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 New Dramaturgies

Series Editors
Cathy Turner
Drama Dept.
University of Exeter
Exeter, United Kingdom

Synne Behrndt
Dept. of Community and Performing Arts
University of Winchester
Winchester, United Kingdom
This series seeks to develop understanding of dramaturgy as a contempor-
ary field, in dialogue with its rich and varied past. The prefix ‘new’ invites
authors to pay attention to the expansion or re-framing of dramaturgy in
relation to contemporary contexts, rather than implying a requirement to
replace ‘old’ with ‘new’, or to offer a programmatic approach to the
definition and practice of dramaturgy. The series will comprise two
strands: Course texts which encompass fresh and original research insights
on key themes related to dramaturgy, at an accessible level for students
and non-experts; More specialized work which includes a higher level of
theorisation. The books in this series will, for example: look at the drama-
turgical implications of new media, globalisation and forms of spectator-
ship; draw on an ‘expanded’ use of dramaturgical analysis to examine the
relationship between theatrical performance and other disciplines; discuss
dramaturgical practice and theory, across a range of perspectives and
geographies. Aims of the series: To foster international dialogue and
exchange, extending understanding of the complex contexts of drama-
turgy and embracing its diversity and scope To examine and deploy
dramaturgical thinking as a productive analytical and practical approach
to performance criticism as well as performance-making To offer theore-
tical discussion of dramaturgy as a field To investigate the relationship
between idea and form in contemporary practice, including practice-as-
research To discuss emerging areas of contemporary performance practice
that produce new dramaturgies or re-contextualise existing approaches To
provide English-language texts for teaching dramaturgy in Higher
Education To build on existing overviews of dramaturgy and of contem-
porary performance practice to discuss specific aspects of dramaturgy in
detail, applying historical and theoretical rigour.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14742
 Peter Eckersall • Helena Grehan • Edward Scheer

New Media
Dramaturgy
Performance, Media and New-Materialism
Peter Eckersall Helena Grehan
The Graduate Center Murdoch University
City University of New York Perth, Australia
New York, USA

Edward Scheer
School of the Arts & Media
University of New South Wales
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

New Dramaturgies
ISBN 978-1-137-55603-5 ISBN 978-1-137-55604-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55604-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932655

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover illustration: END. A Two Dogs/Kris Verdonck production. Image © Reinout Hiel

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book emerged from a series of discussions between Peter Eckersall,

Ed Scheer and Helena Grehan about the discipline of performance studies
at the beginning of the twenty-first century and about our various
responses to a range of works we encountered along the way. We wanted
to find the opportunity to develop a project that was relevant to the
discipline and that allowed us to combine our research interests in new
media, dramaturgy and spectatorship. After a series of long discussions,
NMD was born, and we began to work together to both define and
expand the concept as well as to engage with colleagues on the topic at
conferences, workshops, symposia, and via our publications. We would
like to thank all of those who contributed to the events on this topic over
the past few years.
Our research was funded by the Australian Research Council through
the award of a Discovery grant on the topic of NMD, and we would like to
thank the ARC, as well as our international ‘partner investigators’ Marin
Blažević and Maaike Bleeker. We are grateful to our colleagues Caroline
Wake, Denise Varney, Rachel Fensham, Shintarô Fujii, Sara Jansen and
Cody Poulton for their assistance at various stages of the project’s devel-
opment. We would also like to acknowledge Murdoch University, UNSW,
the University of Melbourne, and CUNY for supporting this research
project. They have provided time, space and financial support that has
allowed us to meet, run events, and spend valuable time away from the fray
for writing. Kris Verdonck also deserves a mention here, as his contribu-
tions to the development of our ideas have been significant. We thank him
for his boundless creativity, his political provocation, and his sense of

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

humour. We would also like to thank the performance makers and artists
who joined us for the NMD praxis workshop we ran at UNSW, and thank
Su Goldfish and staff at the Io Myers Studio. Thanks to Performance
Space, Sydney for supporting the project and exhibiting Kris Verdonck’s
Gossip.
Some of the material in this study has appeared in earlier versions in the
following publications: Grehan, Helena. 2001. ‘TheatreWorks’
Desdemona: Fusing Technology and Tradition.’ TDR 45(3): 113–125.
Grehan, Helena. 2004. ‘Questioning the Relationship between
Consumption and Exchange: TheatreWorks’ Flying Circus Project,
December 2000.’ Positions East Asia Cultures Critique 12(2): 565–586
– and it has been really valuable to have the opportunity to revisit and
reconsider these earlier writings in the context of NMD, some years later.
We also acknowledge our entry on ‘New Media Dramaturgy’ in the
Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska, 2014,
London: Routledge – where some of the arguments developed in this
book were first canvassed.
The authors are also very grateful to TDR for permission to reuse their
three linked essays on NMD that were published in 2015. Grehan,
Helena. 2015. ‘Actors, Spectators and Vibrant Objects: Kris Verdonck’s
ACTOR#1.’ TDR 59(3): 132–139. Eckersall, Peter. 2015. ‘Towards a
Dramaturgy of Robots and Object-figures.’ TDR 59(3): 123–131.
Scheer, Edward. 2015. ‘Robotics as New Media Dramaturgy. The Case
of the Sleepy Robot.’ TDR 59(3): 140–149.
Kris Verdonck and A Two Dogs Company, Blast Theory, Hotel Modern,
Mari Velonaki, Ed Jansen and Louis-Philippe Demers have all kindly sup-
plied us with images and image permissions. A book on NMD without
images would have been a sad book. We thank them for their generosity.
We would also like to thank Fujimoto Takayuki, Takatani Shiro, Bubu de la
Madelaine, Ong Keng Sen, Lydia Teychenne and Kris Verdonck for their
generosity in taking the time to discuss their work with us.
Helena Grehan would like to acknowledge the Dean and staff in the
School of Arts at Murdoch University who have been gracious in their
support throughout the writing of this book. Particular thanks go to Anne
Surma and Sandra Wilson. She would also like to thank her co-authors
Peter Eckersall and Ed Scheer for spirited discussion, thoughtful
exchanges and for pushing her into the new media landscape. Helena
would also like to thank Hans-Willem and Saoirse for their love, tolerance
and interest. You make everything meaningful.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

Peter Eckersall would like to thank Helena Grehan and Ed Scheer for
their continual inspiration and generosity of spirit. Thanks also for the
dramaturgical insights and provocations from David Pledger, Katalin
Trencsényi, Alyson Campbell, Anny Mokotow, Rachael Swain, Paul
Jackson, Melanie Beddie and Paul Monaghan.
Edward Scheer wishes to express his gratitude to Rosa, Cordy, Nini and
Isa, and to Peter and Helena. ‘If You Want To Go Fast Go Alone, If You
Want To Go Far, Go Together’ (unattributed, possibly African origin).
Finally, we would like to thank Alexa Taylor, our research assistant, for
assisting with the final stages of the manuscript production. Her eye for
detail and breadth of knowledge about the topics, works and ideas covered
in the book have been invaluable.
 CONTENTS

