Transmedia Dramaturgy by Magda Romanska

TRANSMEDIA DRAMATURGY

In the simplest definition, transmedia means multiplatform, multigenre storytelling. Robert Pratten defines transmedia as a form of storytelling that takes place “across multiple platforms, preferably allowing audience participation, such that each successive platform heightens the audience enjoyment.” Transmedia storytelling is not an adaptation: it is not the transferring of one story onto multiple genres but rather the incorporation of multiple genres and storytelling environments into one coherent narrative experience, with each component supplementing one interconnected story.  With new technologies and new genres, transmedia storytelling has also developed new dramaturgical questions: how are we to tell stories that use multiple structural dramaturgical frameworks?

MAGDA ROMANSKA

Magda Romanska is an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Dramaturgy at Emerson College in Boston, MA, and the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of TheTheatreTimes.com, the largest global digital theatre portal, for which she won the 2018 Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy. Her research focuses on theatre, transmedia, new media dramaturgy, and posthumanism. She has taught at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Cornell University, and Emerson College. Romanska is the author or editor of four critically acclaimed theatre books, including The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor, Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism; and The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, a leading handbook of dramaturgy. Her fifth book, an edited anthology, Theatre Machine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context is forthcoming from NUP. She is currently completing two book projects: The Bionic Body: Technology, Disability and Posthumanism, and Transmedia Dramaturgy: Multiplatform and Networked Performance. She is the sole editor of a ten-volume series on dramaturgy to be released within the next two years from Routledge. She is a playwriting fellow at Lark Theatre in NYC and a Research Associate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She graduated with honors from Stanford University and earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University’s Department of Theatre and Film.