Innovating: going digital with community performance

This work seeks to explore the opportunities of incorporating digital practices into community performance to produce an audio drama. Starting my research during a lockdown due to Covid-19, I was keen to examine my process as a director and establish a new methodology that adopted the digital tools that were becoming more widely used as a result of the social-distancing requirements of the pandemic. I adapted Berry and Reinbold’s Steps from Collective Creation and recruited a group of community participants in York who were interested in history and drama. The research tested a hybrid model of online and in-person meetings for historical data collection, devising workshops, rehearsals and recording sessions. The main output of the research is INNovating, a three-part audio drama that evokes the sounds and stories of coaching inns and travellers stopping off on their journey along the Great North Road. The drama can be downloaded via the project’s website innovatingaudio.co.uk.
The research into using digital practices to produce community performance as an audio drama resulted in key findings for future productions of a similar nature. These range from the convenience of video conferencing for a variety of workshops, to creating a shared space online for historical research and script development and the dissemination of the audio to a broad reach of audience via a digital platform. Future research is suggested in terms of exploring digital production methods that are less dependent on sophisticated recording and editing equipment, e.g. the advantages of recording on mobile devices. Further to this, an area for greater exploitation of digital practices would be the linking of the audio drama via GPS technology to site-specific locations relevant to the community who made it.