Case Study: C&T Transcript
Birmingham Case Study: C&T: Networked theatre for a global
media culture Transcript
Paul Sutton, Artistic Director – C&T:
Hi there, my name’s Paul Sutton and I’m here from C&T. I’m going to talk a little bit
about our practice generally but I’m also going to give you one particular example,
a case study, a particular project I think is resonant at the moment. But it will also
give you an insight into the way we work.
Most classrooms, whether they be drama classrooms or primary school
classrooms have got a box in the corner of the room. In that corner of the room are
things like a cape or a walking stick or a telephone that teachers use for either
creative play or as props in drama lessons. For C&T, in our work with young
people using drama we think that box of props is a little out-dated because these
are the play things that kids use today - [indicates computer, iPhone, games
console] - this is their box of props in their daily lives.
In our practice we’re interested in exploring the potential between drama and
theatre and participation and the way these technologies connect to the lives of
young people. Our work is predominantly but not exclusively about children and
young people. We focus on their concerns: drama, learning and digital media.
Over the last few years we’ve brought those three aspects together to develop a
particular paradigm of practice. It’s hard to characterize it in fifteen minutes here,
but really we’re about colliding things like performance, processed drama, social
media, serious games and video games, smartphones, pedagogy – different types
of participation, machinima, animation, citizen journalism and those fiddly new QR
codes that are appearing on walls and posters all over the place.
Our work is about communities, about scale, impact and efficacy. Increasingly, we
talk about this work as being ‘networked theatre’. Whilst our background is in
theatre and drama we don’t look anything like a theatre company. We now operate
as a network. Each one of those red dots represents a partner school that C&T
works with across the country, and there’ll be about another ten or twelve of those
joining us in September. Each one of those has their own resident C&T animateur
working in the school. They work in partnership with the school creating creative
learning projects across the curriculum, in the extended day and with the local
community as well. But for us what’s most exciting about this way of working is
what we call ‘network collaborations’ – the potential to use drama and digital media
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Case Study: C&T Transcript
to allow all those young people in all those locations to collaborate and work
together. We increasingly talk about ‘glocalisation’ being at the centre of this kind
of practice – taking big global themes and issues and allowing young people to
explore them within their own local context and customise them and exploring
them on their own terms. But sharing that learning across that network.
This practice doesn’t just include schools and partners in the UK. We have an
increasing network of partnerships internationally. We work with Roundabout
Theatre in New York and with New York City Authority as well; with Arena Stage in
Washington, DC. and with schools and community groups in Queensland and
Sydney, along with the University of Sydney. We also work with community
projects in the Gambia, Kenya, and Malawi and also with theatres and community
groups in Tokyo. In the autumn, we’ll be adding Beijing to that list as well.
At the centre of this practice is a social media platform we’ve developed known as
the C&T Network site. Whereas we’re all familiar with things like Facebook that
allow us to network and share and collaborate with our friends, the only way you
can meet people on the C&T Network site is through collaborating through
projects. You meet and talk with other young people and with other teachers but
the architecture of the website drives young people to share and work together on
particular dramatic activities and creative projects. You can see a list here of some
of those projects in terms of the way young people collaborate.
But it doesn’t just work on computers like this – it allows people to use mobile
devices like iPads and also mobile phones, which allow us to work in a range of
locations where the internet is not available through wires in the ground but over
those mobile telephone networks.
Now it’s great to have a network and it’s great to have those opportunities to
partner with people but you need to be doing things with those young people - you
need creative projects for them to engage with. We call this particular model of
practice that we’ve developed - it’s rather grand, makes sense to us in our sad
little world – we call these things ‘dramatic properties’. In a sense for us what we’re
interested in is building synergies between our project as intellectual property and
the processes within them as drama. This involved the whole organization thinking
very, very differently about what it meant by ‘product’, not in the conventional
theatre sense. We had to try to occupy a different kind of territory to understand
where the strength in our creativity lay.
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Case Study: C&T Transcript
If you found yourself in C&T’s office you’d quite often find us using language to
describe our business like ‘intellectual property’, ‘licensing’, ‘vertical integration’,
‘scalability’ – we try to think about our practice in those kinds of ways.
But essentially dramatic properties are authored collaborative participative texts
that stimulate young people and allow them to collaborate and work together. I
want to take you through one of those examples.
Living Newspapers – Living Newspapers aren’t an invention of C&T; they were
created back in the 1920s and 30s during the last great financial crisis the world
faced as part of the federal theatre project. They created this thing called the
Living Newspaper ---- which brought together unemployed actors and journalists
and got them to create plays about the big topical issues of the day. They were
kind of theatrical documentaries. They were bold, anti-naturalistic, polemical plays,
very satirical, episodic but essentially educative pieces of theatre. But today they
use quite sophisticated technology – projections, PA systems, and the new
technology of their day. We wanted to reinvent that form online for young people
today. So for us, Living Newspapers mean young people researching, devising
and performing their own Living Newspaper on issues that matter to them. They
share this material online, across the whole of the C&T Network we saw earlier.
