Welcome to the first edition of #CdnCult Times to be guest-curated.
As part of SpiderWebShow’s role presenting the ‘From Where I Stand’ forum on Canadian Theatre at The National Theatre School, Sarah Garton Stanley and myself worked with directing students Carly Chamberlain and Tanya Rintoul to create the event and social design that accompanied it. The final element of this design is this edition.
Tanya and Carly discuss their observations about the ideas presented and you can also find the video archive of the forum in their article, playwright and forum speaker Annabel Soutar contributes observations from her 5 minute talk, and NTS design student Alexandra Lord reflects on the importance of dialogue and ideas to push the medium forward. Thanks to the school and Howlround for providing incredible venues and resources off and online at SpiderWebShow’s first livestreamed event.
Vicki and Jacob talk galas. Are they different when they’re for surf museums? Do you want to bring your hobbies into work? Launch of the 2nd SWS Podcast series.
Sarah Garton Stanley, Vicki Stroich and Zimmer talk “leadership” in theatre and life, brain drain and whether one would want Artaud would be a good boss. And yes, surfing.
This week, I am teaching my second annual class on Social Design for directors at The National Theatre School.
It’s been over a year since I wrote my original post titled, “What is Social Design”. A lot has happened to online technology and theatre since then.
I began writing this post on the train to teach social design for a week, as a discipline, to directing students at the National Theatre School. It seems a good time to reflect on recent innovations (and devolutions) and take stock of what the deal is with social design at this moment. Hopefully I will write something of this nature each year for as long as I teach the class. I am only going to get older and more naturally out-of-touch with youth-inspired innovation. This seems a good way to force myself be on the ball with current trends and best practices.
In my original post, I lead by defining social design as the following and I think it is still accurate as a definition:
“Social Design: The strategic implementation of social media to deepen or broaden the nature of an artistic project.”
From there I go on to articulate three ways this usually happens:
Social Media Content ABOUT the Work
Social Design That INTEGRATES With The Work and
Social Design that IS The Work.
These ideas still hold up for me as well. At least as a broad lense to understand how social media can be connected to a live performance.
There are a number of trends that were not evident when these categories were defined moving forwards.
There is a growing suspicion that all of this social media integration is not actually all that great for thinking.
Or more accurately, the way the tools have been designed makes integration less-than-desirable in all contexts. Leading social media theorist and NYU Professor Clay Shirky recently banned the use of devices in his class after many years of being open to it. He chalked his eventual conversion to the dark side up to two factors:
1) Popular Social Media Tools like Twitter, FB, Gmail Instagram, are professionally designed to distract.
2) “Screens generate distraction in a manner akin to second-hand smoke.” Not only do devices distract the user, they also distract other people near the device-user.
It seems significant that this critique comes from Shirky, who once argued in a 2009 Ted Talk that Twitter and FB would be key tools to circumventing repressive regimes. Sober thought about where these things are going is not leading to enthusiasm from some of the industry’s top enthusiasts.
+1 MT @zeynep: Ello hype should alert every social network of the unease about choices. Many looking for a cascade. And not just power users
There is a thirst for something new and better than the tools that are available at a mainstream level.
This is not so much new, as a desire that is becoming more intense. Three years ago, I taught a social media and performance education program for teens. The only thing this cohort could agree on was that none wanted to be on Facebook, but that each felt they HAD to be in order to be relevant/informed in the social order. This sentiment is growing mostly because of the intense changes being brought to these tools motivated by the drive to monetize. That Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm has significantly displeased users has not dissuaded from Twitter musing publicly about doing the same.
