Introducing WordPress

A dedicated web presence is an essential marketing tool for every theatre company and practitioner. But how do you build a web site for yourself or your company with no money and no programming skills? Until recently, many artists turned to volunteer programmers from IT courses who wanted a chance to show off their coding skills. Others took evening courses in HTML, Dreamweaver or Flash. For most, these options were seen as a stop-gap, a way to get online until the money was found to pay for a ‘proper’ web designer.

And then WordPress came along and made the process of getting online available to anyone who could use a web browser and a word processor. WordPress, like Blogger and Typepad, started as a blogging platform. Although it is still seen as the blogger’s choice of platform, it is also used as a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that drives many well-known websites around the world. The beauty of WordPress is that it is an open source platform, which means that anyone with programming skills can contribute to the code, adapt and use it for their own purposes.

There are three main reasons why WordPress is perfect for small creative companies and artists: firstly, it is free to install and adapt, the only expenses incurred are registering a domain name and paying for web hosting. Secondly, the WordPress CMS is easy to get to grips with; in fact anyone at ease with using Microsoft Word or an equivalent word processor will be able to publish a website using WordPress. Lastly, there is a dedicated, worldwide community of WordPress users that devote time and expertise to the project in the form of free support, free design themes and free ‘plug-ins’ (extensions).

You can use WordPress to build any kind of site, it doesn’t have to be a blog. You can insert videos, a forum, a social network, a photo gallery, or almost any type of function you can think of via the plug-in directory.

This week we will look at how to get your WordPress site up and running. Part II will delve deeper into the capabilities of the software and look at design and functionality.

Step One: Get a Domain Name and Hosting Package

WordPress is essentially a set of files that your install on a database in your web space. If you already have a domain name and web hosting company, visit WordPress.org (not to be confused with WordPress.com, the hosted version) and follow the steps for their famous ‘5 minute installation’. This does require some knowledge of how to transfer files to your web space using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) application.

Fortunately, there are a number of reliable, open source FTP programs with simple user guides to achieve this. Alternatively, and in recognition of this additional task, more and more Web hosting companies now offer a One-Click Installation of WordPress. In terms of recommendable hosting companies offering this service, I find Bluehost works well and you can read about my experience here. Alternatively see this list of WordPress.org endorsed companies. Please note that most of these companies offer .com, .org or .net domains only. If you wish to use a country-specific domain such as co.uk, search for ‘WordPress UK Hosting’ in Google and review your options.

Using Bluehost as an example, once you have signed up to a new account and registered or transferred your domain name, you are ready to install WordPress. Login to the Bluehost Control Panel using the domain name and password you chose when setting up your account. Once in the Control Panel, scroll down to Software/Services and click on Simple Scripts. Find WordPress, click on New Installation and follow the simple instructions. Congratulations! WordPress is now installed on your hosting account and you are ready to start building your website.

Step Two: Configuring your Website Settings

To log on to the admin area of your new WordPress website, in your web browser type in your domain name followed by /wp-admin e.g. http://sineadmacmanus.com/wp-admin. Enter the username and password that you gave during the install process and login in. You are now in the administration area of your website. Have a look around.

There are a number of small settings we need to take care of straight away. Go to Settings>General and enter the website name in the Blog Title field and your Tagline in the Tagline field. Set the time and date display as you require.

Next click on Settings>Reading. WordPress gives us two display options for the home page (the first page visitors see) of your site. The default display is a blog (‘Your latest posts’) and the second option is a ‘Static page’. We will come to Posts and Pages in a moment. There are advantages to having your Posts page as the front page of your website – search engines such as Google like original content so having continually changing material on your home page will rank your site higher in the search engine listings. Many companies and artists also use the blog facility of WordPress to provide Latest News and updates on their home page which can make a site more interesting and dynamic to visitors.

To control how visitors can comment, if at all, on your site, click on Settings>Discussion and make the required changes. Next, to ensure your site appears in search engines, click on Settings>Privacy and select the right option. To help with SEO (search engine optimization) and the ability for the search engines to index your website content, click on Settings>Permalink to set the format of the URL that will be used for your Posts and Pages. Choose the Month and Name option.

Step Three: Creating Content for Your Site

To add the main content to your site, you will need to add a series of Pages. Pages are static pages that link from your home page. Examples of static pages could be About Us, Past Productions, Current Production, Education, Contact Us and so on. Click on Pages to see the list of default static pages and edit and add your own here. To add a new page, click Add New. Enter the title of your page e.g. About Us and add your content in the main field. To format the content use the text editing tools. WordPress uses similar formatting icons and tools to Microsoft Word. Pages will appear by default in alphabetical order, but you can adjust this using the settings. Here you can also decide if you want the page to appear in your navigation bar. You can also create Parent and Sub-pages which could be useful for past productions, as an example. When you have finished editing your page, click Publish to publish this page to your site.

