In a great Edinburgh Fringe Festival experiment on 23.08.10, a compendium of new plays, realised as rehearsed readings, were simultaneously transmitted to UK Picturehouse film theatres, including Edinburgh’s Cameo. Despite over-demand for tickets to the live show at the Traverse, Traverse Live! remained a one-off live performance for a small audience, but the show increased its scale, reach impact and accessibility through simultaneous broadcast.

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Black Country Touring, Kali Theatre Company and Birmingham Rep Theatre are using webcasting to realise their latest play – set in homes across the Black Country! Behna is a play based in a Punjabi household set the day before a family wedding. As the guests are busy eating, singing and dancing, tension is brewing in the kitchen. Truths are told and secrets unfold between two generations of sisters. Fast-paced, funny and moving, Behna looks through the keyhole of a family home to reveal secrets and lies.

Six homes are hosting the play across the Black Country for their own private guests: of friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. Audiences will cram into the kitchens and hallways of the homes. A great blog reveals the rehearsal process – for the actors and those who have offered their homes up as sets.

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With the San Francisco Chronicle’s online offering today reporting on Nielsen’s new survey that 85% of internet users want online content to be free, cultural organisations could begin to panic about what the business model is for digitising their product…

However, as ever, I’m not panicing, and am quietly confident

Nic Covey, Nielsen’s director of cross platform insights, wrote in a blog post about the report, “Changing Models: A Global Perspective on Paying for Content Online.while there were no clear-cut categories of content that will successfully sell online, there was a “definite maybe,”

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Digital Theatre has launched! Using up to 13 cameras to capture the performance, English Touring Theatre, RSC, Almeida, Royal Court and Young Vic content can for £8.99 be yours in HD. The papers have talked about the idea replacing the thrill of a live show, and of causing a threat to the live, and this is of course usually the nervous counter-argument against digital recording of theatre companies less comfortable with the idea of their audiences seeing their work online.

I find this argument tiresome and insulting to audiences who of course know that the live performance will be the one that makes the hairs on the back of their stand on end as they feel the collective body heat of the audience rise during a tense scene: but in the absence of the cash to pay for the ticket and the trip to London, and in order to avoid the guilt of an expanding carbon footprint due to art, I’d rather see the work from theatre companies than miss it. Audiences still understand live experiences, and the emerging experience economy that we’re seeing as a current cultural behaviour (living in the now, instead of in the future, a desires to collect as many experiences and stories as soon as possible, is addictive) is growing, not shrinking. All things live will continue to rise in value as the digital world encourages copying and sharing. The live experience is the thing that can’t be copied, the thing that has uniqueness and a one-off factor. What do you think?

My Envirodigital client, the new National Theatre Wales, are launching their opening programme on 5th November 2009. It’ll be a big bang for a number of reasons: its Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes’ Night in the UK, so there will be fireworks. There will also be a new destination website to visit where you can find out what’s on and buy tickets (the huge online community that we’ve grown organically over the past year will be just a click away, and is still growing in numbers, depth and activity daily).

The final big bang will be the style of the launch: rather than hiring an expensive venue to which the press and VIPs have to travel, NTW are instead webcasting the programme launch, hoping that journalists will NOT make the journey to Cardiff, but will watch the news unfold online and so help NTW achieve its environmentally sustainable aspirations. Don’t expect a fancy brochure either: the only paper NTW will print is a (very beautiful!) newspaper. And that will be available digitally too, so if you can’t pick it up in person, don’t expect to receive one in the post [eco choices, not post strike reasons )].

Read John McGrath’s blog about the launch for all the details, and HUGE congratulations to John and all the NTW team from us at Envirodigital – we’re so proud that you stuck to all your original aspirations, and thrilled that we could help you make them realities! For more details on the digital choices that I helped NTW make to ensure their digital set-up was environmentally sustainable, read the Envirodigital blog posts about the community development and the organisational development.

The new National Theatre Wales has just launched with an online presence that is a social network.
My company, Envirodigital, worked with NTW on their digital strategy, and we recruited Cardiff-based social media developers Native to bring the approach alive. The idea was to produce the new theatre company’s audience organically and through two-way discussion, rather than pushing a message out there via a more traditional brochure-style website. Said Artistic Director John McGrath last Thursday on launch night:

Tonight we are letting everyone know the ideas behind our first year of activity at National Theatre Wales. We have an office party, a bunch of volunteers – our ‘TEAM’ members – helping us out, a beautiful ‘newspaper’ developed by our designers Elfen, and of course this online community to help spread the word behind our plans.

We’ll be opening our first show in March next year, and for the whole of the year after we will be creating new theatre across Wales – with three main strands of work – CREATE, DEBATE, RESPOND.

We chose an online social networking platform as the initial online mechanism for NTW because of the potential for anyone interested in NTW to create, debate and respond online. We’ve benefitted from all the photo and video widgets that we could embed, as well as being able to offer a platform for the community to blog and build their own profiles and groups, as well as discuss issues and ideas through comments and a forum. This has really enabled the sense of creativity, debate and response being possible.

