In the spring of 2008, the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London summoned audiences for the Shunt Collective's Contains Violence with a peculiar request: arrive at dusk, wear gloves, and get ready for an evening of rooftop espionage. Upon arrival, audience members were ushered onto the rooftop terrace of the Lyric Hammersmith, seated under the darkening sky on the edge of the balcony, and outfitted with a set of in-ear microphones and high-power binoculars. A uniform-clad officer brusquely ordered audience members to use their individually issued surveillance equipment to follow a drama that would take place several hundred yards away, across a busy commercial street, in a newly built five-story glass-fronted office building.

As the office-world drama across the street unfolded, the lighted rooms revealed a disillusioned office worker typing his letter of resignation, a bubbly male co-worker watering ornamental plants, and, several floors below, a woman in a neck brace and polka-dot dress sashaying around a photocopier and talking heatedly on her mobile phone. Over the hour-plus performance, the audience had to piece together the suspenseful Hitchcockian narrative through the clues they gathered via their zoom lens binoculars and specially calibrated earphones, drawing connections between a fragmented series of sounds and gestures that included obscene and threatening phone calls, a passionate embrace and choice inner thoughts narrated by the characters, all of which were underscored by environmental sounds of typing, phones ringing, paper crackling, water pouring, and mundane office conversation. Finally, much as the title of the show promises, the audience members were witnesses to an act of theatrical violence, a dramatically bloody murder worthy of any televised crime thriller.

The Shunt Collective's Contains Violence (2008) is illustrative of an emergent genre of mixed media performance that I am calling ‘surveillance theatre’. Surveillance theatre pieces are characterized by the significant integration of technologies of surveillance into the form and content of live theatre works, as surveillance theatre artists explore aesthetic and theatrical as well as disciplinary capabilities of surveillance technologies.