal study of how new technologies shape and give rise to new theatrical forms. Over the course of the project, they co-edited three special issues of Yale’s Theater magazine: Digital Dramaturgies, Digital Feelings, and Spectatorship in an Age of Surveillance. 

There are so few instances in communal life now where we share the same object of attention in real time. Theatre offers that. It’s a much older way of being together that isn’t necessarily being commodified in the moment, that isn’t being turned into something abstract that then is for sale. — Jacob Gallagher-Ross

Felton-Dansky and Gallagher-Ross are now proposing a new theatrical genre called “interface theatre,” a term that captures how contemporary performance artists are both grappling with the digital interfaces that shape our everyday lives and illustrating for spectators the theatricality of the interfaces themselves. 

Indeed, the interfaces have become characters.

Their article “Interface Theatre: Watching Ourselves Disappear” was published in April 2024 in Modern Drama, a rigorously edited and competitive journal published by the University of Toronto Press (UTP). The essay was awarded the journal’s Outstanding Article Award for 2024, their writing touted by the award jury as “evocative, intellectually generous, and politically urgent.” 

It’s work that builds on the foundation they established in the Digital Dramaturgies Project, and in it they examine three artistic works: Big Art Group’s Opacity (2017), 31Down’s DataPurge (2015/2016), and Marike Splint’s You Are Here (2020).

This summer, the co-authors also received an honourable mention for the 2025 Outstanding Article Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). 

“The ongoing progress of surveillance capitalism continues to be an urgent political social problem, and I think this award speaks to the fact that these questions that are pressing for theatre-makers right now,” says Gallagher-Ross, who says it was incredibly meaningful to have their work recognized by the field.

They are now working on a book-length version of the project, which will be published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama's Performance and Digital Cultures series. It will expand on the concept of interface theatre and offer detailed analysis of artistic works that explore our complex relationship with interfaces as they intersect with pressing issues like geopolitical conflict, online political discourse, and surveillance. Felton-Dansky and Gallagher-Ross aim to establish a clear, usable term that helps audiences and scholars think through what they’re seeing on stage.

One of the beliefs we share is that in many cases artists are thinking about these questions alongside and sometimes ahead of scholars. We need to attend to the art around us and try to articulate what we’re seeing there. — Miriam Felton-Dansky

Felton-Dansky notes that many artists are interrogating these forces, from algorithmic bias to the environmental and ethical implications of data-driven technologies. “One of the things we really appreciate about the artists we’re looking at is that they’re issuing warnings. In many cases, they're thinking about these questions alongside and sometimes ahead of scholars,” she says. 

For Gallagher-Ross, that’s the power of criticism. “If you see artists doing significant work, writing about it puts it into the conversation — and maybe changes how people think about the possibilities of the form.”