How to link a theatre project with social and media strategies? By professor Robin Nelson

1. Prof. Robin Nelson
Professor of Theatre and Intermedial Performance RCSSD (rtd Jan 2015)
Professor Emeritus Theatre and TV Drama MMU (on-going)
a provocative intervention
Playing Identities
Performing Heritage
Siena 2014-16

2. a theatre project
with social and media dimensions
• engaging local communities,
• actors/directors
• explore a social issue locally
• with implications for heritage and
shifting identities across Europe

3. audience engagement
• mobilisers
• to stimulate process of artistic creation
• to develop local audience both digital
and on the ground
• to set up a social media strategy
• to animate the project web platform

4. Question:
how to link a theatre project with
social and media strategies?
Provocation:
• all contemporary theatre has digital and
intermedial aspects

5. ‘mediality’: the condition of the
digital age
• New ways of representing the world, new creative
possibilities and new experiences (immersive
virtual environments, screen-based
interactive multimedia).
• New textual experiences: new kinds of genre and
textual form, entertainment, pleasure and
patterns of media consumption (computer
games, simulations, special effects cinema).

6. …with regard to theatre
Key elements of
• the body, space, time
• challenged by new media technologies
• consider: avatar body collision

7. http://www.avatarbodycollision.org/
The Colliders are four women (Helen Varley Jamieson,
Karla Ptacek, Leena Saarinen, Vicki Smith) who met
online in 2001 and formed Avatar Body Collision in
2002. We are a collaborative, globally distributed
performance troupe who live (mostly) in London,
Helsinki, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and
cyberspace. We devise and rehearse online using chat
software that is cross-platform and free to download.

8. Avatar body collision
distributed performance practices

9. Key features required of theatre by
‘audiences’ in a digital age
• active experience (rather than passive
reception of a show)
• encounter
• interactivity (co-constructions)

10. ‘co-construction’
might include:
• using documented testimony of others in
‘verbatim’ theatre
• inviting others onstage to take part (Boal)
• projecting video diary recordings in the
live theatre piece
• inviting feedback and incorporating
suggestions

11. implicit recognition of difference of
‘the other’
co-constructive approaches to theatre-
making:
• recognise that there are different
perspectives
• recognise that reality is complex and single
‘truths’ hard to find
• acknowledge situated-ness of viewpoint

12. think things together not apart:
both-and not either/or
‘Intermedial’ theatre may be:
• both physically based and on-screen;
• experiences may be both actual and
virtual;
• spaces may be both public and private;
• bodies may be both present and absent.’
(Nelson, 2010: 17)

13. Examples of strategies and tactics
1) Continuous City (Builders Association)
2) No Man’s Land (Dries Verhoeven)
3) Call Cutta (Rimini Protokoll)
4) Dubplate Drama (Luke Hyama for C4
TV)

14. Continuous Cities
(The Builders Association)
• a meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and
dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our “networked selves”
occupy multiple locations.
• tells the story of a travelling father and his daughter at home tethered
and transformed by speed, hypermodernity, and failing cell
phones.
• The characters they interact with pursue their own transnational
business, from an internet mogul exploiting networking across
the developing world to a nanny who blogs humorous stories about
the people and places within her universe.
• reaches directly into each city visited through a participatory website
and on-site filming to create a global and local production.
• individuals could contribute their own ‘talking head’ video.

15. No Man’s Land
(Dries Verhoeven)
a peripatetic performance / political act in the streets of a
city. Twenty viewers and twenty economic immigrants /
political refugees come together in a station. They’re,
equipped with iPods to provide audio information, each
‘watcher’ listens to the biography of one of the immigrants,
who could be their guide through the streets of their home
city. The pairs of viewers and guides become neighbours of
a unique kind as the latter show the former a side of the
city they may never have seen before. The piece demands
a moving, poetic and meaningful response to the question:
“What can a multicultural environment mean?”

16. Call Cutta (Rimini Protokoll)
Imagine you are buying a ticket at the box office for an individual show
on a specific day, but are not led to the auditorium of the theatre.
Instead, you get the key for a room and a sketch of how to get there. It
might be a room in the theatre, an office, or an apartment somewhere
close by. You open the door and you find a phone ringing. You pick up
the phone and a person with a strange accent strikes up a conversation
with you. The person seems to know the room you are sitting in, even
though he is about 10.000 km away. The voice belongs to a call centre
agent from Calcutta, India. He and his colleagues usually sell credit cards
and insurance on the phone to people on the other side of the globe or
provide navigational help in cities that they have never been to
themselves. But this time you are not supposed to buy anything. On the
notebook desktop in your room images and videos are opening up out of
nowhere. A story is about to develop and you realize that the call centre
agent and you and your city are the very first protagonists of the plot.

17. Dubplate Drama
(Luke Hyam for C4 TV)
• British television series Nov 2005 - July 2009[
• premise - a group of young rap musicians
attempt to secure a record deal.
• show described as "the world's first
interactive drama series“
•allowed viewers to vote on the outcome of
each episode.
• first series contained twelve fifteen-minute
episodes

18. ‘Dramatic’ Theatre
• theatron - a place for seeing (theasthai: to
see; theomai: a spectacle)
• spectators seated in rows (in the dark)
• scripted plays representing actions (mimesis)
• linear narrative leading to closure (catharsis)
• critical distance of eye-mind cognition
(though we may feel pity and fear)

19. postdramatic theatre
• takes place anywhere
• divide between auditorium and stage
broken down
• postnarrative: an assemblage of
fragments without sense-making
frame
• a ‘shift from work to event’ (Lehmann:
61); from meanings to experiences

20. the experiencer
•full sensorium engaged through
immersion in a visceral
experience (actual and/or virtual)
• ‘spectator’ and ‘audience’ are
inadequate terms