I’d like to propose a conversation about using technology in the performing arts classroom, especially in relationship to playwriting and collaborative work. I recently taught a hybrid section of first-year writing and spent the semester looking for ways to create  lessons that were more than just online versions of what we did in class; the real challenge was finding lessons that made the online classroom the ideal environment rather than just the one we were given. I’m teaching a playwriting class in the fall and want to find ways to make online work relevant and engaging.

How are new & emerging media, social media & the Internet changing the way we think about performance and spectatorship? How does it affect our pre-existing discipline categories and demand new vocabularies for creating, discussing and engaging with live performance?

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”.

I was having coffee today with an entrepreneur whose start-up revolves around the performing arts. Although her background is in law and government she is passionate about the arts and determined not only to fight our thirty year audience decline- but to grow the performing arts audience well beyond it’s current base – and who is that base? Well, therein lies a  large part of the problem. The same entrepreneur told me a story of being at a show last weekend when the person next to her turned and asked “Who do you know in the show?”, the assumption being the only  reason you would buy a ticket is to come support a friend. Why? Because WE ARE OUR AUDIENCE. We are no longer a draw to the lawyers, the babysitters, the waitresses the financiers or the educators of our communities.  We perform for ourselves. As Jason Gots said in his recent article about Peter Brook “Why We Need Theater Now More Than Ever”

the small percentage of New Yorkers who ever attend a play fall mainly into two camps: the once-a-year Broadway tourists and the friends of actors, playwrights, or directors.

Art museums have understood for a long while that they can no longer depend on the audience that visits their buildings – their audiences are everywhere and they need to find ways to excite, involve and engage their everywhere audience. The have not shied away from experimenting with new technologies and social media platforms as a way to speak more authentically to today’s wired art enthusiast, and the result is that museums are experiencing a rise in attendance, even as ticket sales to live performance continue on its decline.

What technologies can live performance utilize to expand our audience in our wired world?  How can we speak to today’s digital centric community while still being true to the live- performance experience?  What darlings must we slay and what aspects of the live-performance experience are sacred? Let’s brainstorm new ways to engage today’s digital community, a community that is eager to create and share, in the live-performing arts.

For centuries, the conventional definition of theatre has been of an event occurring in real time in front of a live audience in a physical space. In the last decade alone, there have been hundreds of examples that have put that categorization to the test (one example: www.digitaltheatre.com).  With the rapid advance of technology, theatre has a responsibility to embrace this (r)evolution or ultimately fall further by the wayside. How can we utilize these advances, both artistically and administratively, to transform the theatrical landscape so we can further investigate, innovate and interact with fellow artists across the globe?

Until recently, theatre hasn’t been able to avoid creating sleep-inducing footage when it’s recorded or digitized. It somehow loses its spirit as fast as the present becomes the past; leaving one with the same feeling one has when they stopped being in love. Where does the spirit go? How can that magic remain? How can we keep it interesting for everyone, not just academics and researchers? Is it just a document of a past event, or can we find a way for it to be a living, breathing experience?

Records of performances, going back to Aristophanes and beyond, are gradually being made available online.  Handwritten and printed scripts, scores, reviews and notes from before the digital age require different techniques to compile, archive, digitize, share and analyze.

<a href="http://performingarts2013.thatcamp.org/files/2013/06/f16.highres.png"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-321" alt="f16.highres" src="http://performingarts2013.thatcamp.org/files/2013/06/f16.highres-300×214.png" width="300" height="214" /></a>My research explores the history of the French language as found in scripts of plays, from the  twelfth century dramatization of the Adam and Eve story to the twentieth century Theater of the Absurd.  I have drawn on texts digitized by others, books scanned by Google Books and the National Library of France, and my own scans of published books and microfilms.

What performances are you looking at?  How are you finding them, bringing them together, converting them to digital, studying them and making them available to others?

We will be taking notes in <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s1okeHUcSrZv5gLR_4iYvJPlbBXOTlPK53-nzpYaiI0/edit">this google doc</a>.

During the spring semester of 2013, three acting teachers at three different colleges linked their class discussions through Twitter under the hashtag #ACTweets. (The instructions for students can be found here.) The pedagogical experiment allowed students and teachers to directly interact and discuss with others in Acting 1 classes at CUNY colleges around the city. We thought of it like having the one-on-one attention of a smaller classroom, but the scope and breadth of the CUNY system.

This project was motivated by a desire to help students think through and about acting outside the classroom and was organized by:

@eero_laine – Eero Laine, Acting 1 at the College of Staten Island
@rayelz – Rayya El Zein, Acting 1 at City College
@defyinggravitas – Barrie Gelles, Intro to Acting and Acting 1&2 at Brooklyn College

In light of this recent experiment, we hope to have an open conversation about using social media in (and outside of) the performing arts classroom. What has worked? What has failed? How do students respond? Do the performing arts need social media?

As a graduate student who works on twentieth century drama as well as fiction, I have had at times the daunting task of finding information on past productions that seemingly have no digital footprint. I am less interested in bemoaning this fact than in spotlighting two recent examples I came across regarding (not coincidentally) the playwrights I work on and use those as jumping off points as to what role personal websites and marketing materials can have in offering insightful material for the Web 2.0 drama student.

The first is the Facebook page of the current revival of Tennessee Williams’ little-known and rarely produced play The Two Character Play. More than just a maketing site for the revival (though it never ceases to be just that), the page has strived to create a number of resources on Williams himself, the play at hand and the production itself. It’s at once a curatorial experiment, an advertising and a social media site all in one. (Its accompanying instagram is a nice companion piece).

The second is the personal website/blog of Adrienne Kennedy (you can see more material if you go to the almost egregiously unnavigational mobile site found here). Ms Kennedy, known for her one-act plays (Funnyhouse of a Negro, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, Rat’s Mass) had already to my mind, amassed quite the “behind the scenes” document in her memoir/scrapbook People Who Led To My Plays and I had hoped her website would function in the same way, giving her readers insight into what went into creating and producing her plays. There is that here, but maybe given its interface and navigation, it is less helpful than it could be, though it has plenty of information that has made its way into my dissertation that I had found nowhere else.

There are surely similar examples out there of attempts by productions and/or playwrights to put their process (as well as their work) out there to be consumed in ways that skirt the line between marketing and research resources. Does this suggest a more savvy spectator — one who expects the behind the scenes information DVD bonus features and online featurettes we’ve come to associate and expect from film and, during awards season here in NYC, from big-budget theater productions? What does it mean that information that was usually relegated to program notes (and the occasional newspaper piece) is now readily available to those who need not attend the production? How does promotion and intellectual engagement come together in these instances and how helpful can they be to students of twentieth and twenty-first century drama?

Extending the conversation on the new invisibility/visibility of the library in the digital age begun by Tom Scheinfeldt in Nobody Cares about the Library, we (Mary Isbell and I) would like to discuss if/how creating a digital archive requires the scholar to step back as  “the author” and instead become a curator of data and content. In his post, Scheinfeldt argues that the library should embrace invisibility by encouraging access to content through better search interfaces, APIs, and social media. How does this notion of visibility/invisibility help us think about the challenges facing DH scholars for whom visible authorship is the means to tenure and promotion? Is it fair to say that tools like Omeka have prompted a trend in curatorship amongst scholars who would otherwise rely on the library for that work? Has it also provided a way for the library to become more visible?

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?