To add Posts to your website, click on Posts>Add New. Posts will be displayed by default with the most recent at the top on your home page. You can use Categories and Tags to categorise your Posts to make your content easier to find.

You can use the Appearance>Widgets menu to decide what to display in the sidebars of your home page. If necessary, remove the default widgets and use the ‘Add’ button to add the ones that you want. For example, you could choose to display your Recent Posts, a Tag Cloud and your list of Categories.

What’s Next?

If you follow the steps above, you can have your own website, hosted on your own domain name, up and running in less than an hour. In A Practical Guide to WordPress (Part 2), we take a look at customising the design and capabilities of your site using Themes and Plug-Ins to make a unique site for your theatre company or practice.

Conceived and created by Whit MacLaughlin and his award winning Philadelphia-based company, New Paradise Laboratories, Fatebook is a meditation on fate or destiny as seen through the lens of digital communication. The online strand of the project was launched in July this year and follows the lives of 13 characters as they interact with audience members across multiple social media networks. Their stories evolve – with directorial input from MacLaughlin – through a new media narrative of Twitter and Facebook updates, YouTube videos and photos on Flickr; documenting scenes from their everyday lives in Philadelphia.

Each of these 13 online odysseys is heading for offline collision at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in September later this summer. The real space performance is set to bring even more digitalia to bear. A myriad of screens, projectors and live video feeds will transform the space into an epic mediatised environment in which the borders between digital and analogue, live and recorded, fact and fiction merge in a “momentous night—the Fatebook party—where time stops, computers crash…and nobody can say what’s real.”

After an in-depth Skype exchange with MacLaughlin it became clear that here was an experiment at the bleeding edge of digital performance, evolving in sync with developments in social media. I wanted to find out more about the artistic and logistical challenges involved in creating performance online, to extend my ongoing exploration of performance work crossing the digital-analogue divide and to take stock (in a performative context) of terms in frequent but awkward circulation on the Web. Terms such as real (real time, real space, real life), physical (physical space, physical world), space (cyberspace, real space), and the fact/fiction binary.

Andrew Eglinton: Where did the idea for Fatebook originate from?

Whit MacLaughlin: Around two years ago I was observing the effect of social media on young people. There seemed to be an encroaching difference in the way the imagination worked in this space. I was also hoping to participate in the front line of experiential investigations into the way ‘cyberspace’ and ‘real space’ interact in the imagination. What is the nature of the interactions we experience in both spaces? Where does this experience reside in the individual? I became interested in devising a piece that made use of the style or nature of the experience in both media.

I also watched people having sex in a public online space and was interested in how sexual function was stimulated by almost pure, prefrontal, ‘real time’ stimulation, as opposed to the long-standing tradition of literary pornography.

Around about the same time, I saw a performance of a ‘movie’ at the Ars Electronica conference in Linz, Austria. The piece wasn’t terribly interesting, but one great moment happened that set off an alarm in me; the piece was broadcast through a variety of media, but one of the actors suddenly walked through the space we were inhabiting, and I was struck by the way that I responded so differently to the actor in cyber expressions as opposed to real expressions. I liked the smash up and that was the genesis of Fatebook.

I felt that many of the online films and ’shows’ had not really translated the medium away from film and TV into the new zone. They still seemed cinematic. So I was interested in investigating the possibility of narrative that was interactive; both inside the medium, and then across platforms, so to speak.

Andrew: You mention a perceived difference in the way the imagination works in online spaces, what sort of difference(s)? Have you been able to pinpoint anything in particular?

Whit: Well, it’s conjecture and unscientific at this point, but I was struck by how powerful and immediate text scrolling across a computer screen could be. I began to think about teenagers and how ‘personal’ their conversations are in texting and IMing. I felt that the overall tenor of online ‘conversation’ was really close to the atmosphere of pillow talk. Whispering into someone else’s ear. Short phrases. Immediate and almost telepathic. Not couched in metaphor. Not carefully articulated. Even with young adults, it was bedroom to bedroom.

Andrew: I want to pick up on your experience of watching people having sex in a public online space and interacting with viewers via text chat. What aspect(s) or characteristic(s) of that real time environment did you find stimulating?

Whit: It was the sense of something unfolding in the ‘present’ that was an exhibitionistic expression of intimacy. There were also no physical inhibitions, and this is linked to the phenomenon of physical safety and emotional vulnerability in cyberspace. It’s a paradigm that I find very interesting. Young people are especially vulnerable to emotional cruelty online. Not being wary of it and not understanding the intense ‘publicness’ of action in cyberspace.

