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Surveillance Technologies in Performance and Migration

Surveillance Technologies in Performance and Migration cover

Surveillance Technologies in Performance and Migration

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Pre-order. Available Jul 23 2026
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Description

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

Product details

Explore Methuen Drama
Published Jul 23 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Pages 144
ISBN 9781350556997
Imprint Methuen Drama
Illustrations 8 bw illus
Dimensions 203 x 127 mm
Series Performance and Digital Cultures
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Sidonie Carey-Green

Sidonie Carey-Green is Research Associate at Royal…

Series Editor

Liam Jarvis

Liam Jarvis is a theatre-maker, practitioner-resea…

Series Editor

Karen Savage

Karen Savage is Head of Arts, Culture and Heritage…

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