We used the ning platform, and they have already blogged and Tweeted (@ning) about NTW’s use of their platform!

@Beyongolia comments on Twitter, “Really love the fresh approach, starting with community”. So far there are 209 members, and some really interesting content and debates emerging. Join up, and join the experience of a 21st C theatre company!

For the NTW team, new skills have had to be learnt – blogging and videoing skills, as well as how to use the digital kit, and how to ensure digital connectivity wherever they are. The National Theatre Wales does not have its own venue, its a virtual organisation, so all staff have had to get grips with how to use digital kit in order to enable them to work as a team, and in order to enable them to be out there and online as part of the growing NTW community. This training had to be part of NTW’s emerging strategy, part of emerging operational policy and procedure, and part of all staff members inductions.

New attitudes and behaviours have also been adopted by the company: opening themselves up to debate means that they have to prepared for all sorts of comments, and they have to be active in the debate! This has been a challenge taken on hungrily by NTW, who want to make the process of creating theatre as transparent and porous as they can in order to ensure that anyone can find a way in. So every member of staff’s job roles have a digital media element in them.

The branding process from the very beginning has included dialogue about what an online realisation of the graphic ideas (logo, company ID, font, etc.) might look like. This has been a difference in approach, but a really important journey. Online branding has to reflect the offline graphical development, but not necessarily completely copy it. Check out Elfen’s video (the graphic designers) about how they developed the core ideas, and view online the paper developed for offline! Lesa Drysburgh – NTW’s Communications Consultant gives her overview of the birth of a new company.

The Indy yesterday picked up Punchdrunk Theatre & Hide & Seek‘s collaboration, The Last Will (in the gadgets and tech section, not Arts).

Fancy a night in with the games console? Or is seeing a play a more appealing option? Rob Sharp of the Independent, Wednesday, 12 November 2008, reports on the theatre company that lets you do both – at the same time…

“As dusk falls over east London, I find myself standing in front of a dingy, seemingly deserted warehouse. Despite feeling nervous, I venture inside. Climbing a set of stairs, I find myself in a dark series of rooms. The reason I’m here isn’t because I’ve taken up cat burglary, but because I’ve been invited to experience an exciting hybrid of art and hi-tech entertainment.

Theatre company Punchdrunk is renowned for pushing board-treading boundaries. Since its foundation in 2000, it has won praise from critics and audiences for shows in which participants are free to choose what they watch and where they go. Which is why I’m here. Today I’m going to get a sneak preview of Punchdrunk’s first foray into video games, a show called Last Will, which is being shown to an exclusive audience for the first time.

Punchdrunk has teamed up with games company Hide & Seek, Hewlett-Packard research arm HP Labs and online design firm Seeper to create a “hybrid experience” between real and computer-generated worlds. And at first glance it seems very different to the average console adventure.

Last Will begins with two players walking into disconcerting darkness. Both are led through a series of “tunnels” hemmed in by drapes that hang either side of a dim, central corridor. The players then split up. My gaming partner for the evening, Ben, enters a “physical” realm – several interconnected rooms in the warehouse which have been made up to look like an elaborate theatre set. Meanwhile I enter a “virtual realm”, which is a dark room in which sits – less glamorously – a computer workstation and headphones. Without wishing to give away details of the plot to would-be players, it’s the story of an old man in trouble – whom both players have to help.

To do this, I must navigate through a computer-generated version of the physical space in which Ben is located. I’m charged with solving a number of puzzles, which involves clicking on various objects within a computer-generated room in sequence. I later discover that my actions within the virtual world are having effects in the physical world – such as unlocking doors.

“Clicking on a door in the ‘computer game’ triggers sound and lighting in the real world, and vice versa,” explains Seeper’s Evan Grant, who helped design the virtual world. “There is light-beam technology which the physical player has to block. This then triggers graphics to be displayed on the computer screen.”

Back in my cubbyhole, I’ve completed my first puzzle. Although I’m elated, it all feels similar to an early level of point-and-click PC title Myst – a game I last played about 15 years ago. But what makes Last Will exciting is the correlation between the real and virtual world – anything I type into the computer is spoken aloud by a robotic voice, which my partner can hear. I can use this mechanism to help him complete a series of tasks with the props in front of him. When certain real objects are placed in the correct places – such as a pair of innocuous-looking slippers, say – sensors within the physical realm trigger responses within my computer screen. The graphics aren’t mind-blowing, but it is easy to see how the concept could be used in, for example, a theme park, and could be extended to work across an entire building.

Punchdrunk is the brainchild of artistic director Felix Barrett. “We do everything we can to make people feel uneasy,” he says of his work. “When you’re on your toes, with adrenalin shooting around your body and all of your synapses firing, you’re most receptive to the stimuli we give you.”

