NOT A HERO
The Project
Not a Hero is a sprawling multiverse of content centered around the real life entertainment personality Blxck Cxsper. Its material spans genres with a planned output across social media, live-streaming platforms, theatrical performances and musical releases. It is a musical metadrama set in the liminal place between art and reality.
Artists
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Hannah "Lilac" Morrow is an independent theatre creator, who shaped narratives in the queer Montreal (tio’tia:ke) performance art milieu over the course of the 2010’s. In 2016, she co-founded the iconoclastic wrestling/theatre company EarthBound Sci Fi Wrestling, co-ran its independent venue (The Sacred Square) and in 2019 helped found it as a non-profit organization: a space to re-imagine the fabric of our reality on a political, spiritual, and even metaphysical level. Hannah is currently creating and supporting projects that promise to usher that visceral spirit into new corners of the Canadian theatre world.
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Kyng “Blxck Cxsper” Rose (they/them) is a Montreal based black trans and non binary multidisciplinary hip hop artist, known for being the founder of Trans Trenderz, the world’s first record label dedicated to trans and gender non conforming musicians. Kyng has been recently featured on the Billboard Change Agents list, meant to honour the 100 most influential people in the music industry, next to giants such as Jay Z and The Weeknd.
The Residency
Before the DDI
Coming into the residency there were a lot of ideas of content for the metaverse but the project lacked a cohesive action plan.
There was a desire to investigate accessibility of theatre throughout the week of the residency. The mainstream theatre community can be closed off and inaccessible to those without formal training or who lack connections. Through their work, Hannah and Kyng want to highlight and break down the barriers which exist between institutional theatres and those who feel inherently alienated from those environments. Their work draws a great amount of inspiration from pop culture as they believe that it is an inherently more accessible form than traditional theatre.
“We believe that often, “accessible work” translates simply to work that appeals to audiences acclimatized to consuming pop culture. Our underlying attitude is: theatre that appeals to folks who are more used to mass entertainment, is creating work suitable for the cultural climate of the 21st century. From that place, the work is usually inherently more accessible to folks who tend to feel alienated from the idea of ‘Theatre’”.
Investigations into the relationships between Trans POC as well as the relationships between Trans POC and white cis folk are baked into the core material and the team hopes to continue that work throughout the residency.
Going into the residency, Hannah & Kyng looked to explore the accessibility of theatre through the digital realm:
“Our underlying attitude is: [we want to make] theatre that appeals to folks who are more used to mass entertainment… creating work suitable for the cultural climate of the 21st century”
During the residency
The main focus of the residency period was to collect and organize the large number of concepts around the metaverse of this piece. Focus was placed on identifying concepts and then creating strategies for their completion. The sheer volume of potential content had the ability to be overwhelming.
Since audience engagement is integral to the success of the piece, there were significant investigations into what makes someone lean into a narrative. How do you get an audience to be invested enough in a story that they’ll want to follow the narrative breadcrumbs across multiple platforms and mediums? There needs to be enough substance in the main stream of content that audiences are able to be intrigued and brought into the world but not so much that no mystery remains. Research was done into similar metanarratives such as the work by The Weeknd & Tyler, The Creator and how they were able to tread that fine line between reality and fiction.
During a consultation with social media expert Lauren Allen, the group discussed strategies to keep the amount of content from getting overwhelming. For a project with this scope and scale, Lauren had a few suggestions:
Regularly schedule out time for the following activities and attempt as much as possible to stick within the time allotted
Researching the current trends on social media and planning out the following weeks content based on them
Creating the posts for a week and loading them into a content scheduler
You can have problems with scheduling video content, so you might need to do those manually
It can be very exhausting engaging with this amount of social media so sticking within your scheduled time is important
Successful social media is about playing the long game so you don’t want to burn out quickly and stop posting
Create an overarching media campaign schedule
Name changes on Facebook can be tricky
It can help to change one word at a time with a few days in between each change
Before beginning to post any of the social media campaign creating a guidebook of internal policies such as:
Frequency of posting for each platform
Format and speed of replies
How to deal with trolls and unwanted content
Research the kind of content that is successful for different platforms
Where is video more successful than still images?
What length or amount of images lead to posts with the most engagement?
Look at the caption styles for different platforms, they have different feelings
Budget for some amount of paid posts
It will be hard to organically get the reach that you might need for a campaign like this
Define the voice that is telling the story
Should be consistent
More voices requires more accounts which could quickly become overwhelming
Ultimately, Hannah & Kyng aimed to disrupt the singularity of the stage of ‘digital theatre’ and their question of accessibility was reframed:
How do you get an audience to be invested enough in a story that they’ll want to follow the narrative breadcrumbs across multiple platforms and mediums?
Post Residency
When asked in the post-residency interview what their current view of digital theatre was, the team expressed that it can “be whatever you want it to be” and drew several parallels to traditional theatrical practices. “Theatre people are inclined to be in spaces together and fill and experiment with spaces” while in film, there are a lot more formal feeling steps and not a lot of space for devised work. For Hannah, the key in how film and digital theatre is less about the final product and more about the creation process. Theatre, in general, allows for a more organic process than film does and it’s this creation ideology that separates the two. Digital theatre, like its traditional counterpart, is just “people playing in a space, but that space is virtual”. Artists are still devising and filling out their worlds organically, but now they are asking themselves “how do you fill up virtual space?”
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In the weeks after their residency, Hannah and Kyng released several pieces of content from their Not a Hero multiverse. Blxk Cxsper staged an intervention during Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal’s virtual showcase of their Young Creator’s Unit.
Later in June Blxk Cxsper performed in a solo experience at the Montreal Fringe produced by record label Trans Trenderz called Blxk Cxsper: No Justice, No Peace.
Tools Used
OtterAi was used as a means of note keeping in meetings. One of the roadblocks that was identified early in the week was that as creators the team was having a hard time equally engaging when one of them also had to take all of the notes. By using OtterAi both team members were able to concentrate fully on the creative content without feeling like they were going to miss important notes.
The majority of the work during the residency took place on Miro. Using the sticky note tool, concepts were able to be quickly added to the board and then later sorted. To keep the large swath of ideas organized, character-based concepts were colour-coded to indicate if they referred to events that would be shown publicly or privately, or were just symbolic. These sticky notes were then connected together with arrows to create a sense of which events would lead into each other.
Miro was also used to create content creation timelines and deadlines as well as gather inspiration and research material.
