The recipient of our inaugural Innovation Grant is Magda Romanska for launching Performap.com, an interactive digital map of global theatre festivals.

With hundreds of festivals browsable and searchable by festival location, type, and date, Performap is the first extensive digital index of its kind in the field. It is built expressly for artists, audiences, critics, scholars, festival organizers, curators, and presenters from around the world. Performap also includes reports written by local writers and traveling reporters published by TheTheatreTimes.com. Festivals of theatre and performance are hotbeds of creativity, experimentation, cross-pollination, and virtuosity; they’re platforms for artists at the forefront of their fields; and, because of the rapid timelines and compact scales of festival production, they’re also stunning snapshots of the field’s acutest aches, anxieties, and addictions. Designed to drive online traffic to the individual festival websites, Performap is a highly visible and reliable node in the festival ecosystem—not a destination but a well-trodden intersection. At the same time, Performap also enables quantitative analysis of that very industry. Its primary purpose is to facilitate real-time access to festivals worldwide, ideally by increasing public awareness and ticket sales, but it also articulates the contours of festival circuitry through the collection and organization of measurable data. This data is open access, so that anyone has permission to use its digital archive, run quantitative analyses, and create visualizations, maps, and models of its contents. Performap is an invaluable resource for scholastic, journalistic, and management research on theatre and performance festivals worldwide. Scholars specializing in theatre and performance studies, anthropology, sociology, economics, and urban planning will find it particularly attractive. TheTheatreTimes.com is a global theatre portal. Since its launch in November 2016, TheTheatreTimes.com has published over 3,000 articles covering theatre in 90 countries and regions. With 30 thematic sections, more than 150 Regional Managing Editors, over 60 media partners around the world, and 60,000+ followers on social media, we have grown to be the most far-reaching and comprehensive global theatre portal today. Performap was also developed with funding from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab.

 

A graduate of Stanford’s honor program, and Cornell’s doctoral program in Theatre, Film and Dance, Magda Romanska is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dramaturgy at Emerson College in Boston, MA, a Research Associate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and the Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of TheTheatreTimes.com, the largest global digital theatre portal. She is the or editor of five 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.  She taught courses on theatre, and performance and transmedia at Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Cornell University, and Emerson College; and worked on over 30 theatre and opera productions.