Andrew: So these fragments, these influences and ideas formed the basis for a devised performance project. What was the first practical step towards realising Fatebook and when did it take place?

Whit: I approached a large theatre company in the US that I have worked with before as a commissioning organization. They are into creating experimental work for young audiences, which I initially thought was a prime audience for the piece, and we agreed to proceed. So we embarked on a year and a half series of workshops with a cast of teenagers.

I started to envision a piece that involved real time online interactions that would bring physical life directly up against cyberspace life; a narrative form that would simply highlight the properties of each. People are so passionate about their online hangouts, and I just wanted to see what would happen.

So I interviewed a number of young adults, put together a cast and started to work on the shape of the experience. The project was going to have a technological component. We dreamed big at the time — we were into developing a kind of real time networked approach to the unfolding of the piece.

It soon became clear that there would need to be two shows: an online show that would proceed for a certain amount of time before a real space show took place; and the real space show would interact with the cyberspace one – hopefully in a seamless manner.

Then, just as we were going into production mode, the economic crisis hit, and the project was axed. So I had to come up with alternative ways to structure and execute the piece that I could manage within my own resources.

Andrew: You say you “just wanted to see what would happen”. Did you pitch that as a project outcome in your brief to the commissioning organization? In other words, was it made explicit from the outset that this work would be wholly experimental? That there were perhaps few precedents at the time?

Whit: Yes. Everyone was marginally comfortable with that. We had also hired a consulting firm to help us figure out the web experience, because not much existed by way of templates. There were going to be aspects of the piece that were very challenging to any organization of any size. Paradigm shifts that I saw happening before our very eyes that most theatre organizations aren’t nimble enough to put into action.

Andrew: Such as?

Whit: Well, marketing for example. Who is it in a theatre organization that tells the story? I began to see that in cyberspace, the employees of an arts organization – the production team, the administration, the artistic leadership, the artists etc. – are the prime communication agents.

Theatre is still used to creating a product, a thing, a production, and then hiring marketers, who shape the ’story’ of the thing and try to sell it to the public. In cyberspace, the artistic director, for instance, has direct access to the people who form the ‘audience’ for the piece. But artistic personnel are notoriously fastidious about talking directly to the public. It’s a status drop or something. They think of their work as the primary focus of their relationship to an audience. But in cyberspace, that relationship is begging to be up-ended.

I saw an opportunity to build a community, where the marketing of the piece was indistinguishable from its content. So I began to say things like “its marketing is its content” which some people found disturbing; as if that couldn’t be the content of a theatre piece. Our partner organization found this aspect particularly challenging.

Andrew: So by virtue of its existence in cyberspace, the company was marketing the production at the same time that it was creating the story and characters for the piece?

Whit: I tend to describe the creative process of this piece as writing a novel on the fly that you are shooting at the same time as a film, that you are broadcasting as soon as you have the dailies, and rehearsing after you take the curtain up!

Andrew: Nice. As you mentioned earlier, there’s also a ‘physical world’ component to Fatebook, the show that will take place in September as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Have you resorted back to ‘traditional’ marketing roles and structures for that?

Whit: We do have plans to undertake traditional marketing techniques at the same time as we carry out the online component. There have been ramifications to that. I am now writing grant applications with slightly grandiose claims about reducing the normal ratios of production to marketing costs. People are very hopeful about the efficacy of communication in cyberspace, but they are also increasingly wary of slight changes in the atmosphere of online communication and it’s almost a totally commercial zone.

Andrew: Is there an absence of morality in virtual space? A relinquishing of responsibility?

Whit: I think that personal responsibility as a concept is in flux because of the interaction of fact and fiction in cyberspace. For instance, people have been entrapped for interacting sexually with under aged youth by policemen posing as youth. It’s difficult to tell where the crime really is. It seems to be an Orwellian sort of thought crime. And people have told me about relationships they’ve had with someone they’ve never met or seen online. They wonder if they are having an affair. I say, “do you have ’sex’?” They say, “well, yes, I guess”. And I say “you’re having an affair”. There’s just so much room for manoeuvring.

Andrew: I’m interested in this notion of blurring fact and fiction online, particularly in relation to building characters that inhabit social media space (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr etc.). Could you describe the character development process and your online relationship with the actors as the director?

Whit: I should point out that the 13 actors working on Fatebook have never all been together in the same room at the same time – until this coming Monday when we start work on the real space show. The actors have devised characters whole cloth out of their own lives. So much of the content for this show is autobiographical. I have been steering the development of character – as co-author – remotely. Facebook and Twitter have been our rehearsal space so far. We created parameters, and identities – in collaboration – and then started interacting in these spaces in a variety of ways.

Andrew: Could you give an example of a parameter?