The disparity between what is popular/useful/desirable and what is most profitable is causing a lot of tension a newly interactive sphere that hasn’t really figured out how to meet the needs of the new stakeholders in media as it becomes social: The users. Montreal-based Cllbr’s Francis Gossellin sums it up in a recent post about the implications on start-up social network Ello:
“Social media can be profound, and useful, and productive. The unfortunate downside is that it is owned and controlled by unscrupulous new masters, who, while certainly making everything in their power to “do no evil”, are actually eating away at our confidence in our collective ability to communicate, organize and fix the problems at hand. ”
Despite these reservations Social Design will become an increasingly necessary and relevant tool to theatre-makers.
This is mostly to do with innovation and the age of intended audience. This was drummed into me during a conversation with Gabrielle Madé of the newly relaunched CMF Trends site. She pointed me to this article, in Variety that reports amongst US teens YouTube Stars are more popular and recognizable than Hollywood Stars. Ever heard of Smosh, PewDiePie or Hyan Higga? No? That’s probably because you’re old. These guys are huge, bigger than Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lawrence to the cohort that will be in their 20s and potentially buying theatre tickets in he next decade. What influences new audiences comes not from mainstream media, but the self-publishing/broadcasting world of the internet.
Beyond the popularity of these tools some artists are also becoming more sophisticated at integrating them into the work. The 2014 HATCH series at Harbourfront (curated by Praxis Theatre) saw a number of compelling experiments with social design from Rob Kempson’s #Legacy which effectively integrated livetweeting into the performance, to Faster Than Night that used social tools to give the audience an element of control over the direction of the narrative, to Melissa D’Agostino’s Broadfish, which mined the internet for some of its most important content.
Most recently, I attended the The Sixth Man Collective’s Monday Nights at The Theatre Centre, which encouraged the use of social devices throughout. I found this kept me engaged in an interactive piece that pitted my basketball team against three others. Even when we lost, it gave me a way to celebrate, by documenting the loss on Instagram. Theatre may be ephemeral, but our experience can now live on forever. This means something new for live performance, the next year will probably be figuring out what that means.
SpiderWebShow is one year old and looks like a whole new kid. You can check it out here. The dawn of our second year has arrived.
What is this ‘show’ anyway? It is just site after all. Or a fancy blog – or is it? We think not. Why? Simple, there’s nothing else like us in Canada. SpiderWebShow is the only nationally-driven, performance-based website of its kind in this country. This is true, and it is very cool too, because it is still so young. It is such a baby! But it is already a theatrical space where performance minds can connect and create. We hope you will use it in this way. We sincerely hope you do…and that’s it.
Makes for a short article, besides we are all busy, right?
But wait a minute… a few pieces of how and why this all came to be.
Life is not a highway nor is it authentic. Rather it moves like a web and unfolds like a show. There is connectivity to be found among isolated incidents and there are countless ways to play out any of our individual scenes – be they real or imagined this is the 21st Century after all.
So, how do we talk about this in our theatre?
In the 20th Century Erving Goffman wrote a ground-breaking book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It was a sociological treatise that used the specifics of theatre to parse out the performative elements of everyday life. It went on to suggest that we are the creators of our own social characters; that by the choice of mask and costume and through the timing of our entrances and exits, we can control how we are seen in the world.
When I look back I know that SpiderWebShow was born of a hunch. I had a sense that there might be a way to gather and collate the disparate strands and to allow meaning to form as a result. I had a feeling that we might be able to tell a story in a new way and to allow that story the space to have ever changing narratives.
I wanted to move forward and backwards through the story and to look to its left and its right. Ultimately I hoped we would be able to expose all the story making elements. Since its inception Co-Creator Michael Wheeler and I struggled to find a form for sentiment. Making an online ‘show’ is one sweet challenge.
After first conceiving of the ‘show’ we went on to join forces with our digital dramaturg, Graham F Scott. After an inaugural volume, Adrienne Wong of Neworld Theatre came aboard as our Associate Artist and to head the experimental wing of the ‘show’. After a first year of performing for almost 10,000 visitors, not bad I say, we are expanding anew:
We are so happy to welcome our newest Associate Artist, Laurel Green from ATP and our first Associate Digital Dramaturg Simon Bloom of Outside The March. Not only this, but today marks the beginning of a new look, new features, and it comes with a dedication to making our sight as accessible to as many people as possible. I am also stoked to point your eye to Lindsay Anne Black’s new logo design for our show.
