Digital Documentation of the Creative Process

Digital technologies and the Internet may be helpful in preserving the text of a play and/or the video of its performance to other generations to see and study.

But what if we can have an idea of how the actors prepared? What considerations were taken before creating the stage design? What was the inspiration of a costume design?

In theater, rather than just the product, the process is the most important part since it is where all the information is transformed into acting, stage design, costume design and so on.

If you are researching about a specific play and or performance, wouldn’t it be helpful to have access to a part of its creative process?

As a theater student, I am interested in using the digital technologies as a way of documenting the creative process.

I have two examples of how I have tried to do so:

• I have used Pinterest (my account is available at pinterest.com/arevirorev/) to document visual information that helped me to create a costume design for a specific play, as part of a class. Since most of my visual information came from the Internet, it was easier to “pin” the images. And also, was easier to access them anywhere from a computer and/or a smartphone. Then, the information I have gathered, was available online for my professor and/or classmates to see it (I have to say that my professor loved the idea and he created his own account to work on his designs).
• As part of a bilingual production that I worked with, we created a blog (available at machinaluprrp2012.blogspot.com) that aimed to serve as a virtual portfolio (it included articles, photos and videos) of the entire production. A weekly entry covered the processes of translating the play to Spanish, the technical designs, the rehearsals, the publicity efforts and so on.

The general questions and starting point of this session would be: Which are the pros and cons of documenting the creative process digitally? Which digital technologies and/or social networks exist already that might be helpful to document and therefore preserve the creative process of all the parts that result in a performance? How can we use them?