It’s a glocalized experience.
There’s a website in addition to the C&T Network website which you can find at
livingnewspaper.net. This drives this activity, operating both as an immersive
participatory fictional context that drives these collaborations; but it’s also a
catalyst for developing good practice and sharing those materials across our
network.
So this is what the Living Newspapers website looks like. It’s very simple – in fact,
it’s very loosely modelled on Tweet Deck, where people are users of Twitter via
Tweet Deck. Essentially it divides into three columns. On the left-hand side are
direct links to breaking news stories that young people can use as starting points
for creating their theatrical documentaries. The middle columns are embedded
videos of work created by young people in response to those starting points for
drama. But the more exciting part of the website is the third column called ‘Action
Guides’ where, facilitated by their animateur or their classroom teacher young
people are introduced to the website, and introduced to a secret organization
called the Living Newspaper where they meet three characters called Tom, Kate
and Guy. Using classroom drama techniques the young people are drawn into the
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Case Study: C&T Transcript
fictional world of these three characters and invited to become a part of this
organization called the Living Newspaper.
Video from livingnewspaper.net:
Okay, we’re recording. Okay, so whoever’s listening – we’re
thelivingnewspaper.net. My name’s Guy
--I’m Kate
-- I’m Tom
--We believe that the people in this country, especially the young people, deserve
more of a say in the decisions that get made. Partitions, media people, headteachers, whoever. We think we deserve at the very least for our voices to be
heard. So that’s why we’ve created thelivingnewspaper.net. Kate?
--Yeah, for the last year we’ve been working on the Living Newspaper. This is a
kind of documentary play which shows the audience something real which is
happening in the world.
--About whatever.
--Yeah, but our aim was to stir up a bit of trouble or at least get a reaction and then
change things.
--Which worked!
--And now we want other people to do other newspapers too.
--If this sounds interesting to you there are going to be a few more videos, telling
you more about the livingnewspaper.net and showing you how to make your own
Living Newspaper.
Paul Sutton, C&T:
That’s the kind of way young people make their work on YouTube as well, so it has
a kind of authenticity, we hope.
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Case Study: C&T Transcript
So, back with the Living Newspaper website – young people start exploring this
site, and then they come across a manifesto. The original Living Newspapers had
manifestos that embodied their editorial values. This was one from the 1930s that
Joan Littlewood created in Manchester. “The theatre must face up to the problems
of its time. It cannot ignore the poverty and human suffering which increases every
day.” For today’s digital natives a manifesto like that wouldn’t be of any interest. So
this is our Living Newspaper manifesto:
(Plays video from livingnewspaper.net)
Paul Sutton, C&T:
Working with their animateurs young people have to play it backwards and
forwards, decode it, pause it, work out what the meanings are and decide whether
they want to be part of this covert organization. So they turn their documentary
work into theatre in the classroom; they interrogate the content and they build their
own understanding and views. Then they create content that reflects the facts and
their opinions, they make videos of them as well as performing them live in the
schools and share them through the Living Newspaper website.
To help them in this process, to understand how to make Living Newspapers, on
the website there are five rules which we’ve designed to help them understand
how to make a Living Newspaper. They are be funny, be direct, juxtapose, agitate
and let the facts speak for themselves. This is one of those rules.
(Video from livingnewspaper.net)
-Five rules. Rule Five – let the facts speak for themselves. Facts are interesting.
Here are some facts: the adult earwig can float in water for up to 24 hours without
dying.
-93% of all greeting cards are bought by women.
-In the Second World War over 60million people lost their lives. Over 20million of
these were Russians.
-“I don’t make predictions. I never have and I never will” – Tony Blair
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Case Study: C&T Transcript
-The average British adult male eats one and a half loaves of bread each week.
-People want facts. So find them and use them. You can illustrate them.
-(While eating bread) The average British adult male eats one and a half loaves of
bread each week!
-Or just deliver them straight. But put them at the centre of what you do. So that’s
Rule Five. Let the facts speak for themselves.
-So there are the five rules. Be funny, be direct, juxtapose, agitate and let the facts
speak for themselves.
Paul Sutton, C&T:
The Living Newspaper website becomes a place for young people to upload their
work and share that across the network whether they might be allowing them to
exchange their points of views, experiences in their communities, their cultures
and values. Wherever they might be, whether they are in Romford over in East
London, in the Gambia, whether they’re in Brooklyn in New York, or whether
they’re on a street corner in the slum in Nairobi.
And finally I just thought you might like to see one example of a Living Newspaper.
This is a short scene created by some young people in Tokyo where passive
smoking is a real issue because they are allowed to smoke wherever. This is just a
two-minute scene of some people and their view about smoking.
(Video from livingnewspaper.net in Japanese to end)
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