Digital Media and Technology

Jeni Incontro encourages the theatre industry to change the business model by embracing technology, filming performances, and giving theatregoers the option of watching whenever they’d like.

Jonathan Mandell looks at the questions raised by stage-to-screen adaptations, and wonders what theatre can learn from these successes.

Over the past seven years, the Post Natyam Collective’s creative practice has transitioned from in-person collaboration to web-based collaboration. Often our process is deeply informed by scholarly engagement, including feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and subaltern histories of Indian classical dance forms. Collective members often develop promising seeds from our shared processes into diverse products: dance-for-camera pieces, art installations, lecture-demonstrations, performance works, and scholarly papers.

Café Onda (the Journal of the Latinx Theatre Commons) can’t make all our virtual dreams come true, but this space can celebrate the dynamic creativity and connectivity of Latina/o theatermakers as together we build our digital present.

Miranda Wright doesn’t want to be pegged – not yet. The theatrical environment that she’s creating is both local and global—theater for a world that is simultaneously more connected and isolated, more expansive, more community-oriented, more lonely. More than anything, she’s concerned with the present moment.

Alex Ates and DCW3 offer an overview of the how the internet has shaped theatre.

#RightsWeek post: While I think the databases may be useful for schools and small companies, at the highest level I question whether access to plays is really the rate-limiter behind getting more plays to production. Rather I think the dialogue between producers and playwrights is limited and opaque and inauthentic, leading to misspent efforts all around.

As part of the "#RightsWeek: Protecting & Sharing Your Intellectual Property" series on HowlRound, this week's Twitter conversation topic is "Publishing Your Work in New Media" and will be moderated by Amy Rose Marsh @AmyRoseMarsh and Samuel French, Inc @MrSamuelFrench—who like all of our moderators, authors, and content producers—self-selected to peer-produce on this commons-based platform! This hour-long Howl will take place on Thursday, July 17 on hashtag #newplay at 11am PDT (Vancouver) / 1pm CDT (Austin) / 2pm EDT (New York) / 18:00 GMT / 7pm BST (London).

This week's conversation topic is "How are Theater Makers using the Internet?" and will be moderated by Ray Nelson @justraynelson—who like all of our moderators, authors, and content producers—self-selected to peer-produce on this commons-based platform! This hour-long Howl will take place on Thursday, June 5 on hashtag #newplay at 11am PDT (Vancouver) / 1pm CDT (Austin) / 2pm EDT (Toronto) / 18:00 GMT / 7pm BST (London).

Wherever our skunk works might be located, it’s absolutely clear that our industry needs that sort of effort… if only because every industry does. If we simply repeat, again and again, what we already know how to do, we might as well become obsolescent like cuneiform or letterpress printing, to name two other communications technologies that have long since faded from use. So who is going to step up and say, “We will make this happen, for the good of us all”—who has the courage, foresight, and willingness to do that?

Storytelling in the digital age is a complex task. On the web, we need to embrace a more interactive version of storytelling than we embrace on our stages. Consumers of content on the web create their own narratives by the click-choices they make, moving from site to site, task to task, consuming and creating alternately. They aren’t passive. Too many of our websites seem to be constructed as if we’re going to talk to people; on the web, though, we need to talk with them, which is a lot more complicated.

Paul M. Davis illuminates the importance of artists and technologists collaborating in the civic sphere.

The truth is, I’m a sucker for the well-timed arrival of useful data: just the right information, just when you need it. It’s the surest way, if you ask me, to make any system work… or work better. Over the last few days—often while I’m walking on the treadmill, trying to hit my step goal for the day—I’ve been thinking about the fact that we really don’t get very much well-timed useful data at all in the theater. For example, let’s think about one obvious piece of information we all care about: ticket sales.

Talleri McRae offers her thoughts on Peter Pan Live, and how NBC might approach bringing the family tale to the small screen.