1 Cue Black Shadow Effect: The New Media Dramaturgy

Experience 1

2 The Virtual Machine: Projection in the Theatre 25

3 From Extreme Light to Total Darkness: The Dramaturgy of

Organised Light 55

4 The Theatre of Atmospheres 81

5 Robots: Asleep, Awake, Alone, and in Love 107

6 The Theatrical Superfield: On Soundscapes and Acoustic

Dramaturgy 135

7 XD: Reproducing Technological Experience 161

8 Play/Pause, FF/Rewind. End. Machine Times, End Times:

Theatre, Live Film and Video 185

9 Post-NMD? 209

ix
x CONTENTS

Bibliography 213

Index 229
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.1 OR by dumb type 27

Fig. 2.2 HUMINID – ACTOR #1 by Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs
Company, 2010 36
Fig. 2.3 Johan Leysen in M, a reflection by Kris Verdonck/A Two
Dogs Company, 2012 40
Fig. 2.4 KAMP by Hotel Modern, 2010 43
Fig. 2.5 KAMP by Hotel Modern, 2010 46
Fig. 3.1 OR by dumb type 65
Fig. 3.2 OR by dumb type 66
Fig. 4.1 Mass – ACTOR #1 by Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company,
2010 85
Fig. 5.1 The Woman and the Snowman by Mari Velonaki, 2013 109
Fig. 5.2 Fish – Bird by Mari Velonaki, Sydney 2014 112
Fig. 5.3 Mari Velonaki, Fish – Bird installation, Denmark 2009 116
Fig. 5.4 DANCER #3 by Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company,
2010 123
Fig. 5.5 Tiller Girls by Louis-Philippe Demers, 2010 128
Fig. 6.1 Ryoji Ikeda, superposition, Carriageworks, Sydney 2015 148
Fig. 6.2 Ryoji Ikeda, superposition, Carriageworks, Sydney 2015 149
Fig. 7.1 OR by dumb type 169
Fig. 7.2 Claire Cage as Karen in Blast Theory’s KAREN, 2015 172
Fig. 7.3 KAREN by Blast Theory, 2015 175
Fig. 8.1 Event for Stage by Tacita Dean, Carriageworks, Sydney 2014 187
Fig. 8.2 Event for Stage by Tacita Dean, Carriageworks, Sydney 2014 192
Fig. 8.3 Gob Squad, Super Night Shot 199
Fig. 8.4 Gob Squad, Super Night Shot 201

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Cue Black Shadow Effect: The New Media

Dramaturgy Experience

A blinding light comes from a glass cube of 35 cm × 35 cm. The

spectators, equipped with protective, dark glasses, are led into the room.
The light that normally allows us to see, here blinds us. It could be the
light flash of a nuclear explosion, a never ceasing, eye-burning lightning
that announces the end of the world. . . . Human kind has become a
stranger in its own environment.
Box ~ Kris Verdonck

NEW MEDIA AND NMD

It is just an unprepossessing, clear-glass box. When one enters the white
space the light source in it barely glows.1 A disembodied voice recorded by
the actor Johan Leysen reads urgently from Heiner Müller’s DESPOILED
SHORE MEDEAMATERIAL LANDSCAPE WITH ARGONAUTS.2
The light source slowly increases in intensity to reach a level beyond vision.
There is a threshold at which each spectator risks eye damage and must put
on protective tinted glasses. To experience this work is to feel super-
saturated with light, overwhelmed by it, your existence threatened by it.
Nothing else exists.
This experience is precisely what the artistic team behind A Two Dogs
Company’s Box is hoping to produce. It is the achievement of their
design and dramaturgy. The company website states that the work aims

© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Eckersall et al., New Media Dramaturgy, New Dramaturgies,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55604-2_1
2 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.

to make the ‘impact of technology on our daily lives [its] very subject’ in
ways that touch on ‘existential questions of humanity’ (Verdonck 2002).3
Verdonck’s work highlights a tension between new media as an enabling
part of everyday life and culture, and as something that threatens it. This
tension informs the approach we take in this book. We situate the analysis
of what we will define as new media dramaturgy (NMD) between the
critique of a techno-determinism (the notion that new media determine
and delimit human experience) and the positivist development of a
techno-poesis designed to enhance and optimise social conditions. In
the style of Verdonck’s ongoing experiments with the dramaturgical, we
approach new media in relation to the place – technical, artistic and social
– it emerges from. This means that, in NMD, new media are considered
in terms of their material properties as well as their sometimes virtual
effects or appearances so that the technical specifications of a device will
be considered where relevant to its aesthetic deployment.
Verdonck has been pivotal to the development of the arguments
outlined here and has participated in workshops, presentations and
debates with the authors around the key terms of the research project
into new media and new dramaturgy from which this book emerged.
We began with the notion that what was once called new media has
increasingly become a familiar part of the dramaturgy of the last
quarter-century. This is especially the case since the pioneering work
of Japanese artist collective dumb type,4 a group whose work has, we
argue, been central to the development of NMD. We also wanted to
examine the ways that the use of video, powerful data projections, new
sound systems, and even technologies such as robots in dumb type’s
work reflected not so much a vanishing of human bodily presence from
the theatre or the arts of that period, but a more subtle repositioning
of bodily presence. This repositioning would not effectively abolish the
actor, for example, but would enable a different conception of acting
to emerge from the mediated assemblages in which performance now
occurs.
In broad terms we see that there is evidence of what theorists such as
Mark Hansen, Anna Munster and Donna Haraway have recognised as a
form of mediated rematerialisation rather than a dematerialisation occur-
ring in these fields of symbolic activity, in which bodily sensations and
sense experiences are now redistributed through technical means rather
than diminished or de-emphasised. What we discovered from looking at
the processes of making this work and talking with the artists was that the
 CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 3

