Overview

How can we make the digital performing arts truly accessible? Written by experts at metaLAB at Harvard, this pioneering study explores the urgent need to rethink digital access in the performing arts. Drawing on comparative research across the US, UK, EU and Australia, it examines how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed both the potential and the shortcomings of digital programming, particularly for disabled and marginalized audiences. Through rich case studies and critical legal analysis, it advocates for a new global framework that balances copyright protection with the human right to culture. This is an essential resource for policy makers, arts leaders, disability rights advocates and legal scholars seeking a more inclusive digital future.

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9781529257038

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘This is an urgent and necessary book. It insists, without apology, that digital access to performance is not a luxury, but a lifeline – a matter of both disability rights and human rights. By offering practical tools for theatre makers to reach disabled, elderly, homebound and geographically isolated audiences – as well as the digital natives who grew up online – it challenges our field to expand its horizons and embrace the communities that sustained it during the darkest months of the pandemic. In doing so, it calls upon artists, institutions and funders alike to imagine a future of both access and artistry.’ Anne Bogart, Columbia University

‘This is an urgent and necessary book. It insists, without apology, that digital access to performance is not a luxury, but a lifeline – a matter of both disability rights and human rights. By offering practical tools for theatre makers to reach disabled, elderly, homebound and geographically isolated audiences – as well as the digital natives who grew up online – it challenges our field to expand its horizons and embrace the communities that sustained it during the darkest months of the pandemic. In doing so, it calls upon artists, institutions and funders alike to imagine a future of both access and artistry.’ Anne Bogart, Columbia University ‘Polemically embracing disabled communities’ Right to Art, Digital Access marshals legal and cultural experts to assess inhibiting policies in a livestreaming age. Differently-abled folks were able to access culture with unprecedented ease during the coronavirus pandemic, when pivoting to digital online performance suddenly became urgent. The current book gathers the data about how this historical event enlarged audiences and became dramatically more inclusive – but also reveals the absence of any economic model to sustain it. Magda Romanska, tireless theorizer of transmedia and performance studies, here summons a team of legal experts and digital mavens to report on how online accessibility is faring across cultures in the Anglophone world. Extending the Future Stage manifesto that framed live performance within online culture and accessibility, Digital Access posits streaming as a new creative vehicle of inclusive, dynamic, dramaturgical might.’ Caroline Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Author Information

Magda Romanska is Professor of Performing Arts at Emerson College, Faculty Associate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and researcher at metaLAB at Harvard. 

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