We take as a premise that Social Media is a performance platform both for the new World Theatre and the Theatre of the World.

Who are the new actors? What is the drama that they play? How different or similar might these platforms be from a more traditional performance venue? How does it affect the Performing Arts as we’ve known them? Is it an entirely new Performing Art? How is it realized, documented, preserved? Or is it?

We will play with some of these questions by bringing personal, popular and academic references to the table. E.J. Westlake’s “Friend me if you Facebook Generation Y and Peformative Surveillance” may be a departure point, although we can revise it and update it as we enter the discussion, as many of the references are already obsolete with the development of Facebook, as one of the platforms.

You can view this article here: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9005578/facebookperformativity.pdf

Current events, causes, life stories are case studies for how the media performs and how we perform within the media. Participants should be prepared to present a few of their own examples and be open to play with them – the proposal is to investigate how, for instance, a real life event gets transformed when socially performing to a virtual audience.

Another useful reference for this session is Bernie Hogan’s article “The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media”.

Performing arts digital archives–you’ve seen them, you’ve heard of some amazing ones, maybe you’re working on or with one now. What are the most important pieces of a performing arts digital archive? What should one look like? What can they do? What could they do?

This session invites you to imagine the ideal performing arts digital archive, and, since we’re all into performing arts, perform this archive right then and there.

We’ll spend the first half of the session hashing out the top ten most important parts of a performing arts archive. Once we’ve reached consensus, we’ll break into groups and each “play” one of these parts à la charades for the other groups to guess. Part performance, part brainstorming, part game, this session offers us a chance to concretely discuss what we want to see in digital archives for performing arts and, by putting this ideal into immediate and fleeting action, also reminds us about the ephemerality of the materials we seek to collect and archive.

This session’s Google doc notes and lists of most important parts of digital archives for performing arts