very technical elements, which carried the enhancing effects of close-ups,

amplified sounds, high resolution projection, and other developments, were
not simply scenographic elements or techniques but were in fact core
components of the dramaturgy of the production, from dumb type’s early
experiments to Verdonck’s more recent work. Most importantly, we also
discovered that these elements all had their own modes of existence, which
influenced the work they were conscripted to do in unforeseen ways. In
effect, then, our aim in this book is to consider, through detailed reading
and analysis of a range of artworks, how the inclusion and use of technical
elements – as key players in each work’s dramaturgy – alters the dramatur-
gical landscape, both for the works in question and for the concept of
dramaturgy as a whole. NMD considers the ways in which the materiality
of technical elements matters. As key players in an artwork, the behaviour of
elements within the dramaturgy – whether they are, for example, lighting
patterns, robots, or atmospheres – influences every aspect of it as well as
calling into question how works are made, how they are performed, and
how they are engaged with and received by spectators.
Our approach in this book is to create a picture of the complex practices
and discourses of NMD in which each example can speak for itself as well
as contributing to the larger assemblage we are attempting to construct.
The collage effect this may produce can seem to veer off in multiple
directions but it is grounded in the practices of the core artists in this
study, namely Kris Verdonck’s A Two Dogs Company and the dumb type
group, though many other examples will also be introduced and analysed.
By considering the dramaturgy of new media performance events more
broadly, we seek to develop a language to describe, situate and understand
how the practices of conceptualising, designing, directing, and reading/
responding to performance are now in flux in new ways. This flux is
facilitated in part by developments in digital culture, and by a desire to
respond to and harness these developments. In observing these develop-
ments we see a situation like that of Verdonck’s Box, in which the light is
not illuminating something else but has become its own focus, developed
its own agenda, and is asserting itself. This is the key to the project we have
undertaken in relation to this topic. The more we observe new media
events, the more we see a decrease in representation of mediated society
and an increase in simulation of the agency of its technical creations. We
see less figuration of an abstract and dematerialised digitality and more
urgent and emerging life forms: images and objects performing alongside
humans in ways that seem to refuse old binaries and notions that position
4 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.

the human and the machinic in opposition. Instead, these agentic objects
now appear to engage in complex processes of negotiation and reflection on
the emergent possibilities of a new order of experience between the machi-
nic object and the active subject. The artworks in question in this study
employ and engage with images, machines and objects – what Verdonck
calls ‘figures’ – in ways that suggest alternative modes of making and
understanding experiential art that unleash the latent agency of the materials
at hand, and also echo out into the emerging cultural world more broadly.
The ‘new’ in the context of this book is a new that emerges in the inter-
stices. It is a ‘new’ developed as a result of (or in tandem with) these
advances in systems, media, material forms and technologies, when com-
bined with new ways of thinking about and mobilising these – of generating
new dramaturgical assemblages or possibilities. It is at the same time a ‘new’
emerging from the cultural and social processes that both surround and are
embedded in the work of art. Furthermore it is a ‘new’ that seeks its political
edge – one that pushes the limits of form and function within the artistic
space in order to test, bend and extend the realm of the possible, and at the
same time to probe, question and consider the state of things: relationships,
connections, networks, and structures.
Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, the ‘new’ in
NMD is practised and performed in the work of a range of important
contemporary artists – artists who are radically altering the order of things
through their work with objects, actants, atmospheres, visuality, sound,
machines, and systems of various kinds. The formation of NMD is the
product of an aesthetic ‘flat ontology’ in which the making of the work
depends as much on non-human as on human agency, an agency that
operates through – or often mobilises collaborations between – artists and
things. These artists are engaged with the materiality of objects and with
exploring, pushing and extending the substance of materiality. As
Marianne Van Kerkhoven, an influential dramaturg who worked exten-
sively with Verdonck, explains, they are telling us to ‘listen to the bloody
machine’ (Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens 2012). In the process, these artists
are profoundly changing the nature and limits of each work’s form as well
as its aesthetic concerns, as they engage in processes aimed at activating
the senses. These are processes that involve concrete, literal and material
objects rather than figurative explorations that point to more abstract
philosophical notions. They are processes that occur in a range of spaces,
and which mobilise these spaces and those who enter them in ways that
alter the parameters of relationships between the work, its performers, and
 CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 5

its audience. Indeed, in some cases, the alterations are so profound that
the categories of the phenomenal and the technological blur, or, as Chris
Salter suggests, become ‘entangled’.
In effect, then, while we describe what we see as a paradigm shift in the
languages and practices of performance studies, we do not do so in terms of
an epistemic break or rupture, splitting off radically from the history of
performative art forms. Rather, as the media of performance develop new
kinds of agentic relations, both with audiences and their human co-workers,
we remain concerned with the evolution of old preoccupations (lighting,
scenography, dramaturgy) into new contexts, new institutional environ-
ments, aesthetic forms, and spectatorial experiences – assisted by some
new ideas from the speculative realists and other new materialist lines of
inquiry and reflections on recent practice. Specifically, we explore drama-
turgy as a conceptual approach to art-making and practice, with diverse sites
of application but grounded in a live-art aesthetic. We argue that this
aesthetic is itself changing and expanding from within, and in response to
the tensions outlined above – between the dystopia of techno-determinism
where robots threaten traditional forms of labour and the more utopian
techno-poesis where self-expression and experience are enhanced and
amplified. NMD therefore designates an expanded practice of conceptual
and creative labour across arts institutions and industries facilitated by recent
technical developments, mainly but not exclusively in digital media.
An important illustration of this changing and expanding aesthetic is
signalled in this chapter’s title, ‘Cue Black Shadow Effect’. This cue and its
associated technological innovation emerged from the 2008 contempor-
ary dance performance Mortal Engine by Chunky Move, choreographed
by Gideon Obarzanek. The standard practice to call cues as sequential
changes in the lighting states, sound effects, and properties during the
running of a performance is revised here by the unpredictable behaviour of
the visual effects developed for the show by Frieder Weiss – including the
eponymous black shadow effect. What is normally the most regulated and
repeatable aspect of performance is made conditional in Mortal Engine,
and a new way to operate the show that allowed for this was required.
Stage manager Lydia Teychenne recalls how the technical processes asso-
ciated with developing and running the performance of Mortal Engine
overturned long-established protocols: ‘Particularly as the actors who are
now involved in theatre making have changed (i.e. [Mortal Engine
included company members with backgrounds as] mathematicians and
visual artists). The mechanisms for theatre need to adapt to accommodate
6 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.

these new actors’ (Teychenne 2015).5 This is illustrative of the changes to

live performance occasioned by the rise of digital media, where the ‘actor’
is not only a gesturing figure in the moment of a performance but can be
an amorphic agent, a ‘black shadow effect’. Likewise, stage management is
no longer linear and predicated on a sequential dramaturgy, but distrib-
uted among sensory and technical vectors and interactions.

NEW DRAMATURGY AND NMD

While our conceptualisation of dramaturgy is based on the ‘new drama-
turgy’ model of Van Kerkhoven and Verdonck, with the new media
emphasis of dumb type, it is also important to situate it in relation to
other notions of this practice. Dramaturg and classicist Paul Monaghan is
helpful in showing the etymology of the term. He presents us with a clear
divergence of practice when he explains that:

There are generally two distinct but related ancient Greek derivations sug-
gested for the word ‘dramaturgy’: drama-t-ourgos (the ‘composition’ of the
drama), and drama-t-ergon (the ‘work’ of the drama). . . . But both words
were so rare in Greek that the derivations are virtually nonsensical.
Nevertheless, these two ‘derivations’ reflect two different understandings as
to what is meant by the word, and consequently two different practices: one is
concerned with literary text (hence ‘script doctor’, ‘literary manager’ and so
on), the other includes the text along with all the other elements of perfor-
mance – space, light, movement, and so on (whence ‘production dramaturg’,
‘technical dramaturg’). In addition, the practice has been divided between
one based in aesthetics (the text and/or performance by itself, according to its
own internal coherence) and one based in sociology and ideology, or socio-
political, cultural and historical contexts. (Monaghan 2014, 3)

