Theatre and the Digital by Bill Blake

Author:Bill Blake [Blake, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: computers, General, Design; Graphics & Media, Performing Arts, theater
ISBN: 9781137355799
Google: LD2ICgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan International Higher Education
Published: 2014-10-02T00:03:29.511541+00:00

Theatre apps

Neworld Theatre’s PodPlays project is an example of a digital theatre application. An application in the sense of ‘applied theatre’, which theatre professor Judith Ackroyd defines as any theatre work which shares ‘a belief in the power of the theatre form to address something beyond the form itself’ (‘Applied Theatre: Problems and Possibilities’, 2000; quoted in Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, 2005, p. 3). The PodPlays are also applications in the digital sense, insofar as they are packaged and sold as iPod apps.

The incisiveness of theatre outreach can often resemble commercialism. Aside from the good intentions, the goal of making new and useful theatre that appeals to non-theatre-going audiences is, by definition, a type of publicity cause. On the one hand, there is reason to believe in the democratic ambitions of releasing theatre from its at-thetheatre rituals, moving the theatre to the masses. Walter Benjamin, reflecting on the age of mechanical reproduction eighty years ago, expressed a cautious optimism about the potential for freeing art and cultural participation from its formal, material, and institutional rootedness. Publicity, from a liberatory outlook of this sort, is about making public theatre open to all, and making it accessible, not just available.

On the other hand, as the cultural anthropologist Greg Urban argues in Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World (2001), such hopes for broadening circulation are also ‘at the heart of the expansion of capital’ (p. xiv). Accessibility is not sufficient; promising new platforms for cultural outreach ultimately depend on creating a demand for the works they produce. But not just the works, which is where Urban’s notion of ‘metaculture’ comes in: creating interest in the actual works is only one kind of ‘demand structure’. Another kind is the demand for having something to talk about, which newspapers, journals, magazines, and blogs rely on to attract audiences of their own. The culture industry, according to Urban, depends as much on an economy of discussion between theatre makers and reviewers as it does on an economy of exchange between theatre makers and audiences. Promising new works, even without reaching actual theatregoers, have special value because they are great for keeping up a discourse about newness. The market for commentary and reviews revolves around the production and discussion of a constantly renewed sense of the new. Urban’s word for this is ‘metaculture’: the strand of our culture that supplies ‘newness’ to cultural objects by talking about them in relation to other interesting social phenomena and cultural trends. What is produced is interest, both in the talk itself and in the object being talked about. ‘In order for [a] review to circulate,’ Urban writes, ‘it must be seen as an interesting response’:

By attracting more readers, a successful review will increase its own circulation; it will also impart that interest to the [cultural object], thereby increasing demand for it. In this case, culture and metaculture end up reinforcing each other’s circulatory potential. ... The culture of modernity depends upon the creation of social

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