The American avant-garde theatre of the post-World War II era, with its underlying engagement with the betterment of society and a foregrounding of the body, either solo or collective, could be seen as an extension of the Romantic project. But by the 1990s, the ideas and impulses that fueled its artistic drive seemed to dissipate as it became subsumed by Postmodernism and also by popular culture. The avant-garde energies and impulses did not disappear, however, and increasingly they could be found in the theatre’s eager adoption and exploration of new technologies and digital media. By mediatizing live performance, the new technologies often became co-equal with, or dominant over, the human actors. Beginning with groups and individual artists such as Squat, The Wooster Group, and Laurie Anderson and continuing through The Builders Association, Big Art Group, and Annie Dorsen, among many others, a post-avant-garde has emerged that does not fetishize technology, but rather embraces it as a tool to alter consciousness—much as the historical avant-garde did—and to expand the possibilities and definitions of performance.

This chapter addresses the use of technological media in contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies that have used the form, narratives, and cultural cachet of Greek tragedy to create work that engages spectators in examinations of human culture and behavior which have deep historical and emotional resonance, even when the productions themselves are destabilising and sometimes undermining the cultural position of their ancient Greek referents. The approaches span a large gamut from the use of video as scenography to the immersion of the audience in theatrical landscapes fragmented through media. Central to the discussion are artists such the Wooster Group, Jay Scheib, John Jesurun, and Jan Fabre, who use technology to create intermedial effects that express and interrogate the relationship of media to contemporary culture and representation. These works manage to encapsulate the rapidly changing modes of discourse, both live and mediated, and the ever-increasing problematics of representation in a media-saturated world.