That title got your attention, eh? Well… I’m about to do more of that theatre blogging that you all love so much.

You see, for the past couple of weeks, my theatre company - The Distracted Globe - has been working on a new show. One member wrote it, one is directing it, one is designing the sound for it, and two of us are in it. It’s been a pretty collaborative, interesting experience… and it’s also been an exploration of how we can incorporate all of the technology available to us in a way that will help us not only with marketing, but with building the script, and perhaps even with building a long term project.

Before the script for Rainbow Annie was finished, we knew what the general plot and characters would be (a performance artist turned liberal children’s TV show host whose impending marriage to her producer falls through at the last minute… causing her to take the studio by force and, in a live broadcast, teach the kids the REAL lessons of life), so we chose to use our roots as an improv comedy group to create some YouTube videos of what Rainbow Annie’s show might be like on an average day (if there is such a thing). We also decided to start a Rainbow Annie blog, where I took the opportunity to blog in character, playing with the idea of what Rainbow Annie might be like before the big blow-up. Fellow company members inserted themselves into the mythology by leaving comments. The playwright (company Artistic Director Jayce Tromsness) baited me repeatedly as a young viewer named Tabitha… and he was able to use some of my responses in the script. (Have no fear… none of the comments on the blog are from REAL kids… but they are from real people who are playing along.)  But this became more than just an amusing collaborative tool for the writing process. Traffic has been on a slow steady incline, and a friend of the company was so inspired to interact that he wrote an entire treatise on the ills of communism in the comments. In fact, we’ve become so enamored of this story, these characters and these tools, that we’re considering continuing Annie in the form of online video sketch comedy. We shall see…

Performances are this weekend (January 4 & 5 @ 8:00 and January 6 @ 3:00 at The Warehouse Theatre - details are available on our website, Facebook and MySpace, of course!)… but that’s not really the point of this post. My point is - in this day and age when we seem so much more willing to engage with each other in cyberspace than in real space; when funding the arts is a concept increasingly foreign to donors - it’s important that artists and arts organizations take advantage of the techniques that are working for countless for-profit companies and individuals and products. It’s starting to happen. More and more theatres are starting to blog. The fantastic authors of the new musical Title of Show have been creating an hilarious online offering - The Title of Show Show - as a fill-in in the midst of the writers’ strike. Franklin Furnace Archive - a group that helps to fund avant-garde art - encourages online attributes for grant seekers’ submissions. And countless aspiring comedians (like these two guys who went to school with my little brother) have been using YouTube and the like for years now to try to find that priceless online following that might get them noticed.

Arts organizations are notoriously wary of technology. Sometimes it’s price (but that’s an increasingly lame excuse as open source programs become more and more accessible). Sometimes it’s lack of know-how (but again… there’s always a volunteer waiting to be tapped). Sometimes it’s the fear that technology is out to replace the human connection that art creates. But I maintain that part of being human is that we’ll always need actual human connection. It’s just that, now, we have all these great, powerful new tools to help create, to help connect and to help invite.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 5:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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