Whit: I watched and commented individually as I was devising ways of guiding the actors into the situations I envisioned. I wanted certain characters to be ’supernatural’ for example, but I didn’t tell them, I didn’t want them to ‘hit the nail on the head’ so to speak. So I guided them towards certain things by inference. Soon, one character, for instance, was devising a ‘revirginization’ procedure. Eventually, I took almost five months of online interactions and then started compiling, editing, and rewriting.

Ame Montoya - responding to the theme 'Passing Out'. Photo © Matt Saunders

Andrew: I want to pick up on the term ‘real time’. We’ve used it several times now. It’s a term I associate with ‘real time Web’, often used to suggest a demarcation between a static text-based era of the Internet and the current (instantaneous) global communication platform that it has become. What does ‘real time’ mean in the context of Fatebook?

Whit: To me, it means I can communicate with you without making an appointment. We don’t need to get our bodies anywhere and we just pick up where we left off, whenever we want. It’s realer than real time. I’m not sure whether that describes the actuality of real time online, or perhaps more the experience of it.

Andrew: On the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival website Fatebook is described thus: “The action plays out within a labyrinth of screens displaying the shifting cityscapes and intimate spaces in which the characters live. Twelve projectors and live video feeds blur the line between the digital environment and the physical one.” What are the tensions in shifting between digital and physical interfaces in this performance? What does the physical dimension bring to the performance?

Whit: Well, that’s the point, I think. There will be such an immersion in illusion that I’m not sure the participant will necessarily know what is live and what is canned. The environments well be established then mutated. Characters will be communicating across the room, in ways that it will not be clear how much is live. There will also be live green-screened broadcasting. The whole milieu of the performance is illusion. Then there will be a complete meltdown of the piece that will plunk us all into real space and we’ll suddenly see and feel the unmediated room and hear unmediated sound.

Andrew: What do you hope will emerge at that moment of real space recognition?

Whit: I don’t know. I actually think that presence in real space is the holy grail of experience, and proximity against the odds is the miracle. So, I’m not sure what cyber proximity is going to do with the traditional structures of meaning and what cyber availability is going to do to our physical metaphors. I feel like I just want, at this point, to highlight the differences and make them really salient.

Andrew: Thank you very much for your time and insight into the workings of Fatebook.

I find that they provide a mysterious perspective on the inner workings of a theatre. In the case of Yukio Ninagawa’s Twelfth Night, the set changes engendered an unexpected mood of cathartic mise-en-abîme. A sense of infinite regression heightened perhaps by a back-drop of mirrors on stage where, if I had been more attentive, I may have seen Lyn Gardner idly taking notes in amongst the sea of voyeurs.

Lyn Gardner wrote a piece about the performance for The Guardian (she didn’t like the set changes). I invite you to view the source code of her article (toolbar > view > source). Google sucks up the syntactical nutrients contained in this story within a story and spews out the title and a short description of the article on the search results page for ‘Shockiku Grand Kabuki’. Being included in the first 10 links returned, based on a Google search is the search engine optimisation (SEO) sweet spot and the Guardian’s ability to reach it consistently is no coincidence. The Guardian employs SEO specialists to make sure that the Guardian’s online pages appear relevant to Google. You are not the primary audience for the article nor are you the judge of its relevance or quality. This is Google’s privilege.

In their headlong rush to survive, online newspapers have exposed the rocky truth of their existence: they thrive by spamming Google (and a host of other smaller but collectively important referral sources). Lyn Gardner’s true purpose at the Guardian is to produce search engine friendly copy. Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance. The backbone of new media is not the content but the code.

A small degree away from the dark art of search engine logic, there is the minefield of web-analytics. Web-analytics is the bucket that processes the ‘cognitive surplus’ of the Internet; the system that trends the ebb and the flow of online traffic over time. If you click on one of the links above (effectively a request for the page) it will, amongst other things, run JavaScript code in your browser which in combination with an invisible image request and a tracking cookie will send data back to a remote server where it will eventually be pushed to a reporting interface. This process is commonly called ‘page tagging’.

Page tagging allows the Guardian’s web-analytics software to faithfully record the fact that something has requested a file defined as Lyn Gardner’s article. If you have never visited the site before, you will be counted as a unique visitor to that page. ‘Unique Visitor’ is a euphemism for an Internet enabled device. It is assumed that a person is controlling the device but it could just as well be an automated script. The nature or rather quality of the visit is irrelevant: the quantity of visits is what matters.

At some point, behind the scenes coding became more important than the journalistic front of house authoritative first take on daily events. This is a world away from the beauty of Ninagawa’s vision but just like set changes, it has to be considered.

