Hannah Nicklin

Shift Happens 2010

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?

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The Player as Political

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

From the bypassing of human interface devices (HIDs) such as mice and keyboards represented by the iPhone and the iPad, to the removal of a media interface represented by the increasing popularity of social media, the current trend in digital technology centres around the removal of the interface. This trend has recently been seen as becoming increasingly prevalent in theatre and performance.

[A] key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves […] increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

In 2009 the biggest selling entertainment item on Amazon.co.uk was a video game – COD:MW2 outsold both Harry Potter and Twilight on DVD. We spent 30% more on video games last year than we did on going to the cinema and purchasing DVDs combined. And in a recent survey done by the BBC, 100% of 6-10 year olds gamed regularly.

With gaming you’re involved and in control. With other things you just have to sit back and watch. I’ve been gaming for most of my life. – Callum, aged 10 (BBC 2005 Source (PDF))

Although digital strategies and ideas have been examined in a performative context since the 1960s, this technology and these strategies have reached a point where they are ubiquitous enough to form a real trend in narrative consumption. As thus ours is a culture becoming much more used to being embedded in its stories, political as well as social. In Theatre and Performance in a Digital Culture Matthew Causey discusses the political move from simulation to embeddedness, suggesting that

The site of power has shifted from the exterior screens of simulation to the interior body of the material subject. (Causey 2006, 179)

The example drawn by Causey contrasts the illusion of Gulf War I – of cut together clips, narrators, and news packages – to the rolling embedded coverage of Gulf War II. ‘This is happening now’, the spectacle says, ‘there is no room for editing, cutting, or simulation; this is reality’. In our age of so-called reality TV, 24-hour rolling news, and the advent of the ‘real-time’ and ‘social’ web, we are witnessing a corruption of the data-flow of contemporary life. We are led to believe that the data we receive is live, uncut, unmediated and true. As thus we lose the critical tools afforded us by distance and reflection. It is the ‘interior body of the material subject’ where the political battle for subjectivity must now be fought, in our selves.

Pervasive gaming and interactive theatre takes the digital idea of player-as-protagonist, and applies it to the lived body of performance. Pervasive games are ‘playful experiences’ which combine aspects of childhood parlour games and video game ethics and t to be played in groups across large urban spaces, interactive theatre moves these ideas into thicker narratives. Both forms allow the audience to become agent, and can be seen to expand their storytelling over space, technology, and/or time.

“All theatre is interactive. To call this diverse spectrum of work ‘Interactive Arts’, is only to suggest that it acknowledges that relationship and seeks, in some way, to interrogate it.” (Field 2010)

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Ourselves, in Other Contexts.

I have been thinking a lot over the past few days about the new narrative strategies emerging in the digital age- moving on from why and what they are, and what has provoked them (pretty much everything that I put into my two speeches at Notts Trent and Leeds Met in January) and instead considering the implications for us as a society, in their being our main way of consuming stories.

Stories are a massive part of how we learn and grow as a species. They allow us to try out other eventualities, other roles, understand the feelings of others, and our own place in the world. Stories are intricately linked to play, and playing (whether actually, or theatrically) is a recognised learning technique for both adults and children. (See the massive success of TIE in schools, prisons, and deprived areas, as well as the ways that children learn about their world). Likewise play – the ability to try and test for no reason other than the fun of it – is vital to creative thinking, whether in business and tech (where it’s called ‘innovation’) or in the humanities and social sciences, play, and narrative, is at the very basis of our evolutionary and inventive potential.

There is largely considered to be a point when we ‘grow out of’ playing. It is in evidence, in teasing, between friends, but proper immersive narrative experiences are thenceforth ring-fenced. There are areas where they are ‘ok’, and they include theatrical spaces, board games, TV, music, video game, radio, film, books. The arts, in short.

The film/television experience is inarguably passive when compared with the play that we experience as children, and with the ‘old’ narrative strategies of books (and to a certain extent radio – though ‘old’ perhaps not) where we are placed, if not in the position of another, at least in a world-constituting position of one type or another. We build worlds of the books we read with our imaginations, likewise theatre is necessarily world-constituting, the tension of live-ness with narrative, reality with suspension of disbelief, is an inherently world-constituting process – and a collective one at that.

Film and television are passive forms of narrative consumption, they are involving, largely individual, and can pretend to be interactive (the arbitrary decision of whether someone stays or goes is not world constituting) and are no less a form for that, but in terms of play, in terms of one key aspect of play – there’s something missing. Empathy. The process of placing yourself at the centre of creating a narrative – constituting a world – seeing it through anthers’ eyes is largely missing (though of course there are exceptions to this). I’m not arguing that film and television is bad art, but I do believe that to subsist on a diet of only filmic narrative will provoke illness.
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Good Bye Bugsy

Hooray for technology! I have a phone again! It is officially up and running- after a lot of pain trying to APP/CID unlock it, I just hard-reset, and second time round it worked fine, it’s all unlocked (inlc SIM) and windows 6.1′d up now, so I am content :-) I am currently transferring music on there- got an 8gb micro SD card to fill up with exciting things, then all I need do is set up the push mail and I’m good to go! It feels SO much better to be part of the world again, rather than passing through.

My time at work this week was really excellent- I revisited two schools in Smethwick for the culmination of their work on The Corner Shop Project. The kids had visited their local high street, then invited guests, interviewed and archived what they gleaned, and then created site-specific (around their schools) performances, which involved shadow puppetry, food tasting, ghost stories, and walking back into the past of Smethwick’s high street. Some amazing and so eloquent responses from 9 and 10 year olds, amazing stuff. Particularly valuable was seeing the nuts and bolts of the work- all the thought behind it on the part of the people running the show… and finally, the difference it made in the kids, in one school, there was a pupil from Russia and a pupil from Iraq, neither of whom spoke english very well, and neither of whom had ever been to school. Likewise in the other school there was a little polish girl who did not speak very good english, and a boy who could barely read and was official ‘class joker’ because it was the only way he could deal with having no friends. I am wary of being too idealistic about ‘the power of drama’ but seeing these kids, and the changes wrought in them was almost overwhelming. The children who had felt outsiders, were suddenly part of a group effort, they had made friends, talked fluently and understood each other, the little boy who had felt so outside his peers had made friends and (according to his teacher) his studies had improved immeasurably. They all spoke so meaningfully about the project, and how it had brought them together, how it had made them feel, it was a really moving experience.

Now I know that schools and education is very difficult territory, the national curriculum must be a nightmare to preside over, and to provide a national service at the same time as being able to cater for millions of individuals? Horrible. But we all know how important some things can be- that extra special teacher that supports and pushes you, that lecturer who took the time to make you feel like you really did have potential. I believe that theatre, in a very special way can make kids feel similarly- an awareness of yourself as construct, of your body and your movement and the signs you give off, the chance to try and understand others’ lives, theatre can help show us that we are all amazing, we are all individual, and that we are all part of this… and I think that somehow, a more concrete provision for challenging and different theatre needs to muscle in on the time dedicated to yet another production of ‘bugsy malone’ or ‘high school musical’ in our schools.

Taking my hippy hat off now, there, it’s gone. In a nutshell, I think the idea solidifying in my mind is that my next big piece, after the thesis play, and a new piece for radio, will very definitely be a piece for young people… so watch this space for emerging ideas.

In other news, I have entirely avoided any work on my AI piece due the end of this month… and I’m probably losing hope on that… we’ll see. Fixing and sorting my technology has gotten in the way. I shall redouble efforts, and try and fix something in time for the end of July.

Right, teatime methinks…