Recent scholarship in the field widens our understanding of dramaturgy as

an artistic activity that operates conceptually and procedurally between
dramatic literature and performance, and at the same time links theatre
aesthetics and practices with questions about ideology and culture. For
example, in Dramaturgy and Performance (2008), Cathy Turner and
Synne K. Behrndt give an extensive overview of the evolution of dramaturgy
in contemporary performance, including discussions of the bifurcated
notion of literary dramaturg and production dramaturg, and the recent
focus on the role of the dramaturg in the devising process of contemporary
and/or postdramatic theatre.6 Dramaturgy in this latter sense is a practice of
 CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 7

exploring how a performance communicates its meanings, and is some-

thing to be considered in the wider context of the social world. The new
dramaturgy we adapt for the elaboration of NMD builds on these tradi-
tions in different ways, but also has its own specific circumstances of
production.
New dramaturgy is a term introduced by Van Kerkhoven (2009) to
describe hybridity in contemporary European performance after the
1980s and to explain how it interpolated aesthetic and political issues
in different ways to that of modern theatre. Van Kerkhoven was the
resident dramaturg at the Kaaitheater in Brussels from 1985 to 2013
and one of the influential figures in the Flemish new wave. New drama-
turgy comes from her experience of working with new wave artists
including Jan Fabre, Anne Teresa De Keersmaker, and Tg STAN, who
created fusions of dance, drama and visual arts. This established a new
context of complexity and a variant dramaturgical sensibility that, she
argued, was ‘an alternation between “looking at something” and “walk-
ing in something”, an alternation between observation and immersion,
between surrendering and attempting to understand’ (Van Kerkhoven
2009, 11). In a 1994 issue of Theatreschrift Van Kerkhoven wrote about
a new, collaborative dramaturgical model that would encompass the
entirety of the production process. Such a dramaturgy would be inquir-
ing and provisional rather than already decided. It would need to accent-
uate the materiality of performance and include stage materials, bodies,
light, duration and dramatic context in a ‘ceaseless dialogue’. In this
regard she asks:

[I]s there a dramaturgy for movement, sound, light and so on, as well? Is
dramaturgy the thing that connects all the various elements of a play together?
Or is it rather, the ceaseless dialogue between people who are working on a
play together – or is it about the soul, the internal structure, of a production: or
does dramaturgy determine the way space and time are handled in a perfor-
mance, and so the context and the audience too. And so on. . . . We can
probably answer all these questions with Yes, but. (Van Kerkhoven 1994, 5)

This conception changes dramaturgy from a process that seeks to establish

uniformity regarding the formal properties of theatre into something more
provisional and conceptual and, for us, enables the discussion of a drama-
turgy of various mediated and material properties in terms of their thingly
influence on the ‘soul’ and ‘structure’ of productions.7 For Trencsényi and
8 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.

Cochrane, new dramaturgy is post-mimetic, intercultural, and focused on

process (2014, xii–xiii). This is comparable with the idea of ‘expanded
dramaturgy,’ as Eckersall writes:

it is productive to think about dramaturgy as a process of being undecided

and, by virtue of the fact of creative indecision, of being in a relational state
of intercession. (Eckersall 2006, 284)8

There is an openness to this kind of thinking that can readily incorporate

new elements.
Finally, the connection between visuality and dramaturgy is an essential
component of NMD. Visuality ‘in place of a dramaturgy regulated by text’
(Lehmann 2006, 93) is given primary importance in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s
theorisation of postdramatic theatre. Other equally compelling dramaturgi-
cal elements are highlighted in his theory, including ‘parataxis, simultaneity,
play with the density of signs’ and ‘physicality, irruption of the real, situa-
tion/event’ (Lehmann 2006, 86). For Lehmann, the turn away from what
he calls conventional dramaturgy is connected to an awareness of the ele-
ments of theatre and how they can open up our understanding of the
performance as an event. In describing the experience of contemporary
theatre as a hovering of perceptional focus between a ‘temporalizing’ view-
ing and a scenic ‘going along’ – between the activity of seeing and the (more
passive) empathy – Lehmann (2006, 157) echoes the ‘looking at/walking
in’ dyad of Van Kerkhoven. Moreover, Lehmann’s perspective on postdra-
matic theatre as a ‘displacement of theatrical perception’ (2006, 157)
accords with the many variances of NMD.
As our case studies will show, the turn to visuality in live performance
not only connects to the development of new media, but also relates to the
way that performance is drawing into a much closer conversation with the
field of contemporary visual art more broadly, in institutional terms as
visual arts museums try to accommodate live performance, and in aesthetic
terms as new media and live performance continue to mutually inform
each other. Hence it is not only technologies that are entangled with
sensibilities and audience expectations but also the reception of live arts,
their dissemination and display in visual-art institutions and discourses
and, indeed, the increasingly complementary practices of dramaturgy
and curatorship, that are knotted together as well.
 CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 9

THEORISING NMD: FROM ENTANGLEMENT

TO VIBRANT MATTER

Our book shares with Salter’s Entangled: Technology and the

Transformation of Performance (2010) an interest in linking artistic prac-
tices to generative performative categories and terms. Entangled includes
discussions on the modalities of sound, projection, bodies and machines
that also figure in a different way here as well. Salter’s work is expansive and
offers a multitude of historical perspectives – from the mid-nineteenth
century to the present day – on how technologies evolved and function in
performance. Building on his work, but with a more restricted historical
period roughly coterminous with the commencement of the internet age,
we aim to take the discussion of technology in different directions. Whereas
Salter is definitive in linking numerous historical practices with the technol-
ogies of their time, including recent developments, our approach is drama-
turgical and concerned broadly with the ‘thingworld’ of technologies
activated in art since the early 1990s, their affordances and dispositions.
We try to follow the pathways along which objects become assemblages,
more networked and imbricated than overarching, operative within and
connecting various constituents of an artwork. We offer a truncated and
concentrated history of the last quarter-century of key developments –
anchoring our discussion around the work of dumb type in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, and more recently the work of Verdonck – in an account
that draws from the recent history of new media in performance and the
discourse of new materialism and what has been referred to in philosophical
and cultural debates as the ‘nonhuman turn’.
Richard Grusin summarises these concerns for us as ‘decentering the
human in favour of a turn towards and concern for the nonhuman, under-
stood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geo-
physical systems, materiality or technologies’ (Grusin 2015, vii). We are
influenced by themes and perspectives arising from this in the work of Jane
Bennett (2010), Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Bruno Latour (2005), among
others, not to forget the influence of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) in
opening our work to rhizomatic approaches. We are particularly interested
with how these ideas take artistic practices into a wider consideration of
the non-human and thereby embolden a critical politics of the
Anthropocene. As Grusin writes: ‘Practitioners of the nonhuman turn
find problematic the emphasis of constructivism on the social or cultural
10 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.

