See above (or click here) for images taken of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You by my lovely friend Rowena Scott, and see:

http://twitter.com/thederminator/status/18781755974 http://twitter.com/danpyt/status/18778361379 http://twitter.com/fribbletheatre/status/18777877251 http://hannahnicklin.posterous.com/some-awesome-rainreminds-feedback-to-round-of

for some interesting reflection and nice things said about it, although there are critical things to say about it too (and nice polite people are less likely to direct those responses at you). I’d call it 65% successful, which I reckon is not too bad for the first test of a piece that so directly involves an audience. Blog post and video to follow, as well as other posts long overdue, over this coming week or two.

The cast (touch wood) should come off my arm on Tuesday, so I will be trying to use it more to get back in the swing of typing. I have my first year progress panel this Friday, a kind of mock (and much nicer) viva that means I can move onto my second PhD year, so some of them might come after that, but either way I intend to begin to get caught up on write-y things again.

You have been warned.

(Youtube link here)

So, a couple of days writing, recording, and editing later, here’s a quick taster of the first minute and a half of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You.

The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You is happening (rain or shine) at 5PM on this Saturday 17th of July, at Piccadilly Gardens, in Manchester. For more info go to rainreminds.tumblr.com and join the facebook event at bit.ly/RainRemindsFB for a reminder when the MP3 and instructions are live.

Follow or discuss it on Twitter with the #rainreminds hashtag.

The soundwalk is part of the Hazard Festival, Manchester hazardmcr.org/

Base image shared on Flickr via a (remix) Creative Commons License by AnitaKHart. Shameless Helvetica added by me.

So, if you’ve been following me on Twitter over the past week or so you will have seen that I have been a) collecting stories and b) seeding the #rainreminds hashtag. What’s it all about? Well, I’m delighted to announce that I have a piece of work in the Hazard Festival, next Saturday at 5pm.

The dedicated mini-site can be found at http://rainreminds.tumblr.com/ where there are links to the location and facebook event, and a nice big old Share Button. Please do!

The piece will be somewhere between stealth performance, soundwalk, and flashmob, will involve up to 100 umbrellas, and will take place in the middle of Manchester. Full instructions, and an mp3 to download and bring with you will be released 24 hours prior to the event, so if you’re interested, do sign up to the Facebook event so I can send a nice reminder out when I release it.

The hashtag for the event is #rainreminds, and over the past week or so I’ve been collecting stories, voices, and sounds from people all over the internet. These will either be used directly in, or help to inspire the 10 minute long piece, which I will be writing up until Tuesday, recording and editing until Thursday, and then releasing at 5pm on Friday with accompanying instructions in advance of Saturday.

In the meantime you can have a read of (or add to) some of the awesome stories coming into http://rainonmy.tumblr.com – and if you want to be credited make sure you leave your name in the *body* of the submission (if you missed that in the submission guidelines and you do want crediting, drop me an email or @ on twitter). Also, follow the  #rainreminds hashtag for trials, tribulations, and exclamations in the writing/recording journey.

So, see you in Manchester, and spread the word.

Hurrah!

Image of my gormless face taken by and shared with the permission of @documentally

The beginning of my week was spent at Shift Happens 2010, where I had the very awesome and slightly scary opportunity of giving a 10 minute talk on where I think theatre and digital tech are going. A brilliant couple of days, with inspiration abound, and some really lovely little pieces of performance woven in. I’m still not really up to long bouts of typing yet (the cast comes off in T-minus 12 days), so have embedded a couple of things here to give you a taste of what I took to the event, mostly in flash though, apologies for that.

The first a slideshare version of my talk – with me actually talking (apologies for the pops in the audio) through my ideas on it, and the second is a phlog done by a local community radio station talking to me and Babba Israel from Contact Theatre in Manchester. I’ve also put on Contact’s weekly video blog, the second half of which covers Shift Happens, which should at least give those of you on iPhones a sense of it. You can also download a pdf of the talk here, and for links to other presentations and sources mentioned, check out this very useful post by Matthew Linley.

It will be interesting to see where the next Shift goes. There was much less dissent this year, which although at least means the arts industry is catching up, perhaps means we now need to be pushing further, aiming to (as Andy Field had it)

“dream stupid, impossibly grand visions of what the future might look like”.

Do we now need an arts and tech conference which is more than just entry level? And that also challenge the conventions of a conference? I’m doing a joint paper with my supervisor for the TaPRA 2010 Conference which seeks to interrogate the failings of the top-down conference form in properly communicating the wholeness of performance and academic thought. To move the arts/tech world on do we need to find something that falls somewhere between festival, workshop, conference and digital and performative playground? What do you think?

Finally, I’ve got something exciting and performance-y to announce this weekend, which will be happening in Manchester on the 17th of July, so keep your feeds peeled, and watch out for the hashtag #rainreminds on Twitter.

It’s my right arm, I’m right-handed and despite having some speech-to-text software that works pretty well, I had no idea how much my thinking relied on handwriting and that small amount of time between thought and keyboard. Turns out trying to develop lines of argument at the same time as saying them out loud is kind of distracting.

Who’d have thunk it.

In the meantime, if you’re desperate to hear me rant, I’m going to be speaking at the (massive, gulp) Shift Happens Alt/Shift arts/learning and tech conference in York on the 5th of July. I do believe the tickets are sold out, but just in case I don’t pass out/throw up I’ll ask someone to film it, and youtube it after.

http://walkwith.tumblr.com

Just squeaking in a blog post at the last moment to keep to my ‘at least 4 a month’ quota. Lots has happened this month, Mayfest took up a great deal of it, then I completed 10,000 words of PhD chapter 1 and other material for my first year progress board, including all of the fore-planning (I actually have the next two and a bit years planned out, which is an unusual combination of reassuring and scary). I’ve also released a first foray into soundwalk style storytelling to the general public, and agreed to and submitted an abstract for a joint paper on the inefficiencies of the academic conference in representing performative thoughts for a TaPRA conference in September… That’s written better in the actual abstract. So a busy month, though I really do intend to do a run down of my experiences at Mayfest sometime soon, promise.