“Guy Cools writes that he believes that the 19th century was the century of the actor, and that the 20th century was the century of the director, the ‘guru’ director. And that the 21st century will be “the era of collective process guided (as opposed to directed) by the dramaturg”. He believes that the dramaturg has become the avant-garde,… ”
These are shifting sands time and The SpiderWebShow, conceived dramaturgically, is looking to keep with it.
Over the course of a year this constantly devising ‘show’, has become a production. The ‘show’ has moved from the amorphous and hidden, to the present and uncertain, to the performance that we are today. I want t close by doubling back to performativity: Our costumes are different, our masks are less full, and our next entrance comes with some really cute baby steps and a celebration of being one.
A google chat at the end of the work day between Graham F. Scott (SWS Digital Dramaturg) and Laurel Green (Artistic Associate).
Early cocktail napkin sketch of SpiderWebShow by Sarah Garton Stanley.
When Graham first started working with SpiderWebShow he created a proposal to become the site’s ‘digital dramaturg’. It’s fascinating and got him the gig – you can read it here: gfscott.com/sws
Laurel: Hold on…I’m trying figure out how to download a script I’m reading to the hard drive on my Kobo. That to me is Digital Dramaturgy.
Graham: Haha.
Laurel: Ok, here now. Hi. Graham, I’m a dramaturg at ATP where I work with playwrights as they develop their new scripts, read plays for future programming, and I’m the sorta ‘resident contextualizer’ for the plays in our season. I’m curious about your use of the word dramaturg in terms of your work for SWS, and I’d love to hear more about your practice.
Graham F: It made sense to me because the original goal of the SWS was to build a “National Theatre” that made sense for the Internet age. Reading the original proposal, I felt that it was going to be actually very difficult to separate the project’s artistic goals from their technical realization. Which is why I kind of asserted myself a bit more and said that not only was I going to write some code, but I had to have some sort of advisory role, helping the creators see the technical limits, but also the technical possibilities.
Laurel: Which makes sense that in a dramaturgical role you would function as a technical facilitator, editor and writer. When I’m working on a script I have to keep the audience’s understanding and experience front of mind. Also, I’m thinking about how content informs the shape and style of the piece.
Graham F: Yeah! And for me I think it’s also about maintaining a little critical distance during the creative process, and posing questions that might help clarify what’s going on for the creators who are so deeply embedded in it. Like: “Here’s what I’m seeing and hearing. Is that what you intended?”
Laurel: I think that critical distance is totally key to working as a dramaturg. So, can you share some anecdotes about what it’s been like to work on SWS thus far?
Graham F: Sure. It has involved a lot of Google Hangouts, because we’re all seldom in the same city. So a lot of highly-pixellated streams of Sarah beaming in from Saskatoon or St. John’s or Vancouver or wherever she is that day. We had early arguments about how to translate the name into the design….because the name was meant to evoke the web of theatrical creators across the country who were collaborating on it. If you literally drew the lines on a map it would be this crazy spider’s web.
Laurel: Ah, yes.
Graham F: It’s a metaphor—and a perfectly good one! I was dead-set against actually using an image of a spider, however. Very early on, there were a bunch of visual things we decided we could never, ever use for this project:
no spiders
no red curtains about to be raised
no laughing/crying drama masks
no Matrix-y computer code
Much of that was just to try and inoculate ourselves against kitsch and cliche.
But also: I thought it was important that we get closer, visually and conceptually, to where contemporary “net art” is right now…or I should say, where it was last year. (It moves pretty fast)
Laurel: It does move fast. I think that’s part of the anxiety over how to design one’s space online…
Graham: Exactly. And “space” was a word we actually haggled over a whole lot. Because: I argued that the idea of “space” was wrong for an online venture.