constructions of the human subject because, taken to its logical extreme, it

strips the world of any ontological or agential status’ (Grusin 2015, xi). It
is this illusive ‘agential status’ of the multitude of lively things operative in
NMD that we are most concerned with.
The case studies, environments and performative instances we analyse in
this book are informed by a set of topics loosely associated with the new
materialist school of thought. As Rebecca Schneider summarises it, ‘the new
materialism takes seriously the idea that all matter is agential and that agency
is distributed across and among materials in relation’ (2015, 7).9 Of equal
significance, she adds, is that this enjoys some synchronicity with perfor-
mance studies as it recognises not only different types of material agency but
also that matter can be seen as ‘discursive’ (7). We see this non-signifying
but still significant and communicative capacity in the object world brought
to life by the artists in this book. But rather than applying a new materialist
theory to the work at hand, we would rather note that some of these
tendencies – examining ‘the role of inhuman forces within the human’
and exploring ‘dissonant relations’ between non-human processes and cul-
tural practice, among others (Connolly 2013) – are already at work in NMD
such that our title could also read as New Materialist Dramaturgy.
Arguably, Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is the key text in this field, and it is
of particular relevance to NMD for a number of reasons. First, Bennett
develops the Spinozan concept of ‘Conatus’ – purposeful and persevering
agency or ‘active impulsion’ – a notion that has the potential to recompose
our relations between human and object agencies (Bennett’s ‘thingly’
agency) and ‘uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances’
between them (2010, 99). We take this term to imply a subject’s or an
object’s performative potential – an inchoate agency as well as an actual
kinetic function. With Bennett’s suitably performative emphasis in mind,
but with a very different focus on aesthetics rather than political ecology,
we consider the virtual context of art and theatre as a site where a ‘vibrant
materialism’ might offer useful insights on the status of the object in an
expanded dramaturgy. Art and theatre can function as laboratory environ-
ments uniquely suitable for the consideration of object kinship and empa-
thy in the manner of Bennett’s thesis.
In our reading of her text, it is the focus on the conative materiality of
all forms – organic and inorganic – that produces the possibility of a
perception of the agency of the inorganic. In these terms, both human
and non-human agents in contemporary performance can be said to
possess a dramatic potency that is readable in terms of human experience.
 CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 11

This may translate as an anthropomorphic perception, but perhaps, again

after Bennett, we might revalue this perception as a productive point of
view promoting an expanded repertoire of empathic engagement rather
than an unconscious privileging of the human over non-human forces.
The dramaturgy in this context must mediate between these forces in a
process in which relations between sensitive humans and hypersensitive
machines occupy the aesthetic foreground rather than the entities them-
selves. In this sense it is properly a question of New Media Dramaturgy.

BOOKENDING NMD
We deploy the terminology of new media to consider its deployment
across the visual and performing arts in the last two decades. Our first
examples are from dumb type and their 1989 analogue-industrial machine
performance pH, and we end with more recent examples from the work of
Verdonck and his A Two Dogs Company. Bookending our study with
dumb type and Verdonck illuminates the shift in approaches to experience
design in the use of theatre and performance technology in the past 25
years. The shift might be characterised as one in which the human sense of
what occurs, the overt anthropo-scenography of our traditions, is gradu-
ally diminished in favour of an object-oriented scenography informed by
what the technology itself seems to want to say. In this study we see
technologies that are overtly visible, externally mechanical, operating on
and against bodies, centrally regulated and controlled alongside dispersed,
multiple, interactive, liquid media.
For example, in dumb type’s pH, the stage design is structured by the
use of two huge purpose-built mechanical armatures constantly sweeping
the stage area. With the audience looking down onto a white rectangular
stage, the performance choreography is dictated by the need for the
performers to slide under or jump over the perpetual robotic glide of the
lower beam. Fast forward to Verdonck’s Box (2005) and the contrast is
evident. While the design of the work is similarly based on the distinctive
presence of a machine, its effects are less overtly material, simply the
production of a light so blinding it cannot be seen, only experienced as
something beyond human apprehension, since to look directly at the
source of the light without the protective glasses provided could cause
serious side effects and possibly lasting ocular damage.
While both of these works can be understood as performative responses
to technology, their different approaches to dramaturgy are instructive.
12 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.

pH demonstrates the dystopian impact of technology on the body through

showing us its disciplining effects on the performers’ bodies, supplemen-
ted by the depiction of power in terms of inscription and mediatisation.
Box takes all this aesthetic rendering of power (the box is a metonym for,
inter alia, the multinational corporation that developed it) and places its
effects immediately in contact with the spectator’s sense organs. There is
no distance between image and activation here; there is no demonstration
of an effect; rather, the two are one and the same and the border between
dramaturgy and execution is collapsed. This immediacy is a consequence
of a thoroughly mediated dramaturgy. In this way it accords with how our
thinking about NMD often draws from Verdonck’s oeuvre and the fact
that many of his works provoke the need to rethink performative interac-
tions with media in ways that we will describe here.

LISTEN TO THE BLOODY MACHINE

Verdonck’s A Two Dogs Company has been company-in-residence at the
Kaaitheater in Brussels since 2010. He explains that his creations ‘are
positioned in the transit zone between visual arts and theatre, between
installation and performance, between dance and architecture’ (Verdonck
n.d.). Many of his performance and installation works are made with light,
haze, and projections, performance elements that he terms as ‘figures’
along with machines and live actors (Eckersall 2012, 68). At the heart of
his works are machines, objects and performative effects engineered to
‘perform’ tasks in symbiotic relationships to humans who are present
variously as actors and spectators. A key discussion in this book centres
around the ways in which Verdonck’s works often ask questions about the
relationship between human and machine, through a focus on developing
our awareness of materiality and of collapsing borders between things. As
Van Kerkhoven, in her book on Verdonck’s End, writes:

Performers connected to machines are required – they cannot do otherwise –

to question their own representation, to deconstruct it even. Submission to
the machine destroys their role-play. Allied to machines, performers are
allowed to get as close as possible to sheer presence, to naked presentation,
to the unmediated moment. (Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens 2012, 30)

Artistic processes are, for Verdonck, ones of discovering what the machine
‘needs’ and ‘wants’ to do. This leads directly to the question of dramaturgy
 CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 13

and the desire to think about the materiality of the machine as a part of his
dramaturgical process. This is a firm point of orientation for our book – the
discovery of the importance of objects in performance for their own sake,
their materiality, and their spectrum of performance parameters. These
machines are not as deterministic as they are in pH, but they are relational,
transforming of matter, fluid and effortless, also perhaps sinister and con-
trolling.10 To understand the significance of Verdonck’s dramaturgy, to
account for the ideas and the action, is to listen to his machines.

