Back in January, the nice people at Theatre Bristol advertised for a freelance delegate to join them in Amsterdam at one of this year’s IETMs: Informal European Theatre Meetings.
The focus of this particular meeting was billed as Live Art in Digital Times.
This is the sort of billing that if it belonged to a show, I would skip the page.
The page would probably be accompanied with some sort of ultra-cool-but-at-the-same-time-highly-ironic-and-a-bit-retro-but-with-incredible-design-somehow-also-a-bit-taboo-breaking marketing image – and then I’d continue to flick through until I found a nice solid play-sort-of-thing to go and see, with absolutely no silly digital nonsense and a lovely strong character narrative thank you very much.
The fact that I even use a paper brochure as my metaphor here only serves to further betray my tendency to veer away from anything with ‘digital’ in the title (and to a lesser extent, Live Art).
A few years ago, I willingly did a bit of nosing around narrative and the digital thanks to Kaleider in Exeter, who supported me to simply go and have a series of five conversations with storytellers who made use of the digital in their work. It was a reaction to a shift in the theatre culture I could see springing up around me, and was born out of curiosity and a slight panic at getting left behind.
After this tentative toe-dipping, I had a think and decided that I was more interested in how ‘analogue’ theatre might reflect the change that’s taken place in the human as a result of the digital – the speed with which we think, the multiple platforms upon which we operate, the value we attach to the palm-sized computers in our hands – and I left it at that.
Things have changed in the last few years.
Firstly, I now have two kids. Going to the theatre – let alone going abroad to see and talk about theatre – requires forward-planning, time-management, financial considerations and childcare conversations, and on top of that I’ve no longer got the luxury of just going to see stuff because I fancy it – I’m much more selective, want more for the effort I’m putting in to arrange it, and am therefore much less likely to take risks.
Secondly, ‘the digital’ in its various forms has gradually emerged more and more as part of the work I’ve been making.
In a series of five linked one-person shows I wrote, one had to be turned into a film within a live theatre experience. In a current collaboration with Just Jones & in London, film and image will form a crucial part of how we hold the journey of a city for an audience. In a burgeoning international collaboration in South Korea, we’re calling on sound artists to create storytelling devices for us, and they will be created via digital technology. A commission with Symbiotic Theatre in Plymouth, where a man with fronto-temporal dementia journeys back through his diagnosis, is heavily dependent on sound, image and video to communicate point of view (and is operated by the performer on stage).
Several inter-disciplinary projects at R+D stage with Part Exchange Co in Bristol, upon which I worked as dramaturg, had digital elements at their core, driving audience understanding and experience by weaving together with live performance.
But what unifies all of these examples, and intrigues me further, is that I’m still working as a playwright – that’s how I’ve been employed. But the toolkit that comes with that role (and it overlaps with dramaturgy too) is now being diversely applied across different theatrical languages that embrace the possibility of digital interventions. And I imagine, probably for hard-core digital enthusiasts, they’re all still pretty benign examples of what’s actually possible.
So cue me three years on, staring at the Theatre Bristol call-out, suddenly realising that far from it being an irrelevant venture to apply as a (predominantly) playwright, it’s actually about recognising the rapid progress of storytelling techniques and a need for theatre-makers of all kinds to keep up with the changing times.
The digital is not just an application – it’s a socio-cultural phenomenon, a way of living, being, understanding our world, and it’s embedding itself in our physiologies, biologies, psychologies and storytelling habits. For me that makes it relevant to anybody who’s trying to tell stories about our world today.
The other attraction (besides going to Amsterdam and drinking nice beer whilst hanging around pretty canals in the springtime with live artists feeling terribly hipster) was the opportunity to mix with an international delegation of theatre-makers.
I’ve had the fortune to be able to do this sort of thing three times before in the last decade: briefly in Paris with an international studentship at Ecole Philippe Gaulier; in Beijing at the ex-pat British School of Beijing (working with twenty nationalities across thirty students) and then most recently in Seoul as part of the Korea project.
Each of these experiences has had a significant impact on my artistic identity. My work, values and artistic practice has been rigorously questioned by artists and students from other cultures, and I’ve been able to step outside my limited UK experience and challenge assumptions I’ve held about my own identity and role in the theatrical landscape. It’s expanded my dramaturgical understanding through seeing native work, allowed me to reassess theatre’s function, and question how my work maintains urgency and relevance.
So tomorrow, I get on a flight to Amsterdam to spend three and a half days absorbing workshops, talks, plenaries and performances reflecting Live Art in Digital Times (and I realise I’ve talked less here about the Live Art aspects, but I think I’ve started to see those artistic principles borrowed more directly through text-driven authored works in the last five years or see – Tim Crouch is a good example even if it’s still fairly vanilla).
I’ll be trying to blog each day, to do a bit of Tweeting, getting down and dirty with social media platforms – but all from the perspective of a playwright asking one core question: how might all this be relevant to the very basic aspects of crafting text and stories for performance?
I’ve been encouraged by Theatre Bristol to allow it as ‘time and space to think differently’, so whilst there’ll be some answers, some documenting and pondering, who knows what form they’ll take?
Maybe I’ll get converted and do all of my blogs via Vine or Skype or digital semaphore via live-streaming with interactive tweets or interpretative dance or something whilst sporting a huge beard and intercutting strobed inverted negatives of my own avatar.
And then also, maybe I’ll come back being slightly less stereotypical about something I don’t really know very much about yet.
If you fancy being part of the conversation, feel free to Tweet me @davidjohnlane and of course leave comments on any accompanying threads.