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AH/E002773/1
This unique European theatre project uses technology innovatively and imaginatively to create new theatre in a specially designed CyberStudio that offers myriad possibilities for live on-line,reflective and archival research by geographically dispersed collaborators. Our chosen use of this new tool we have created, confronts the enduringly thorny subject of gender relationships in today's globalised culture by plunging into the intimacy of cyber space to make live performance. We thus work from the potential the Web offers for private lives to become public, for exhibitionism, confessional correspondence and masquerade. We explore how we behave here, role-playing anonymously and writing collectively, and adapt this into a uniquely energetic and lively theatre text. \n\nAs a co-production this innovative work brings two very different organisations that share theatrical aims and creative strategies into close and pioneering collaboration. Both Director and partner organisation Mladinsko Theatre (Ljubljana), share a commitment to theatrical research, each inspired by the example of Peter Brook. Mladinsko's ensemble of actors, still working today from a Communist cultural employment model with annual salaries, long rehearsals and tenured contracts, contribute intellectually and artistically to the creation of new works and conduct intensive literary and practical research over many months on each new project. Whilst less funded in the UK, creating work over much shorter periods, the Director also encourages the performer to be an active intellectual and artistic collaborator in theatrical creation. \n\nIn the Don Juan Project habits are being stretched in new directions. Technology here offers an exceptionally long artistic research and development period leading to a physical/devising methodology in rehearsals towards final production. The inventive and original approach to the development of a dramaturgy / using cyberspace as a research studio / is an experiment in how to harness technology to artistic synergy. \n\nThe co-production involves a core company of five Mladinsko/three UK researcher-performers, and a Dramaturg. Prior to live research in rehearsals, they will have met and played in the CyberStudio in directed research, improvisation and role play for one year on a weekly basis. They use live writing and visual and written source material to interrogate the icon of Don Juan as manifest in classical and modern drama, poetry, opera, film, the Web and their imaginations as a springboard.\n\nTogether with Mladinsko dramaturg, Zeljko Hrs, Furse will create a draft performance text devised from this virtual exchange. The company will assemble live for a ten week rehearsal process in two blocks of time during which this text will be further researched in embodied practices - training, improvisation and devising - and reconstructed into its final performative text. The result should prove to be an electric, visceral and trenchant physical theatre production in which all will have invested a great deal of themselves and which should appeal to a wide audience as well as to scholars and researchers in contemporary European theatre and performance, media studies, and gender studies in particular.\n\nThe production will premiere for performances at Goldsmiths Theatre, London and Mladinsko in September 2007. It will tour abroad and to venues in the UK, offering workshops, talks and residencies to University Theatre/performance departments in 2008. \n\nImmediately our research has come to fruition, the software for the CyberStudio will be released into the public domain on line together with a Manual and a Creative Commons license, so that as a template it can continue to serve and be adapted by practioners and researchers, encouraging potentially globally dispersed collaboration. \n\nA conference on international co-production models is planned for 2008 to coincide with UK touring.
DON JUAN WHO? - FROM CYBERSPACE TO THEATRE SPACE : a strategy for developing international performance collaboration using online cyber research tool
http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk:80/projects?ref=AH%2FE002773%2F1
DON JUAN WHO? - FROM CYBERSPACE TO THEATRE SPACE : a strategy for developing international performance collaboration using online cyber research tool