NMD AND THE IMAGE MACHINE

Many years before Verdonck’s dramaturgy, Shikata Yukiko’s description
of dumb type’s mediated scenography as an ‘image machine’ func-
tioned to denote the extent to which this company’s scenic design,
populated with digital video projections and animated with digital
lighting, assumed increasing importance in their work and became
influential beyond it (Shikata 2000, 45). A corollary to this is that
screen-based installation environments are now part and parcel of the
‘image machine’ of contemporary performance culture. It is also no
accident that a number of key dumb type performance works, such as
S/N which premiered in 1994 and OR which premiered in 1997, were
remediated as installation works with the performers appearing as pro-
jections. In Furuhashi Teiji’s Lovers (1994), images of bodies projected
on a wall fall back away from the viewer when they approach. Images of
performers from the work OR were remediated as photographs on life-
size slides on the floor, shifting to reveal new bodies as the overhead
monitor changed position, like still-breathing corpses on a mortuary
slab. These works are literally image machines focusing on the intimacy
of the encounter with death and disappearance, and on the many ways
we are completely reliant on technology to manage both the interface
with daily life and the relentless medical interfacing associated with
illness and ultimately with death. The dramaturgy of the installations
consists in the way the spatial and intermedial composition translates
the idea of the impermanence and fragility of life at the threshold into
an affective encounter between the image and the viewer.
Such works also refocus the problem faced by many theatre-makers,
that the most intensely embodied experiences are often conveyed virtually;
or to put it another way, that media art provides a way to more fully
experience an event at the level of the body. This mutual intensification is
14 P. ECKERSALL ET AL.

what Scheer has called ‘performative media’ (2011). This term refers to
assemblages of bodies and media that, in their mode of production and
reception, involve and invoke ‘meaningful gestures, symbolic acts and
significant behaviours on behalf of human actors’, such as the example
of motion-capture systems (Scheer 2011, 36). NMD is a way of analysing
performative media in just this sense, by proceeding with the understand-
ing that the body/technology nexus in performance functions to amplify
rather than negate bodily and affective experience. In effect we argue that
the interaction between live forms and mediated experiences reintensifies
both media and performance in the context of NMD.
This type of work clearly raises questions about the limits of live
performance, since the only live component in an installation is the spec-
tator and their remixing of the elements of the recorded performances.
The dislocation of the familiar roles assigned to viewers and performers is
for media artist Jeffrey Shaw the essence of contemporary art practice as he
understands it. Shaw describes a kind of ‘euphoric dislocation’ arising
from the perceived friction that occurs when our bodily senses start rub-
bing up against our projections and fantasies; ‘representation is and always
was the domain of both our embodied and disembodied yearnings’
(Hansen 2006, 90). This conception of NMD as a new materialist aes-
thetic is exemplified in Verdonck’s most recent production, In Void,
described by the artist as ‘an uncanny experiment’ and an attempt to
create ‘a performance without human presence’ and ‘a reflection on the
end of humankind’. The design of the work features Verdonck’s machines
imagining the world without us as his embodied machine agents come
into contact with the disembodied yearnings of the spectators to experi-
ence a more liberated mode of addressing the performance event:

At the cash desk you don’t buy a ticket, but a code that allows you to unbolt
the door of the theater building. You wander around freely in an obscure
world full of surprising machines, objects and images: a combustion engine
that goes all the way until it spurts flames, a bath of light of 400.000 lumen
and floating, composing sousaphones. (Verdonck 2003)

Autonomous objects, instruments that play themselves, exploding engines,

and a return to the light that started our discussion here – these are the
kinds of elements that inform the experience of NMD as we see it and
understand it. In this we are guided by Verdonck’s restless imagination and
constant experimentation. Accordingly, the structure of the book echoes
 CUE BLACK SHADOW EFFECT: THE NEW MEDIA DRAMATURGY EXPERIENCE 15

some of the essential components of the dramaturgy of his company with

the different parts all asserting their autonomy in the mise en scène.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This book covers a number of different ‘scenes’ from new media drama-
turgy. This refers to the material properties and artistic processes of works
that we document and analyse in the following chapters. These are:
projection and light, atmospheres, sound and acoustics, robotics and
android actors, experience design, and finally, machine time and the
importance of new and old media. While this is not an exhaustive list, it
is exemplary of what happens in, with and in response to NMD artworks.
The idea of scenes is at once a reference to visual and sensory experience
that, when dramaturgically organised, can show us something new and
communicate an effect. It is also a structural metaphor taken from theatre:
a scene is a performative unit that in composite form builds in various ways
to make a performance. Finally, scenes are moments from larger events
and are marked by the experience of dislocation; we notice a scene when it
differs from the quotidian, such as when we travel. While not purporting
to be a global mapping of trends in new media performance, we draw on
examples from a diversity of places, genres, and media of production. We
illustrate how NMD has developed parallel to the increasing accessibility
and functionality of computer, video projection and sound technologies,
what might be termed the epistemology of technology as it relates to the
production environment of contemporary performance practice.
We begin with a discussion of data projection and the ways in which it
has thoroughly transformed the notion of liveness in the last two decades.
New projection technologies enabled the harnessing of data-based images
to create immersive, multiple, virtual stage-spaces that became increasingly
easier to reproduce in inverse proportion to the disappearance of the
auratic analogic image. To this end, we discuss examples of video projec-
tion in dumb type’s seminal works S/N and OR and show how projection
renders the theatre space informatic and performative rather than simply
illustrative. Meanwhile, analysis of works such as Ong Keng Sen’s
Desdemona and Verdonck’s HUMINID foreground the experience of
viewing mediated artworks and proposes a form of projection as critique.
Finally, consideration of Chunky Move’s Glow shows the integration of
projection with the performer to create a real-time and dramaturgically
transforming expression of intermediality. Overall, this chapter shows that
Exploring the Variety of Random
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TEXT-BOOK OF INDIAN HISTORY; WITH GEOGRAPHICAL

NOTES, GENEALOGICAL TABLES, EXAMINATION QUESTIONS, ANI>
CHRONOLOGICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL, GEOGRAPHICAL, AND GENERAL
INDEXES, FOR THE SEsse of
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PRINTED RY RAI.I.ANTYNE AND COMPANY EDINBURGH