The reason for this phenomenon lies in the play’s main theme. Its protagonist Jacob (Edmund Dehn) is suffering from Alzheimers, and the performance charts his decline. We witness the first stages of the illness when Jacob is still trying to hold on to his energetic life and his successful career as a head-hunter. Once this turns out to be impossible, he decides to capture his remaining memories on a tape-recorder. The play ends with his daughter Gracie (Rebecca Stevenson) and her ex-boyfriend Michael (Jim Fish) taking him on a tour of his own past based on his recorded memories. In the course of this development, Gracie manages to rekindle her relationship with her father, and also comes closer to Michael, the only person to help her through difficult times.

Cooper cleverly represents the collapse of past and present in Jacob’s mind through a fragmented chronology. With the use of two blackboards, on which the different moments in time are indicated, and the tape-recorder from which key memories are replayed, we see a poignant juxtaposition of these two time frames. Director Steve Harper enforces this mirroring effect by running many of these incidents in parallel. Harper is able to elude the duplication of storyline by exploring differences in tone and rhythm between the narration and the action: a memory that causes pain for Gracie and Michael for example, could have been a joyful experience for Jacob.

Through all of these changes of time and emotion, it is the actors’ versatility and subtlety that makes this performance special. Story and structure are well-conceived, but without Rebecca Stevenson’s ability to change from schoolgirl Gracie to a prematurely grown-up woman in a heartbeat, and Edmund Dehn’s harrowing juxtaposition of energetic businessman and a dumb, pitiable wreck of a man, the play would remain just that – an interesting story well told. Harper rightly identified Cooper’s ability to create nuanced characters as the strongest point of For Once I Was, and found actors that live up to the demands. Even characters that could have been seen as minor, such as Jacob’s girlfriend Eleanor, or Gracie’s ex-boyfriend Michael, are given depth by Victoria Kruger and Jim Fish. Strong as the main pull of empathy towards Jacob and his plight is, I never stopped thinking about the feelings of the people around him.

Consequently, plot was secondary, while relationships and reactions took centre-stage – a simple smile, the turning away of a face. I was surprised to see Annabel Pemberton’s Laura (Jacob’s wife) in the spotlight given her relatively small part. She infused every gesture with a special significance, but due to the intimacy of the play this came across as rather heavy-handed. It raises the question as to whether the script would not be more suited to the medium of film; particularly in its ability for close-ups, match cuts, and cross-fades. Even the dissolving of time, the bleeding of one character into another (Jacob increasingly confuses his girlfriend Eleanor with his ex-wife Laura), would be more effective on screen. Despite this minor imbalance, the fact remains that the performance sucked me into a bitter-sweet world of emotional conflict and confusion.

“We’re guilty of homemade bombs and homemade wine. We’re guilty of coldness and spite. We never laughed and we never found the time….”

In Speak Bitterness a small group of performers take on the task of confessing to everything. Dressed in their best suits, the performers compete to confess the most horrific, amusing or convincing things. Lined-up as if for a show trial or a press conference, they meet the gaze of the audience, speaking softly, drawing them in and admitting it all.

For the six hour duration of the work the audience are free to come and go as they please while the performers are trapped – by turns cowed, breezy, anguished, reluctant, jovial and of course determined. The text they work from is a constantly updated catalogue of human wrong-doing great and small, from murder, genocide, rape and arson to bad moods, jealous rages, never washing-up properly and not taking the dogs out for a walk.

The performance will be webcast live, and will be performed by the six core-members of Forced Entertainment including Artistic Director, Tim Etchells. The whole company performing together is a rare event and a fitting marker of Forced Entertainment’s 25th anniversary this year.
Tune in here from 5pm-11pm (UK time), 6pm – 12midnight (Mainland Europe).

Theatre practice remains strongly rooted in the physical world, but the impact of the real-time Web on the infrastructure of theatre is undeniable. It is changing the way we encounter theatre, the way we learn and talk about it, and it has given rise to new exploratory practice. Performance in virtual online envrionments goes back to the beginning of the Internet (and beyond), but only in the past few years with the Web 2.0 paradigm has it become viable to produce live online performances for live online audiences.

Curious to find out more about the possibilities of performance in this context, I spoke to two artists from The Netherlands about their work with theatre in Second Life (hereafter SL). SL is one of the Web’s largest 3D virtual worlds, built to a great extent by its users who interact and socialize via personal avatars. Joyce Timmerman is a member of the Amsterdam based theatre company Slapelozen. She has a personal interest in SL and sometimes uses it in her creative work. Ze Moo is an “information-artist” and (live)media-expert/consultant based in The Netherlands and in Cyberspace.

Second Life Logo

Andrew Eglinton (AE): Thank you both for taking the time to participate in this online discussion. The aim is to try and paint a picture of what ‘theatre’ in a virtual online environment such as SL might consist of and to find out what some of the implications are for ‘real world’ theatre.