Laurel: Interesting. Why?
Graham: The whole idea of the internet as a “space” seemed, to me, a bit creaky in 2013. Like when someone says “information superhighway” or “cyberspace” — it’s this hangover from the ’90s, when all of the imagery related to computers and the internet is explicitly spatial: think cyberpunk classics like Lawnmower Man or Hackers or The Matrix. When in reality, the internet is a bunch of people sitting at their desks or waiting for the bus playing with their phone or whatever.
Laurel: So it’s more fluid?
Graham F: Perhaps less fluid! I thought it was important to discard some of those romantic metaphors about the web. The experience of the web today is largely textual. It’s your Facebook newsfeed, your Twitter stream.
Laurel: Right. So, not a big ‘space’ full of ‘fluid’?
Graham F: That resistance to spatial metaphors is what drove the design — trying to flatten it and make it (relatively) straightforward.
Laurel: How does the site produce online performances?
Graham F: I built a website where we could showcase what people were doing. And that performance has taken all sorts of forms. One of the successes of SWS is that it’s done stuff that I think gets beyond the most obvious adaptation of theatre to the internet, which is video. I’d cite Adrienne’s audio postcards, and Mat’s photo tableaux series. In both cases it definitely feels like there’s a “performance” going on, but it’s not “turn camera on, act scene, turn camera off”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Laurel: Nor is it “turn on, watch something, and turn off” for the audience.
Graham F: Yes! I hadn’t even thought of that, but it’s true for the audience as well. I seldom scrutinize photos as closely as I do Mat’s in that series, which I think is testimony to the power of the concept theatrically. It’s got that riveting quality that the best live theatre does.
Laurel: Absolutely.
Graham F: I think mobile is actually where we have the most work to do in future, in terms of trying to find performance possibilities and adhering to the principles of Responsive Design — meaning that the site displays differently, and displays well, whether you’re looking at it on a big screen or a little one. So we’ve done some stuff with audio, with images, with video on YouTube. But what’s a performance on Instagram? On Snapchat? On Yo? And people are doing all that stuff already: it must be said. I don’t think we’re late to the party, by any means, but a lot of these mediums already have emergent aesthetics, stars, fandoms.
Laurel: What do you think about SWS adding livestreaming to capture and share events happening across the country?
Graham F: Livestreaming is going to be important, but I think a big part of livestreaming it at the time is also archiving it for the future. Like, most people who watch the video don’t do it while it’s actually happening; they watch when they can, which is usually later. The important part is being there to capture events that would otherwise be quite ephemeral: panel talks are so in danger of that.
Laurel: Another dramaturgical revelation is the ability to collaborate across distance using google hangouts, trello, etc. Working on SWS there’s a behind-the-scenes experiment with making art via technology that is ongoing also.
By the way, I managed to solve my Kobo issue only about five minutes ago…
Graham F: You were multitasking.
Laurel: Weeellll, I was telling myself that I would just try ‘one last thing’ after letting it sit.
Graham F: It’s amazing how often that one last try does it.
The first edition of this volume, brings together a number of concepts we have been exploring since our launch one year ago that can all be understood under the rubric of Social Design.
Social Design: The strategic implementation of social media to deepen or broaden the nature of an artistic project.
Sarah Garton Stanley celebrates this important anniversary with an exploration of what we hope to achieve with this site, where we started, where we are now, and exciting news about who has joined the project. One of those people is Alberta Theatre Projects’ Laurel Green, who interviews Graham F Scott about his role over the past year-and-a-half as Digital Dramaturg for SpiderWebShow. My contribution to the edition concentrates on what social design means this year, which will probably mean something different next year, as tools morph and humans adjust their behaviours accordingly.
Social Design: The strategic implementation of social media to deepen or broaden the nature of an artistic project.