The image above is from the soundwalk I’ve released, check it out at http://walkwith.tumblr.com – all it requires is an mp3 player, 10 minutes, and some rain. I would really appreciate any feedback you have – either in text/audio/image/video form via the site, Twitter, or even posting me handwritten/collected things (as some people have). It’s my first experiment in the form, and at the moment is a bit like a monologue-with-interactive-bits than something that might be called truly interactive or player-as-protagonist driven. I shall have to get working with the second-person referential, I think. I’ve also got plans to play with binaural audio – to develop a real 3D feeling with the headphones. You can hear some really good examples of where that can lead at Papa Sangre’s house, the audio storytelling is there described as a ‘video game without video’. Make sure you wear headphones when listening. I’m getting some mic’d up ear buds and a cheap minidisc player (from Twitter, the lovely @daveisanidiot) to experiment with that. My brother (trained sound engineer if you’re hiring/have intern work/want someone to hold a boom mic whilst BREAKING WOOD) is also going to help out, so more technical stuff and higher quality hopefully forthcoming.

These experiments are all eventually leading towards the ideas I have for the currently quite cryptic Umbrella Project (no zombies involved), which I’m trying to secure some funding before lift-off. If you know of any funds, grants, or tech/web/music support-in-kind that might be out there and interested in being involved in a country-wide pervasive storytelling experiment, let me know. You can follow the Umbrella Project on Twitter here, and if you have £8,000 (I have a fully costed and sensible budget and everything) you wanted to throw at me, please do!

Finally, as June arrives and July seems much closer than it did in May, I’m beginning to think about what I might talk about at Shift Happens on the 5th and 6th. Shift Happens is an industry (as opposed to academic) conference about arts, learning and digital technology, and there are some really big speakers from places like 4ip, The Guardian, and the National Theatre also up there, so I’m trying to work out how I can best fit in. I suspect I’m there as a passionate loud-mouth and blogger before I am an academic, but I do feel like the dialogue needs to move on from ‘you should be using/interested in tech’, ‘but it’s scary/time consuming/too hard/not monetarily justifiable’. Perhaps a focus on the harder times that are upcoming with regards to the Tory-Lib Dem arts cuts. I’ll have a think about that. And if you think I have a particular clear message that I’ve hitherto missed, do let me know, very welcome!

Merry Bank Holiday Weekend. And if any of you are off to the Rough Beats Festival next weekend, find me and say ‘hi’. I may even say ‘hi’ back.

A quick taster of my time at Mayfest in Bristol, more detailed blog posts will appear soon. I returned into a very busy time of PhD, so blogging is suffering slightly in the mean time. Do also check out the microsite I set up and liveblogged from on behalf of the Forest Fringe whilst at the microfest.

The Forest Fringe Microfest is a travelling microfestival taster of the work collated under the umbrella of the Forest Fringe – a lo-fi fringe of contempoary performance held at Edinburgh each year. Generally made of win.

People to follow from the video:
@forestfringe
@andytfield
@search_party
@actionherolive
@shellshocknews

And non Twitter folk; Brian Lobel, Tinned Fingers

Check them out.

Some video I cut together of the Playgrounds event I attended at the V&A last Friday. Brilliant collision of gaming, art and theatre curated and created by Hide&Seek. Think I need to get designing some games myself. If the vimeos don’t like you, here’s the Youtubes.

Here’s a short cut of some of the footage I took of the rehearsals of Awake last Friday. If your device/phone doesn’t like Vimeo check out the Youtubes. For more information on Awake and Word:Play 3 (including how to buy tickets!) check out http://bit.ly/WordPlay3.

Proposal for a 10 minute paper at

DEALING WITH THE DIGITAL

TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium

10 – 5.30, 20th March 2010, Bedford Square, London

The Player as Political.

The video game ethic of player-as-protagonist is beginning to influence mainstream non-digital approaches to narrative. In theatre this is seen in the emerging popularity of interactive forms pioneered by companies such as Blast Theory, and current being popularised by Pervasive Gaming companies such as Hide and Seek and the mp3 or locative technology driven soundwalks of Duncan Speakman and Subtlemob.  This paper examines the root of the current drive towards total and pervasive performative immersion, and how we can tackle the traditional problems of immersion that are suffered by video games and other escapist narratives – a loss of political power, objectivity and community experience – within a theatrical context. This paper investigates the ethical implications of suspending the weight of disbelief in one person, and suggests that in hyperlocal performance, and a new world of fractured, multi-facet identities, gentler tactics are necessary, and locative and site-responsive aspects are the best way of preserving the political power of theatre within an individualist context.

Hannah Nicklin

Hannah Nicklin is a first year PhD student at Loughborough University. Her research interests include questions of theatre and digital technology, with a particular focus on selfhood and storytelling in a digital age. She has spoken at Nottingham Trent and Leeds Met universities on new narrative forms and social media for theatre companies, drawing on her work with Foursight Theatre and Theatre Writing Partnership. She maintains a blog at hannahnicklin.com, pieces of which have been reproduced by the Telegraph, Subtext Magazine, and the Arts Council, and she will be speaking at the Shift Happens UK arts, learning and tech conference in Summer 2010. Hannah is also a playwright, her most recent work Awake – the story of a gamer meeting her avatar - will be performed at Theatre503 this March.