I understand that you’ve both been involved in a particular project that brought live performances in SL to an audience in a venue in Amsterdam. I’d like to start by asking you both to outline the event so that we have a common ground for this discussion.

Ze Moo: First of all, I should point out that Joyce and I met in SL. We share a mutual interest in the field of theatre, and I mean ‘theatre’ in the broadest possible sense of the term. I co-organized the ‘Live Machinima Theatre’ event on August 30th 2008 in Amsterdam in collaboration with the grassroots art & technology lab ‘Meta.Live.Nu‘. Joyce was an essential member of the production team. The show you’re referring to was called Goodbye Dollar. It took place in SL and it fused musical theatre, performance art, stand up comedy and experimental cinema.

Joyce: In Goodbye Dollar, the ‘real’ or physical audience watched the SL performances on a screen in an auditorium in Amsterdam – the venue was De Balie, it’s well known for housing experimental art work. There were numerous acts in Goodbye Dollar by artists from around the world and the SL medium provided the possibility for audiences to interact with the artists.

AE: Interact? In what sense?

Ze Moo: Some audience members had laptop computers and were connected to SL so they could use text or audio chat.

AE: So the audience was split between people in the physical space at De Balie and people logged into SL from around the world, what about the cast and crew?

Ze Moo: The night was divided into time slots and the artists were responsible for the content of each slot. All artists were operating from home, or in studios. In terms of the crew, there was a production team present at De Balie.

AE: What did the production team do?

Ze Moo: The production team (of which Joyce was a part) had to coordinate the programming and facilitate the various technologies used in the event. I directed the whole night at De Balie like a TV channel showing different ‘programmes’ in real time. But for those accessing the event remotely and not logged into SL there was also a live TV stream broadcast on the Web. So we had multiple streams of media running in parallel.

Goodbye Dollar Event viewed from inside De Balie

AE: Let’s move on and talk about the role of the artists. Could I ask both of you to choose one particular artist involved in Goodbye Dollar and describe a particular performance? Starting with Joyce?

Joyce: I’ll talk about the stand-up comedian Lauren Weyland and her show “LaurenLive: The Dollar Undone”. What you saw on a virtual stage in SL was the avatar of a pretty girl combined with Lauren’s deep masculine voice, cracking sexist jokes about men.

Lauren’s performances are all about playing with gender identity and stereotypes. You see the graphic image of a woman but hear the physical voice of a man so you’re always conscious about both levels: the physicality of the actor and the virtual avatar he uses.

The strange thing is of course that as a stand up comedian you are very aware of your audience’s reactions, their laughter, their silence etc., but in SL it’s different. People react and laugh, but you cannot see their faces, you can only hear those logged into SL who use audio headsets.

Ze Moo: Large parts of audiences at Lauren’s performances always use microphone headsets so it’s possible to hear real laughter and comments in real-time about Lauren’s material.

Joyce: This can create a strange effect at times and it’s one of the areas that needs working on if virtual theatre is going to improve in the future. I’d like to be able to see the facial expressions of both the actors and the audience.

AE: Would it be possible to see everyone involved in the performance simultaneously?

Ze Moo: Not at the moment in SL, but it will be possible in the future I am quite sure. People can already project their webcam faces onto their avatars. There have been numerous experiments with that, but technically speaking it’s still at an embryonic stage.

AE: Could you clarify what an avatar is in the context of SL?

Joyce: The avatar is the ‘doll’ you walk around with in SL, you create it yourself by selecting your own appearance, gender, skin colour, shape etc., and you can even become a beast if you want to. This opens up a new range of possibilities for transformation, both for the actors and the audience. In the theatre, you need to use your imagination when it comes to seeing actors perform complex roles. In SL that transformation is immediate and seamless.

AE: So the SL audience no longer needs to suspend its disbelief?

Ze Moo: Virtual theatre is more immersive, like being part of a live, interactive movie.

Joyce: Yes, it is like cinema. More is possible, so as an audience we might expect more; when I see a beast on stage I can accept that it’s an actor who delivers the roar…but in a movie I want to see the beast in all its three dimensional ferocity!

Ze Moo: But imagination definitely still plays a role and in my view the stimulation of the brain in SL with all kinds of visual illusions can be an even more intense experience.

Joyce: Imagination is an interesting aspect of SL right now; everything is possible, but we still tend towards reality. There are artists now who are changing that in SL they are exploring ways of stimulating their audiences’ imagination.

AE: Are the artists beginning to develop a ‘vocabulary’ of performance that is specific to the context of SL?

Joyce: Yes, I think so.

