Society is constantly submerged in digital content, theatre scholar Dominic Hingorani states “in a digitally saturated culture, many young people may have little direct experience of the live theatre and find it irrelevant” (Hingorani 2012, 59). As a theatre company we had to acknowledge how society receives content about the world around us therefore, to create theatre that is relevant to our audiences we had to incorporate technology. A theatre piece called Mad Blud (2008) written by Phillip Osment, is a verbatim theatre piece aimed at young audiences. The piece was themed around knife crime in the city and incorporated technology into the piece by having the actors listening to the live recordings on Mp3s on stage. By involving modern day technology into their piece it enabled actors to convey the true emotion of the interviewee.
The piece inspired us to incorporate verbatim into our piece and having many different stories of how members of society grew up as this is our centre theme for our performance. We did this by compiling stories from us as a company and to then perform to each other, this gave us the confidence to further develop this idea and to further compile stories of how some grew up. However, I explained how we needed to compile stories from an array of people, as we were more likely to interview people who were of the same ethnicity and demographic. This would mean we would narrow our audience greatly and therefore we should make sure to interview people of different ages and races to reach with all members of society.
Mia
Work cited:
Hingorani, D. ‘Creating theatre work for a diverse teenage audience’ in theatre for Young Audiences: a critical handbook. Maguire, T & Schuitema, K (Eds.). (2012). Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham.