VANCOUVER
Playwrights Theatre Centre
With nearly 40 collaborators gathered at PTC’s home over the week, there was a rich exchange of ideas between specialists ranging from social media, digital performance, and VR to analogue practices in clown, archival tools, and live motion capture projection. To spark dialogue and connect the core artists with a wider community, convenors Milton Lim and Brent Hirose hosted lunchtime ‘convenings’ foregrounding local online artistic practices, discovering how artists have responded to the shifting demands of performance. Participants also had access to full digital performances from local innovators to demonstrate the breadth of responses in a digital and hybrid performance spectrum.
The final leg of the Digital Dramaturgy Initiative was hosted by Playwrights Theatre Centre at PL 1422 in Vancouver. This week looked towards post pandemic creation methods. How will the discoveries learned over the past few years shape future creations? How do we bring new audiences with us from a digital space into a live space? Whose stories are captured in the digital space, and how can we engage in that process with a commitment to justice? The projects chosen were primarily in earlier developmental stages with imagined in person and digital audiences.
Even in the design and implementation of our mostly-live DDI sessions, there was a feeling of tenderness and uncertainty - are we being safe enough? Can we relax into each others’ physical presence again? The reach for connection through digital and live spaces reminded us of the roots in live performance that our practices spring from, and brought new appreciation to the digital tools that have helped connect us, while distancing kept us safe. These sessions were a beautiful rehearsal for hybrid collaboration and creation processes that will continue to strengthen as we grow our hybrid dramaturgical muscles.
“Exploring and meeting the artists’ varied needs reminded us of some foundational principles: uphold artists’ agency; use the simplest tool that will do the job; and connect with other people to unlock ideas.”
Note from Heidi Taylor, Artistic & Executive Director of Playwrights Theatre Centre
The Digital Dramaturgy Initiative in Vancouver benefited from the creative explorations and discoveries made in Winnipeg and Montréal. In Vancouver, we were able to work in person for much of the residency, based on the artists’ needs. Small convenings in our studio to hear from leaders in digital performance, like Chris Reed (Continental Breakfast) of the Darlings, brought the challenges and creative solutions from the early days of the pandemic into focus. The chance to witness and reflect on unique digital performances like Deanna Peters’ Something between my face and your face is always interesting, Conor Wylie’s K Body and Mind, and Derek Chan’s yellow objects gave us a sense of joining an existing stream of practice, of expanding our vocabularies with tools that aren’t necessarily new, but still offer opportunities for discovery and challenges for implementation.
Exploring and meeting the artists’ varied needs reminded us of some foundational principles: uphold artists’ agency; use the simplest tool that will do the job; and connect with other people to unlock ideas. It was such a gift to have Emily and Andrew join us on site for a few days to share their accumulated knowledge with the participants. We also grappled with the challenge of recording and studying the work while doing it, which has positive outcomes for sharing discoveries (like this website) but also can increase the vulnerabilities of artists who are in critical stages of a process. The generosity of the participating artists in showing their work as it was being made is key to our ability to track and learn from this tumultuous period of creative problem solving.
“Showing our work” was also revealed as a critical tool for social justice as we learned from Celeste Insell and Lili Robinson’s Black Theatre Archive Initiative. Failing to capture and share the intangible, ephemeral moments of performance can play into the erasure of work with long lineages. As we continue to learn and challenge white dominance and other hegemonies in our practices, the power of the archive is increasingly evident.
The Digital Dramaturgy Initiative has moved PTC’s current work in digital practice forward, giving us dramaturgical knowledge of digital strategies that makes it easier for us to offer creative explorations and solutions to artists who are naturally ranging across live, digital and hybrid performance. This omnivorous approach in the end gives more audiences access to the artists’ creative visions. It’s a reframing of live performance that helps us be active participants in the most ubiquitous performance contexts in contemporary culture. As Joanna Garfinkel proposed in her opening remarks for the Vancouver leg of DDI, the digital space is another site-specific performance context, and we can use the tools of site-specific performance creation to plumb its creative depths.
Land Acknowledgement
Playwrights Theatre Centre acknowledges the sovereignty of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations on whose traditional, unceded and occupied territories we live and work.