Digital Renaissance
DIGITAL RENAISSANCE PROJECT
A series of digital projects created in collaboration with young artists from Andy’s Summer Playhouse during the COVID-19 pandemic
During the summer of 2020, we were invited to join New Hampshire-based youth theatre Andy’s Summer Playhouse on a series of digital projects created under lockdown conditions. Shifting their entire summer programme from in-person to digital, Andy’s had created an innovative new collaborative platform - The Digital Renaissance Project - designed to connect their community of young artists with theatre makers around the world. Using Zoom, Twine, and Andy’s bespoke collaborative portal, we worked with 3 different ensembles of young artists across households and time zones to devise creative projects celebrating liveness, play, and community during this unique time of separation and isolation.
FRANKENSTEIN
Communicating through Zoom is weird. Our body language changes. We are stuffed into boxes. The computer screen becomes a monster of fragments.
Inspired by passages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we experimented with making our own Frankenstein’s Monster through Zoom. We explored the ways our bodies interact with cameras, how music changes the meaning of images, and how a group of people can become one body in the weird world of cyberspace.
movie re-enactment challenge
We’re all stuck inside. Zoom is our new reality. So let’s make a blockbuster movie.
In this week-long challenge, we explored ‘shot-for-shot’ re-enactment, taking a scene from Jurassic Park and recreating it using our bodies, our homes, and our imaginations. Using techniques from devised theatre, we explored ways of re-imagining familiar stories, finding Hollywood moments in our everyday surroundings.
the ghost house
The floorboards creak. A candle flickers. Something stirs in the darkness…
THE GHOST HOUSE is a play-at-home experience that peels back the veil between our world and what lies beyond. Guided by their phones, audience members are taken on an interactive journey through their own homes, glimpsing stories that are normally hidden in the shadows. Created using the interactive Twine platform, this is our first phone-based experience that fuses game play, mixed reality, and pre-recorded story elements.
Collaborating with an ensemble of young artists, we spent 3-weeks exploring our homes as sites of ghosts, history, memory, and imagination. Together, we created soundscapes, voice overs, video portraits, short stories, visual art, character improvisations, costumes, and more. The result is a spooky, innovative hybrid experience that re-imagines our relationships to our homes, igniting new possibilities for the worlds that might be contained within them.
