I am particularly interested in three aspects that have emerged in these collaborative theatre projects: how social media has influenced the creation process, specifically within the context of collective creation how social media influences the themes of our relationship to reality and fiction and how social media foregrounds issues of time-sensitivity and relevance with respect to the use of such technology as a tool for making theatre. Focusing on these experiences, this paper explores the distinction between making theatre work with social media and making theatre work about social media. Under discussion here are two projects on which I have collaborated that include an exploration of social media: Semblance, in 2013 and La fin de la fiction, which is currently in development and scheduled for production in 2022. Because of this creative method, all aspects of the production develop simultaneously, organically and over a long period of rehearsals, as opposed to more traditional approaches in making theatre work, often condensed to a few weeks. Working with Les Nuages en pantalon, each artist participates in the writing, staging, set design and performance. Inspired by the Cycle Repère method, made popular among French Canadian theatre makers in 1980, members of Les Nuages en pantalon devise theatre through a creation process of using material objects as “sensitive resources” through which they explore the relationship between the actor and the stage. This company has a reputation for working with diverse artists to produce works that bear witness to contemporary cultural concerns facing humanity. Over the past eight years of creating new work as a theatre maker, I have experienced directly the intensification of the use of social media in collaborations with the theatre company Les Nuages en pantalon (founded in 2001), with whom I have worked closely. While his observations certainly ring true in the internet age, it is unlikely that Debord could have envisioned the extent to which mediatization would have transformed the making of theatrical work. In The Society of the Spectacle, first published in French in 1967, Guy Debord argues that “the show is not a collection of images, but a social rapport between people, mediatized by images” (10). Keywords: social media, theatre creation, process, product, collective This paper focuses on these two experiences of professional theatre-making and explores the distinction between creating work with social media and making work about social media, given how the complexities of it proliferate and change so rapidly. Social media, being at the heart of everyone’s day to day experience, is a central part of the two works under discussion here: Semblance (2013) and La fin de la fiction, which is currently in development and scheduled for production in 2022. In The Society of the Spectacle, first published in French in 1967, Guy Debord has a sense that “the show is not a collection of images, but a social rapport between people, mediatized by images.” While his observations certainly ring true in the internet age, it is unlikely that Debord could have envisioned the extent to which mediatization has transformed the making of theatrical work.
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