The company’s previous project was last year’s The Masque of the Red Death, which The Independent described as “a certain type of site-specific theatre and starts a new experiment that leaves you trembling with anticipation. The performers hurl themselves into it with ferociously disciplined abandon.” In it, audiences roamed free around the former Battersea Town Hall in south London, and were confronted with actors reinterpreting the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

Last Will came about when theatre and television producer Alex Fleetwood contacted Barrett after seeing Punchdrunk’s work. “Our ultimate aim with this was to prove how to extend site-specific theatre work into other media,” says Fleetwood. “Our question was, ‘How can you create something that is part game and part narrative, and make that into a theatrical atmospheric experience whether you are playing in real life or online?’ To me, a Punchdrunk show is part theatre experience, part first-person shooter and part warehouse party. I like all of those things. It’s a winning combo.”

He’s right. The idea is interesting and the experience reminds me of the old television programme Knightmare – for readers old enough to remember – but, mercifully, easier to play. Last Will is still a prototype but I look forward to seeing how Punchdrunk develops its latest weird and wonderful gaming experiment.

Virtual worlds: Where the internet and reality collide

Real-life Pac-man

In 2005, Singapore researchers developed a human version of Pac-Man, in which players wore a computer, headset and goggles and entered a real-world game space. The game merged technologies such as GPS, Bluetooth, virtual reality, Wi-Fi, infrared and sensing mechanisms.

Perplex City

Perplex City is an alternative-reality game (or ARG) organised by entertainment company Mind Candy. The game involved players searching online and in the real world for “The Cube”, a “priceless” spiritual artefact, which was buried somewhere on Earth. The game offered a real-life £100,000 reward to the person who found it; participants were pointed in the right direction using clues on printed cards that they bought in shops.

StreetWars

StreetWars is a three-week-long water tournament that travels to cities around the world, in which protagonists attempt to shoot each other with water pistols. It is a version of a game that is already popular at colleges and universities across the globe. The founders of the game adapted what previously was used only on campuses to a city-wide playing area. The most recent StreetWar was held in New York earlier this year.”

I’m in Manchester at AmbITion’s Digital Content re:connected event. We’re trying to make it as live and globally available as we can! So…

Marcus Romer from Pilot Theatre is currently presenting, and his talk and all the links to the resources mentioned is available here. Marcus is explaining his online strategy, which is about enagaging audiences and presenting work in new ways so that more people can see what Pilot Theatre do. They’re using Mobius as a streaming mechanism to create a live TV channel from their website – its a different way for Pilot to “tour” and distribute content. Last night Pilot Theatre won the TMA award for Best Young Peoples’ Show with their show Looking for JJ, which as I’ve described in an earlier blog post, was created collaboratively with MySpace users. Pilot Theatre also use Second Life for online collaboration and for working out staging and lighting for shows – its cheaper (and greener) than rehearsing in a theatre space – and of course use Bebo and Facebook. People involved in their writers’ group use wikis to collaborate. Young people in particular join Pilot’s SMS group. Pilot Theatre collaboratively (in 2 days!) made a video as a promo for Arts Council England’s Get Into Theatre initiative – see it on that website as well as on YouTube and Blip.tv. As a core team of four, they are really crowd sourcing ideas and content creators – a 15 year old made their MySpace page, an actor runs the latest show’s Facebook group.

Vitto Rocco, director of Faintheart, spoke earlier this morning about collaboratively creating the world’s first user generated movie – written about in detail in my blog earlier this year, here.

We’ve just been looking at New York live online – you can also watch the video we’re recording now live at Digital Content re:connected. Also, we’ve got a flickr group and you can add photos to the pool – let us know what you’re up to in the outside world!

This is an interesting piece of work – We Feel Fine – all the blogs in the world are tracked by this beautiful visual representational mash-up – it looks at text, words and now integrates Flickr and Google Maps. Also, check out Wordle: and create your own beautiful visual representation of a project or organisations from the words you’ve written to describe it.

This story was told to the English Classical Music sector’s chief executives, as a provocation, at a day of consultation on how the arts sector should respond to OfCom’s Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) review. Having also attended a previous consultation with the visual arts sector, it seems to me that the cultural sector need to be seen by OfCom as public service content providers, and therefore receive a portion of the [what is currently know as] TV License Fee. Then the hard work really starts – we have to start seeing ourselves as content publishers in the digital world!

Some shows in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival will be commenting on our new digital era this summer – art reflecting bang-up-to-date life: great to see! Read the press release here.

Check out the Globe’s latest efforts to stage the whole cycle of Shakespeare’s plays in Second Life. Victor Keegan’s All The World Wide Web’s a Stage Guardian article from 3rd April 08- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/03/internet.shakespeare

You can also now buy music for download at MySpace, as the social networking site seeks to become a one-stop source for all incarnations of digital music. Four major record labels and MySpace will spin off the venture, MySpace Music. You’ll still be able to listen for free first.