Meet My Gaze: Crafting the Agentic Gaze for Zoom Theatre

Abstract

This article considers both improvised and scripted performances produced during the pandemic and the ways in which framing live performance creates gaze. In conversation with Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze and Stephanie Jennings’s concept of the feminine gaze, this article analyzes the ways in which awareness of both of these gazes can inform the development of a new gaze—an agentic gaze—for Zoom Theatre. The agentic gaze requires an adapted directorial practice in order to create a dialectic among collaborators characterized by agentic symmetry; this article describes the ways in which a curatorial directing process accomplishes this.