ABSTRACT
The first Fast Forward Festival (FFF) included productions by the Berlin-based company Rimini Protokoll, the Dutch scenographer and performance-maker Dries Verhoeven, and the Lebanese writer and director Rabih Mrou. This small selection represents much of what Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement addresses, for these pieces variously deal with perspectives on fact and reality, adopt hybrid performance modes, and are intrinsically shaped by digital culture. Cultural production in the twenty-first century reverberates with this paradoxical mingling of capabilities and effects. Havens and Lotz characterize this within a longer trajectory of post-Fordism whereby service-oriented trans actions replace a factory-based model of production as a complex web of centralizing and decentralizing tendencies. Running alongside the development of postmodernism is a common conceit: the world has become theatre; performance provides not just a metaphor but also a modus operandi for our relationship to the world.
