Theatre 2.0
Dunkirk NY – Lately my thoughts have been swirling around between the world of Henry David Thoreau and the world of Clay Shirky. Thoreau was noted for his observation that Texas and Maine, once they were connected by telegraph, may have nothing to say to each other. Shirky has observed that the internet allows all of our concerns to have equal and valid weight, and that in the digital age Texas and Maine are so interconnected that their concerns are similar and mutual.
This is going to be a difficult post to write, because I find myself equally attracted to both worlds without knowing which is the “right” world. On the one hand, the world of Thoreau preaches a slower, more localized approach to living, an approach which attempts to make life simpler. This notion fits in well with the basic foundational principles of community arts, since it has a rural foundation and a localized sensibility. On the other hand, Shirky points out that, for the first time in human history, a majority of people around the world now have within their grasp something he calls “many-to-many” communication. Individuals can now bypass all sorts of cultural and political institutions, creating new means of receiving and transmitting news and culture to ad hoc networks which they create on a “many-to-many” basis, as opposed to the standard “one-to-many” basis. Question: does this developing ability for “many-to-many” communication mean that people will soon be bypassing institutions like television, radio, movies and – gasp – theatre?
We are already seeing how bloggers have affected the professional class of journalists. Independent filmmakers are beginning to crack major holes into the Hollywood institutions. YouTube will sooner or later begin to replace television as homegrown sitcoms develop and mature.
It seems to me that, when you see all this technological development, theatre begins to look like a hapless, one-to-many, 1.0 institution. More to the point, eventually as generations turn over, how will you ever convince the emerging generation who will be raised from the cradle with this kind of technology that theatre is worth becoming involved in? What will babies being born today, breathing technology as they do air, think about theatre?
It is clear that Thoreau’s philosophy of how life should be lived, despite its romantic and, in many ways, practical appeal, never took hold in American culture as anything more than a romantic idea. Do we try to preserve theatre as Theatre 1.0, with its roots planted firmly and resolutely in its 2500-year-old tradition, or do we look to what the new technologies hold and try to imagine what Theatre 2.0 will try to be, as it revolves around new ideas of communities and new methods of communication? More on these questions in future posts. -twl