AND LONDON
 PREFACE. This book is strictly a manual for students, and
everything has been sacrificed to the one object of making it
thoroughly useful in this way. The author has long been engaged in
educational pursuits in India, and has had considerable experience
of the requirements of the Indian Universities ; and he has aimed
chiefly at producing such a manual as might be sufficient for those
who are preparing for these University Examinations. Even for
others, however, it may be found useful, as containing a carefully
digested epitome of the subject. The difficulty of bringing so wide a
subject within" convenient limits has been very great ; hence the
author has felt it necessary, in general, to omit anecdotes and details
of sieges and battles, and to say what be had to say in the fewest
possible words. It is to be hoped that those who use this text-book
will be induced to read for themselves the very excellent works in
which almost everything connected with Indian history is to be
found. The chief of these are indicated below. Tbe writer bas made
use of them freely ; while he has tried to go to the very sources of
information where he could do so, he advances no claim to
originality. The literature
 IV PREFACE. i . connected with the history of British India is
exceedingly copious and valuable. Among the sources of British
Indian history must be mentioned the following : — (1.) The various
" Records of Government," issued regularly by the Supreme and
Local Governments in India. Those published by the Bombay
Government are singularly useful. The reports of the Panjab
Administration are invaluable. (2.) The " Collection of Treaties,
Engagements, and Sunnuds relating to India and Neighbouring
Countries," compiled by Mr C. U. Aitchison, with introductory
remarks, is a most useful work. (:3.) The files of the Friend of India
— the famous Serampore newspaper for the last twenty years —
afford the completest and most trustworthy data, not only for
current events, but for almost every portion of Indian history. They
abound in able monographs. (4.) The volumes of the Calcutta
Review, though unequal in merit, and uncertain in tone, are
nevertheless a mine of information. Some of the most eminent men
in India have been among the contributors to that valuable work.
(5.) Twelve volumes of " Annals of Indian Administration " have been
published at Serampore by Dr Smith. These are of much practical
utility.
 PREFACE. V (6.) The following are standard works, to which
the writer acknowledges his great obligation. They should be read by
every one who wishes to understand Indian history : — 1. Wheeler's
History of India, . . . . ) In connection with 2. Mrs Spier's Life in
Antient India, . . j ch. i. of this text-book. Republished as Mrs
Manning's Antient and Mediaeval India : a most useful book. 3.
Elphinstone's History of India : Edited by Mr Cowell, ... ... 4. Brigg's
Muhammedan Power in India (Fe- I Ch. ii. rishta), ...... 5. Keene's
Mogul Empire, 6. Grant Duff's History of the Mahrattas, 7. Murray's
History of British India, 8. Thornton's British Empire in India, 9.
Auber's Rise of British Power in India, 10. Malleson's French in India,
. 11. Orme's Hindustan, . . . . 12. Cunningham's History of the Sikhs,
13. Wilks' Mysore, Ch. v. Ch. vi. Ch. vii., viii., ix., x. Ch. xi. Ch. xii. (7.)
The books mentioned under are also of great value : — 1. Malcolm's
Central India. 2. Tod's ltajastan. 3. Kaye's Life of Metcalfe. 4.
Metcalfe's Despatches. 5. Malcolm's Life of Clive. 6. Gleig's Life of
Hastings. 7. Kaye's Life of Malcolm. 8. Martineau's British Rule in
India. 9. Hamilton's Gazetteer. The list might be greatly extended ;
but these are books which every real student should possess. They
will introduce the reader to others.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 29.56%
accurate

