Theatre, Social Media, and Meaning Making

TLDR: In the last five years, the emergence of social media platforms as new technologies to allow two-way interaction between artists, audiences, and society at large has been held up as a game changer by many in the theatre industry as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: In the last five years, the emergence of social media platforms as new technologies to allow two-way interaction between artists, audiences, and society at large has been held up as a ‘game changer’ by many in the theatre industry. Social media provides artists and their audiences with new tools to share theatre work, and share their thoughts about theatre work, which are accessible to a global audiences and cannot be gatekept in the way that traditional theatre venues, programs, criticism and archives are. In Theatre, Social Media, and Meaning Making, I offer a broad based survey of this emerging field of practice. I look at well-known and less well-known examples from across the US, UK, Europe and Australia, including stage works such as Adam Cass’s I Love You Bro, Liesel Zink’s Various Selves, The Builders Association’s Continuous City, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B, Peta Brady’s Involuntary Dances and Rita Marcalo’s Involuntary Dances, live and as live broadcasts by companies such as the National Theatre, and immersive, telematic, networked and participatory performance on Second Life, Upstage, Waterwheel, Twitter, Facebook, and other two-way interactive platforms such as Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming, Blast Theory’s Desert Rain, Ian Upton’s Ritual Circle, RSC and Mudlark’s Such Tweet Sorrow, RSC Google Creative Lab’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming , Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, New Paradise Laboratories Fatebook: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party At A time, Jeffrey Cranor’s tweet plays, La Pocha Nostra’s Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post, Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension, Brian Lobel’s Purge, Sarah Rodigari’s Reach Out Touch Faith, and @Platea’s Co-Modify, along with archives like Hemispherica and AusStage. I examine these examples, in the light of theatre theory by Lynne Connor (2013), Christopher Balme (2014), Toni Sant (2014, 2013, 2009, 2008), and others to ask critical questions about the emergence of social media engaged theatre practices. Do they really deliver distinctive shifts in theatre practice, meaning making, and impact? Or do they just get audiences to talk about work they are no longer watching, an advance in the theatre marketing at the cost of theatre’s active, interactive aesthetics? The first book to bring aesthetic, critical, audience development, marketing and assessment uptake of social media in theatre together, Theatre, Social Media, and Meaning Making will appeal to scholars, students, as well as industry practitioners working betwixt and between old and new forms when they use social media to evoke emotion, entertain, educate, or empower.