Nottingham based theatre company Chronic Insanity had just launched a 12 shows in 12 months project and were getting ready for their first Edinburgh Festival Fringe when COVID-19 struck. Fortunately their work has always thrived on experience technologies and investigating how they can play a role in storytelling, so they adapted and pushed forward. This summer they will release three productions, one a month, to be accessed online.
Launching at the end of June Conduit is an interactive hyper technological performance focusing on a character that is trying desperately to be with a separated loved one. A brand new piece, Conduit casts audience in the role of the character’s friend, feeding back on new innovations in presence technology to help them towards the person they miss so desperately. Mixing heart-warming anecdotes with video, 360 video, ASMR, and volumetric video capture to create an all-encompassing technical experience, the piece asks whether it right that grief should be used as a tool to drive innovation.
Myles Away follows in July, in which the livestream of a tech company’s annual announcement gets subverted, and eventually hijacked by the estranged founder to reveal some murky secrets about the organisation. Using multiple synchronised video feeds and interactive audience elements, this performance looks at the relationship between capitalism and discrimination in the tech industry and asks what we as consumers are willing to turn a blind eye to, in order to have a slightly easier life and whether our benefits are worth someone else’s loss. This piece is being adapted from an original piece prepared to present alongside Nottingham Pride with Near Now and Broadway Cinema. It includes an accompanying VR experience.
Finally in August, Edinburgh festival fringe theatrical variety show 52 Souls still gets its run, albeit online. Using a deck of cards, over the course of an hour the audience draws one by one and tells their computer what cards they’ve picked. Each card delivers a short performance, one per playing card, each from a different performer, that explore death and mortality. The structure places the means of continuing a performance into the audiences hands and will examine how we react when faced with time running out when we still have more to do.
Theatre, poetry, magic, music, puppets, and other performance styles combine in this self-driven, randomly generated variety show about a universal topic that we have both a morbid curiosity and instinctual repulsion for.
Nat Henderson and Joe Strickland said “We always try and push the boundaries of live performance and theatre and being faced with the challenge of making digital work is something we are very happy to rise to. We’re so excited to be able to continue working with all of our freelance artists, start building relationships with new creatives from a wide array of backgrounds, and show everyone something approaching the complete breadth of what digital theatre can be.
These aren’t just filmed or streamed live productions, this is digital theatre, about digital stories, made for digital platforms and communities. We hope you enjoy the shows!”
Tickets for all productions available here
Shows should all be able to viewed on any device with internet access (computer, tablet, phone etc).
29 June 2020 Conduit
27 July 2020 Myles Away
24 Aug 2020 52 Souls
