Steve Dixon

Stephen Robert Dixon (born 1956 in Manchester, England) is a British actor and academic.

Early life He studied performing arts at the Victoria University of Manchester, graduating in the same class as Rik Mayall. He worked as an actor for many years, taking minor roles in films like Privates on Parade and on television shows including The Young Ones and The Krypton Factor. For three years in the early 1980s he began working as a stand-up comic at The Comedy Store in London. He also worked in theatre, most notably with directors such as Nicholas Hytner, Steven Berkoff and Richard Eyre as well as working with experimental theatre companies Incubus and Lumiere & Son. He has directed productions himself in Mexico, Latvia and the UK, and produced an opera for the theatre company Opera North. Dixon has also directed five independent films which include large-scale movies produced through community texts. He also won an Industrial Society directing award for corporate video. He has also been the Director of Training for Glasgow Film and Video Workshop. Dixon has directed television programmes for Anglia and Granada Television, where he also produced an arts series. In 1984 Dixon appeared on Coronation Street as a taxi driver escorting the long serving character Elsie Tanner out of Weatherfield after 24 years on the show and 45 years on the street.

He turned to lecturing during the 1990s, and has since become a noted academic in the field of performing arts. Originally working at the University of Salford, he has since moved to Brunel University in London, where he was head of the School of Arts, and later from 2008 one of the university's Pro-Vice-Chancellors. One of his main publications is the book on Digital Performance published by MIT Press.

Academic background University of Salford Steve Dixon is a noted academic in the field of performing arts, in the 1990s he started lecturing at the University of Salford. Between 1991 and 2005 he was the Associate Head (Teaching and Learning) of the School of Media, Music and Performance at the University of Salford. In 1992 he co-founded the first honours degree combining media and performance. And then in 1994 he created the first UK module for Stand-up comedy, one of the former students of the course being Peter Kay.

Between the Years 1999 and 2000 Dixon began working on, and became the co-director of the Digital Performance Archive. Whilst at the University of Salford he published several articles which address a range of subjects including performance studies, gender, virtual theatre, pedagogy and cybertheory in leading journals such as The Drama Review (TDR), CTHEORY and Digital Creativity. Dixon also published two CD-ROMs which document and analyse the work of his multimedia theatre company, The Chameleons Group. One in 1996 called 'Chameleons: theatrical experiments in style, genre and multi-media’ and another in 1999 called ‘Chameleons 2: theatre in a movie screen’. In 2004 Steve Dixon's co-authored book with Barry Smith ‘Digital Performance: New Technologies in Theatre, Dance and Performance Art’ was published by the MIT press.

University of Brunel

In 2005 Steve Dixon left the University of Salford to become the Head of the School of Arts at the University of Brunel. Dixon led strategic and curriculum developments in the School of Arts at Brunel that led to the establishment of four research centres and the development of 11 new Masters Courses as well as the creation of new subject areas such as, Journalism and Videogames Design. His work as the Head of School of Arts also led to the recruitment of world-leading Professors, such as Fay Weldon and Stelarc. Dixon also managed to start the development of the new £3M Performance and Media centre at the University of Brunel.

Advisory Positions Dixon is a Research Panel member for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Panel 7, Music and Performing Arts), and has served on two specially constituted AHRC advisory panels (ICT in Creative and Performing Arts, and the Strategic Evaluation Review of AHDS). Dixon is a recognised academic pioneer and advisor on the use of ICT in the arts and humanities. He is currently a standing committee member of Digital Resources in Humanities and Arts (DRHA) and an advisory board member of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), and Artifact (JISC Resource Discovery Network hub).

Digital Performance: New Technologies in Theatre, Dance and Performance Art

It was after this major research project that Steve Dixon co-authored (with Barry Smith) the book Digital Performance and accompanying DVD Digital Performance: New Technologies in Theatre, Dance and Performance Art which was published by MIT Press in 2004. The 800 pages of Digital Performance outline the theory and history of digital performance. The book analyses topics such as ‘space’ and ‘interactivity’ and pays particular attention to the extensive research project of the Digital Performance Archive between the years of 1999–2000. Subsequently, the book contains additional research from the 1980s, 1990s and work from the early 2000s. Along with providing a history of digital performance, Dixon addresses and critiques views regarding digital performance. Digital Performance has won two international awards – The Association of American Publishers Award for Excellence in Music and the Performing Arts (Professional/Scholarly Publishing Awards) and the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics (Media Ecology Association).

His contributions to the Digital Performance Archive and the creation of his book Digital Performance have provided a solid grounding for the ongoing discussion of digital performance.

Published Journals Steve Dixon published extensively on a broad range of areas including theatre studies, digital arts, film theory, Artificial Intelligence and pedagogy in lead journals such as TDR and CTheory. Dixon is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, a journal in which he co-founded.

The aim of The Chameleons Group was to create multimedia performances. The company devised and toured with live 'film-theatre' productions, where live actors work in front of large video screens, interacting with film characters and their own 'digital doubles', and appear to move from the stage to the screen space. The company has also toured with many original theatre performances that experimented with the integration of video and live performance. In 2000, the group presented their most ambitious interactive cyber-theatre event ever staged, the performance allowed online audiences to direct the actors and write dialogue for the performances in real time.

Chameleons: The Dark Perversity of Chameleons

The Dark Perversity of Chameleons was the first performance created by The Chameleon Group and directed by Steve Dixon. The idea was conceived and developed by the media and performance research unit at the University of Salford. In the summer of 1994 it was performed at the University of Salford and toured various venues. It was a technically ambitious project that involved the devising of a theatrical text and the shooting and editing of over six hours of original video material. The end video material was screened on five video monitors positioned in different places on the set. The devising process incorporated a composer (Steven Durrant) who wrote and recorded original music for the production.

The narrative portrayed four characters in an imagined place and time somewhere between reality and a dream, who were striving to find a sense of self and their role within the external world. The primary research objective of the Chameleons Group was to bring a closer integration of the video and of live action.

The performances took place on three separate stages situated in a black-box studio theatre. The live actors performed on the stages in front of projection screens which played the pre-recorded edited footage; however, there were no live audiences present.

Four characters, a devil male escort, a genital-less femme fatale, a paranoid cyborg and a vampire bimbo played dangerous games through doors. Similarly to Chameleons 2, the performance incorporates multiple imaging and split screen digital video techniques with live theatre performed in hidden doors and windows within the screen itself. The Chameleons Group used this digital performance to explore the relationship between the esoteric and the populist; the disturbing and the comedic and the virtual and the 'real'. The multimedia theatre used aided the fusion of vivid dream narratives, surrealist comedy and the Artaudian techniques of the theatre of cruelty.