VI PREFACE. No pains have been spared to make the

indexes, tables, &c., complete. The author will be thankful to receive
any hints from those who use this manual, in order that in a future
edition it may be more thoroughly adapted to its purpose.
OOTACAMUND, SOUTH INDIA, October 5, 1869. ERRATA. Page 45,
line 14, for Panchaba, read PancMla. „ 54, „ 17, for Shah harueh,
read Shah Nameh. „ 87, „ 11, for Bababhipor, read Balabhipor. „ 122,
„ 30, for Marquis de Confleurs, read Marquis
 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. I. POLITICAL DIVISIONS 0"
INDIA, ...... 1 II. SKETCH OF THE GENERAL GEOGRAPHY OP INDIA,
... 19 III. ARRANGEMENT OP THE SUBJECT, ..... 30 CHAPTER I.
ANTIENT INDIA, ........ 33 CHAPTER II. THE HISTORY OP THE
VARIOUS APGAN DYNASTIES, . ... 46 CHAPTER III. THE MO(N)GUL
(MOGUL) EMPERORS OP INDIA, . . .75 CHAPTER IV. A SUMMARY OF
THE HISTORY OP THE DAKHAN, . . . . 131 CHAPTER V. THE
HISTORY OF THE MAHRATTAS, FROM THE BIRTH OF SIVAJI, . . 146
CHAPTER VI. THE PORTUGUESE IN INDIA, ....... 227
 viii CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER VII. THE HISTORY OF THE
EUROPEAN COMPANIES, 241 CHAPTER VIII. THE RIVALRIES AND
WARS OF THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH, 257 CHAPTER IX. THE
FOUNDATION OF BRITISH POWER IN BENGAL, 278 CHAPTER X.
THE GOVERNORS-GENERAL OF BRITISH INDIA, 299 CHAPTER XI.
THE PANJAB, ....... 384 CHAPTER XII. THE HISTORY OF MYSORE,
...... 405 CONCLUSION, ....... 432 EXAMINATION QUESTIONS ON
INDIAN HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY, 439 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES
OF INDIAN HISTORY, 457 BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX, . . . . . 469
GEOGRAPHICAL INDEX, ...... 493 GENERAL INDEX, ....... 521 LIST
OF MAPS, ....... 527
 INTRODUCTION. I. POLITICAL DIVISIONS OF INDIA. § 1.
Our subject is India, and especially British India. Under this name is
included tbe immense tract from Peshawar, and the Suleiman and
Hala mountains, on the N.W., to the banks of the Salwin and the
island of Singapore in the S.E. ; and from the Himalayan chain on
the N., to Cape Comorin, or (including Ceylon) to Dondra Head in
the South. This is a vast and varied field. § 2. The accompanying
sketch-map should be carefully studied and copied. It will be well to
observe the following particulars : — (1.) The latitude of Singapore,
1° 15' N., nearly on the equator. Longitude, 104° E. (2.) The latitude
of Peshawar, the -British frontier Cantonment on the N.W., 33° 57' N.
Longitude, 71° 40' E. (3.) The latitude of Dondra Head, the South
Cape of Ceylon, 5° 56' N. Longitude, 80° 30' E. (4.) The latitude of
Cape Comorin, the South Cape of the Peninsula of India, 8° 4' N.
Longitude, 77° 30' E. INTRO. § 1, J. Boundaries. Singapore.
Peshawar. Dondra nead. Cape Comorin.
 INTRO. § 3-S. Extent of India. Population. Grand Divisions
of India. INTRODUCTION. Political Divisions of British India. The
Bengal Presidency. The Supreme Government. The Home
Government. The Bengal Presidency. Bengal. § 3. India extends
about 1900 miles from north to south, and 1500 miles from east to
west, and contains 1,500,000 square miles. § 4. Its population is
about 187 millions. It varies from 600 to a square mile in Bengal, to
10 in some of the hill districts. § 5. In this vast territory we must
distinguish : I. The British dominions strictly so called ; II. Provinces
under British protection ; and more or less dependent upon Britain ;
III. Independent States, in alliance with Great Britain, and
acknowledging her as the paramount power ; IV. A few small spots
belonging to other European powers. § 6. The British dominions in
India are divided into Presidencies, Vice-presidencies, and provinces
under Commissioners. There are three Presidencies. § 7. (I.) The
Bengal Presidency. (See map.) Of this Calcutta is the capital, and
here the Viceroy and Governor-General resides. His authority is
supreme over all India. The Govern or- General's legislative council
makes laws for all India in general, and for all but Madras, Bombay,
and Bengal in detail. Every act of the subordinate councils must be
confirmed by the Governor-General. The Secretary of State for India
can advise Her Majesty to veto any act of the Governor-General's
Council. The Secretary of State for India, with his council of fifteen
members, is thus supreme. § 8. In this Presidency, (1.) Bengal itself
has been under a Lieutenant-Governor
 POLITICAL DIVISIONS OF BRITISH INDIA. 3 INTRO, i 8.
Sub-Divisions of Bengal. since 1853. His controul extends over Bahar
and Bengdl proper, Orissa and Assam. The number of divisions here
is eleven, and of districts fifty- six. The following is the table of the
sub-divisions of the Bengal territory. (See map.) Divisions. Districts.
Divisions. Districts. r L ! Bhagulpur < (Boglipur). n. BuhdwAn. r in. i
Chittagong. | IV. f Cdttack \ (Ch. v. § 56). 1 • 1 Dacca. VI. Nuddea. 1
Bhagulpur. 2 Monghyr. 3 Ptirneah. 4 Sonthal Pergunnahs. 5
Bancoora. 6 Beerbhum. 7 Burdwan. 8 Hugli. 9 Howrah. 10 Midnapdr.
11 Noakhally. 12 Chittagong. 13 Tipperah. 14 The Chittagong Hill
Tracts. 15 Balasore. 16 Cuttack. 17 P
 INTRO. § 8, 9. Population. Sikhim. Cossyah and Jyutia.
Munnipflr. Cooch Bahar. Tipperah. North-Western Provinces. Extent.
Districts. (Ch. x. § 74.) Uill States. INTRODUCTION. The North-
Western Provinces. The total population of this province is nearly
40,000,000. It is considerably larger than France. Sikhim is
independent. Darjeeling (a favourite sanitarium) was purchased in
1835. On the south-west frontier are twenty-one Mehals, or small
districts, and the Cuttack tributary Mehals number eighteen. These
mostly came under England in 1803. Connected with Assam are the
Cossyah and Jyntia hill territories, in which are many semi-
independent chiefs ; and the Garrow country, with which we have
little intercourse. The state of Munnipur pays no tribute. Cooch
Bahar, in 1772, became tributary, paying half its revenues to the
British, in return for the expulsion of the Butias. Here is independent
Tipperah, which was never subjected by the Moguls, and is perfectly
independent. § 9. (2.) The North-Western Provinces are also under a
Lieutenant-Governor (since 1835) : its capital is Allahabad. This
territory extends, as seen in the map, along the banks of the Jamna
and Ganges, including Alldhdbdd, Agra, Delhi, and Ben&res, the
heart of the antient Hindustan. Delhi has now been put under the
Panjab Government. It contains thirty-six districts, under seven
Commissioners. Here are the Rajas of Gurhwal and Shahpura. There
are also here nineteen Hill States, to whose rulers the right of
adoption has been conceded. (§ 24.) The following is the table of
the sub-divisions of the North- Western Provinces : —
 POLITICAL DIVISIONS OF BRITISH INDIA. The Panjab.
INTRO. § 9, 10. Divisions. Districts. Divisions. Districts. , 1 Mirut.* r
19 Allahabad.* 2 Allghar. 20 KMnpto.* I. 3 Seharunpur. IV. 21
Futtehpur. MlRUT. 4 Muzaffir Nagar. Allahabad. 22 Banda. 1 5
Boolundshuhur. 23 Hummeerpur. 6 DSraDun. .. 24 Jounpftr. ( 7
Bareilly* r 25 Benares.* 8 Bijnur. 26 Gorruckpux.* II. 9 Moradabad.*
V. 27 Busti. ROHILKHAND. 10 Budaon. Benares. 28 Azimghar. 11
Shahjebanpur.* 29 Mirz&pur.* 1 12 Terai. . 30 Ghazipur. ' 13 Agra.*
vi r 31 Jhausi. , 14 Muttra* 32 Jaloun. III. (Mat'hura). 33 Lullutpflr.
Agra. 15 Furruckabad.* VII. f 34 Kumadn. 16 Mynptiri. Kuma6n. 35
Gurhwal. 17 Etawah. 36 Ajmir(Rajptitdna). 18 Etah. Tbe places
marked * are the great cities. The population of this great territory is
about 30,000,000. It is nearly equal in area to Great Britain. § 10.
(3.) The Pan jab is under a Lieutenant-Governor, and is divided into
thirty-two districts, under ten Commissioners. (Comp. ch. xi. § 46.)
There are six Cis-Satlaj States, to whose rulers the right of adoption
has been given. (§ 24.) Cashmir and the Trans-Satlaj States may be
here mentioned. The treaty of Umritsir, 16th March 1846, put Golab
Sing in possession of Cashmir (ch. xi. § 34), between the Indus and
the Ravi. The Maharaja died in 1857, and his Population. The Panjab.
Cashmir.
 INTRO. § 10, 11. Sikh protected States. Dli&walpfir. (Comp.
ch. xi. §1, Ac.) Divisions. I. Delhi. II. HlSSAR. III. Umbala. IV.
JULLINDHUR. Y. Umritsib. VI. Lah6r. INTRODUCTION. The Panjab.
Oudh. son, Rumbir Sing, succeeded. The right of adoption has been
granted to him. There are also the Rajas of Kapurthala, Mandi,
Chamha, and Svkltet, and the Sirdars Shamshir Sing Sindhanwala,
and Tej Sing, who are included in the list in § 24. The Khftn of
Bhawalpur is protected by the terms of a treaty made in 1838. He
receives a pension for his services in 1849. (Ch. xi. § 35.) The
following is a list of the sub-divisions of the Panjab territory :—
Districts. Delhi. Gurgaon. Kurnal. Hissar. Rohlak. Sirsa. Umbala.
Ladiana. Simla. Jullindhur. HushiarpUr. Kangra. Urnritsir. Sealkot.
Gurdaspfir. Lah6r. Ferozpftr. Gujranwala. Divisions. VII. Rawal Pindi.
VIII. MULTAN. IX. Derajat. X. Peshawar. Districts. 19 Rawalpindi. 20
Jhilam. 21 Gujamt. 22 Shahpftr. 23 Maltan. 24 Jhuug. 25
Montgomery. 26 Muzaffirghar. 27 Dera Ismael Khan. 28 Dora Ghazi
Khan. 29 Bannu. 30 Pesh;\war. 31 Kohftt. 32 Hazara. Oudh. The
population of this territory is nearly 15,000,000. It is about the size
of Italy. § 11. (4.) Oudh is entrusted to a Chief Commissioner, under
whom are four Commissioners, with twelve districts. (See map.)
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