The Digital Dramaturgy Initiative
Online Research and Residency Archive
This website serves as an educational resource and archive for the Digital Dramaturgy Initiative created with theatre companies throughout 2021 and with the funding and support of Canada Council for the Arts.
Across all of its stages, knowledge sharing has been one of the throughlines of the project and it is in this spirit that we created this archive. We’ve tried to capture the discoveries of the different weeks, what worked and what didn’t as well as looking at some larger questions around the concept of digital theatre. Each city tackled a slightly different angle of digital creation and so we’ve kept the projects organized by which residency they took part in; explore the individual city pages to learn more about them! In addition to the archive, we’ve curated a list of useful programs and platforms which can be found on the digital tools and tutorials page.
A Brief History of the Initiative
The Initiative
Following the first iteration of the project at the Blyth Festival in early 2020, the project partners of Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal (PWM), the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, The Blyth Festival, and Playwrights Theatre Centre (PTC) were excited to announce the reboot of the Digital Dramaturgy Initiative in 2021, designed around the expansion of Digital Literacy for those who work in the field of new play development in Canada.
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated our use of digital tools, however, knowledge and financial gaps are still with us. With this reality in mind, we designed three locally based residencies which explored and expanded our vocabulary around interactions with digital technology.
These three distinct week-long residencies were designed to allow for a deep investigation and articulation of two main questions:
Where are the literacy gaps in managing the processes and systems in the integration of digital components;
How do we best organize creative relationships to maximize expertise in the collaboration process?
We explored these and other fundamental dramaturgical questions through workshops, seminars, active learning, case studies, documentation, and ultimately through dissemination in the form of this website archive here.
Participants across the country brought their projects and creative questions into each local residency, where hosts from each institution provided access to dramaturgical expertise and digital technology. We documented these activities and discoveries over the course of each week to add to the national dissemination archive. Auxiliary programming over the course of the workshop weeks included collective investigations into both traditional and emerging digital tools and technologies, exploring the vocabulary needed to collaborate in digital integration and exploration, and looking at case studies from Canadian and international initiatives and creators.
The residency in Montreal took place in April of 2021, Winnipeg in June 2021, and finally Vancouver in September 2021.