Ze Moo: The ‘Bunnyken’ were created specifically for performance in SL by Arthole in a piece called Orientation. Arthole is a US/Brit art collective who use SL as their main medium.

AE: Was this also part of Goodbye Dollar?

Ze Moo: Yes Arthole performed at the Goodbye Dollar event. They were one of the top art collectives in 2008 to use SL as a medium of expression.

AE: Could you describe their performance in more detail?

Ze Moo: It began in the SL reception area that Arthole had created. The audience was instructed to gather in this space before being told to swap their regular avatars for ‘Bunnyken’ creatures.

Bunnyken in performance Orientation by Arthole

The Arthole members ushered the audience, now dressed in Bunnyken avatars, around the performance space. Don’t forget that this was being observed on the big white De Balie cinema screen in Amsterdam. And since some people in the auditorium had laptops, they were able to participate as Bunnyken.

AE: So an audience watching an audience?

Ze Moo: Yes. In the SL performance, the audience were made to sit in rows in an amphitheatre. They had to listen to strange alien-like speeches; the whole thing had an Orwellian feel to it. There was an atmosphere of intimidation, of control and the speeches were a form of ‘white noise’. Amazingly, most of the SL audience went along with this and did what they were told to do. In the end they arrived in a type of factory where they were made into a sort of pink mud food.

AE: Right…I see. What was the ultimate direction of the piece? Were Arthole working towards a particular outcome?

Ze Moo: A machinima was produced from it a week later (the event was projected on a live Web video stream as I mentioned earlier). Seeing it live on the large auditorium screen was far more impressive than the YouTube viewing experience.

AE: What makes you say that?

Ze Moo: It was the thrill of being there combined with having the option to interact in real time. My aim as director of the experimental ‘live-cross-reality‘ art section of Goodbye Dollar was to try and bridge theatre and film in a way that has not been done before, while at the same time exploring the boundaries of art, media and technology.

AE: Thank you for sharing your accounts of the two performances. Your last point Ze Moo, on bridging theatre and film segues nicely into the last two themes I want to pick up on: ‘liveness’ and interaction. Starting with liveness I’d like to get a sense from both of you of what it was like to be a spectator at this event. Did you feel part of a community in the De Balie auditorium?

Joyce: For me, there was more a sense of community online than in the auditorium, simply because by nature of the virtual environment there was more potential to interact and participate as a virtual audience member then a physical one.

AE: Could you give some concrete examples of interaction?

Joyce: So in the comedy show I mentioned, Lauren Weyland could hear you laugh or speak if you were online. Also, every performance throughout the evening took place in a different SL location; so you had to ‘teleport’ yourself (avatar) to a destination. This act of teleportation engages the audience from the start. Then there was another performance in which the audience could help build a giant tower.

Ze Moo: Interaction options in SL consist of: text chat, voice chat, individualized avatar shape, looks (fashion) & animations (body language). And also: building (aka ‘rezzing’), moving, altering objects and backdrops and environmental sounds. This adds a whole new ‘live narrative’ (non-verbal) layer to communications, that thus far hasn’t been humanly possible.

AE: I’m curious about Joyce’s teleporting. What’s so special about it?

Joyce: Well usually you don’t teleport in such large numbers in SL. Walking in the SL environment is often a solitary thing. But as a group there’s a sense of community just by walking together. It’s very much the same phenomenon you experience in a real life installation or promenade performance.

AE: Thinking about the audience in the auditorium, to what extent would you have to be knowledgeable about SL to appreciate the whole event?

Ze Moo: Good question.

Joyce: SL users got more out of it I think. For audience members who weren’t familiar with SL there was a narrator in the auditorium who provided voice over commentary and explained what was going on. There were also volunteers present, explaining the event on a person-to-person basis.

AE: One final question. How important was it from the production side of the event to create a ‘streamlined’ show? Presumably there were many stops and starts for technical reasons?

Joyce: Actually, it was surprsingly smooth, but Moo was incredibly busy!

Ze Moo: We were all very busy. Getting everyone in the right place at the right time took a tremendous amount of effort. We prepared several months in advance for the event and worked to a tight schedule. In the end it all went much smoother than I had expected. The only serious technical failure was in the video documentation of the event. But I don’t believe it would be possible to completely document/archive such an extensive interactive live experience anyway. That is why we concentrated more on preparing the live event itself. We are doing the same for one of our largest upcoming events of the year: The ElectroSmog Festival in Autumn 2010.

AE: Thank you both very much indeed for your time this evening. It has been a fascinating discussion. I have many more questions to ask and I hope there will be another occasion to explore this further.

