theater

Intelligences

Rehearsing Imagined Futures: Creative Performance as a Resilient Process among Refugees

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Presentation slide: Photo of people dancing on stange.
NICOLE ALEONG University of Amsterdam Cultivating resilience while navigating uncertainty is crucial for refugees. In the Netherlands, after receiving asylum and the right to work, refugees are often urged to adapt or evolve in hopes of successfully integrating into the Dutch economy. How do forced migrants who pursue work in creative enterprises help us rethink the relationship between forging new lives and uncertain futures? In this paper, resiliency of refugees is presented as a process of creative performance and experimentation. Efforts taken by refugees to explore, or ‘self-potentialize’, new future creative pathways suggest that resilience is overly simplified when defined as a pursuit of resistance to integrate and conform into established creative industries. The stories of two refugees living in Amsterdam showcase how resiliency is future-oriented, processual (Pink & Seale 2017), and connected to the preservation of one’s ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2013). ‘Future-making’ is embedded into their...

Intelligences

The Future of Audiences & Mixed Reality Performances

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Future of audiences and mixed reality performances
Keynote Speaker: SARAH ELLIS, Director of Digital Development, Royal Shakespeare Company Sarah Ellis is an award-winning producer, the Director of Digital Development for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a fellow of the University of Worcester for her work in arts and technology. She has been awarded The Hospital Club & Creatives Industries award for cross industry collaboration for her work on the RSC’s The Tempest (with Intel and The Imaginarium Studios.) In 2013 she was listed in the 100 most influential people working in Gaming and Technology by The Hospital Club and Guardian Culture. She is an Industry Champion for the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, which helps inform academic research on the creative industries. She has been appointed Chair of digital agency, The Space, established by Arts Council England and the BBC....

Perspectives

Pepper’s Ghost to Mixed Reality: How Sarah Ellis Anticipates Futures at the Royal Shakespeare Company

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"play with technology. Challenge that technology. Imagine it in different ways." Sarah Ellis, director of digital development, Royal Shakespeare Company
Welcome to EPISODE ONE in a series of conversations with some of the makers and speakers of EPIC2021—a global, virtual conference and community promoting ethnography for impact in business, organizations and communities. In this episode, Luc Aractingi talks with Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Keynote Speaker at EPIC2021. Find out why artists are the consummate innovators and Shakespeare is on the cutting edge of mixed reality and emerging technologies! TRANSCRIPT LUC: Hello and welcome to EPIC interviews, a series where we get to know the makers and hosts of the conference EPIC 2021. Today we are interviewing Sarah Ellis, who is the Director of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hello, thank you for coming. SARAH: Hello, nice to be here. LUC: I was wondering if you could tell us more about your role. SARAH: I work for the Royal Shakespeare Company and my job is the first job of its kind where I'm the Director of Digital Development. What that means is...

Intelligences

How Tragic Flaws Resonate at Scale: Just Ask Shakespeare

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MEGAN DAVIS Spendlove and Lamb PechaKucha Presentation—What do Hamlet, Daenerys Targaryen and Persona development have in common? As an actress I had an in-depth understanding of character development but struggled with creating insights from personas. I embarked on a quest to find out why. I interviewed one of the greatest authority's on Shakespeare, John Bell, AO, OBE FRSN about The Bard's greatest gift to storytelling, the invention of personality and characters. I share the realization that came next, how an individual character's tragic flaw can resonate at scale. Megan Davis is originally from Michigan and now living and creating in Melbourne, Australia. As the founder and lead storyteller at Spendlove and Lamb, she has been discovering stories since 2012, specializing in narrative based communication strategies, using human centred design practices to create meaningful visions of the future. Each bespoke framework uses stories to strategically move projects, organizations and governments into the new realities they...

Intelligences

Ethnographic Findings in the Organizational Theatre

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JACOB BUUR and ROSA TORGUET In the quest for engaging ethnographic insight in organizations on a more fundamental level than mere ‘innovation drivers’, theatre offers ways of triggering a change in conversations through emotional engagement. This paper discusses the impact of using theatre with professional actors to convey the outcome of ethnographic ‘user studies’ to industry and academia. In a project on indoor climate control with five company partners, the field studies brought about controversial findings, like ‘Indoor comfort is what people make’ – as opposed to something fully controlled by technology and ‘provided’ to inhabitants. We explore how theatre improvisation can convey such findings and thus support the provoking role that ethnography may play in organizations. Based on the study of two theatre sessions, we will articulate the importance of balance between playful and serious, of explorative discussion, and of supportive event planning and space layout to achieve audience engagement....