This is the second part of a 2-part interview with New York video blogger, Loren Feldman. If you missed the first part, you can watch it here. In this part we discuss Loren’s use of puppets and his ‘interventions’ in the tech world through this theatrical medium. For the most part, the puppet characters are parodies of existing figures in the US tech industry, including Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Michael Arrington and Loic Lemeur. Intercut in this video are excerpts from Loren’s puppet video archive, these include:

• 1. Shel And Scoble Talk Chips
• 2. Shel Interviews Kevin Rose
• 3. Le Beast and Secretary Besson

After a little prompting from the Gate Facebook group and mailing list, I dropped the theatre a quick email with my postal address. A week later, an envelope dropped onto my doormat. Inside was a Gate postcard and a red balloon.

As instructed by the postcard, I inflated the balloon, took a photo of it and emailed the photo back to the Gate. Within a few hours my balloon had joined a host of others in a Flickr stream. Then, on Wednesday 11th February, it went up on the wall in the theatre foyer, along with 130-odd others, in an exhibition the Gate are calling Up … Up … and A Play!

The foyer walls are newly occupied by large blackboards. One lists the names of everyone that contributed a photo; another shows the locations of contributors on simplified maps of London, England and the world; the others all bear neat arrangements of photos. The pictures that have travelled the furthest are framed and hung along the staircase. Gate balloons have reached as far afield as Paris, Spain, Finland, Australia and Alaska.

Taking part in the exhibition engenders a strange feeling of connectedness, something like the six degrees of separation theory. The people and places pictured have little visibly in common, in the same way as the pictures themselves vary widely in terms of subject matter and photographical skill. But they all have one obvious common factor – the presence in every photo of a red balloon, and each photographer’s connection (whatever that may be) to the Gate.

If you’re interested in viewing the exhibition, arrive early. The doors open at 6:30pm; at around 7:00 the foyer will start filling up with people waiting to see that evening’s show, and you’ll have to fight your way around the tiny space to take in all the material. Take your time on the stairs – the framed pictures all have attached labels that provide a little context.

As a birthday celebration, Up … Up … an A Play! steers clear of self-congratulation and instead acknowledges the people without whom a theatre cannot exist. The Gate are still sending out balloons, and plan to re-exhibit with additional photos at the end of the year, once again turning an appreciative spotlight on their loyal audience.

Matt Boothman's Contribution to the Gate Theatre's Up ... Up ... and A Play! Exhibition

There are very few professional theatre critics in the UK, by which I mean people that earn a living from theatre criticism alone. Of those few, the vast majority are of what most people like to call ‘a certain age’. I knew this before attending the discussion; as a young person working in the field of arts journalism, it has a direct effect on my life. What I hadn’t considered was the effect it has on the evolution of theatre journalism as a form.

The small cadre of professional critics was represented on the panel by Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Telegraph. From the off, Spencer declared himself openly hostile towards theatre bloggers. He accused the blogosphere of watering down critical discourse with a morass of uninformed opinion, and claimed that same morass would soon put him and his colleagues out of their jobs.

Spencer labelled his hostility “a generational problem”, and admitted that he simply didn’t like computers and technology. He also labelled himself “the last of the Luddites”; unfortunately, this epithet is not as accurate. His contemporaries are, if anything, older and more set in their ways than he is. Which means the most powerful portion of the critical establishment wants nothing to do with new media.

How is criticism supposed to evolve and find a place in the media as it exists today, if its biggest names think blogging is the enemy?

Not everyone in the industry is resistant to the change new media offers. Andrew Dickson, arts editor for the Guardian Online, was also a panellist. The Guardian have been quicker than their competitors to embrace online content. But the publication still follows the formats and processes of print journalism. Dickson commissions reviews, blog posts and podcasts or videos in the same way as his print counterparts.

No one has yet fully grasped the potential of new media. No one has fully exploited the combined power of online journalism, podcasting, social networking and mobile synchronisation. I still structure my reviews for London Theatre Blog the same way I would for a print publication. But if the critical community is held back by an older generation with a lot of clout and no love for web 2.0, by the time we get there technology will have moved ahead of us again.

In some ways perhaps it already has. Wired magazine declared the death of blogging in October, and the theatre industry still has yet to fully acknowledge its legitimacy. Whether or not the problem is generational, there is indisputably a problem: technology moves fast, and we’re being left behind.

Brickbats in Cyberspace took place at the Royal Court Theatre on Monday 1 December 2008. The event was braodcast live online and here is the full audio archive of the event.

The participants were as follows:

Chair:
Karen Fricker, critic for Variety magazine and lecturer in Theatre Criticism at Royal Holloway university

Panellists:
Andrew Dickson, arts editor for guardian.co.uk
Judith Dimant, producer for Complicite
Charles Spencer, lead critic for the Daily Telegraph
The West End Whingers, theatre bloggers