I got Elvira’s email about being part of her podcast for Mountview’s Asexuality Visibility Day on the train back to York after the holidays. It was really nice to get to talk about theatre with another queer creator, and to get to revisit Mission Creep. The episode also features producer Lotty Holder, and I loved what she had to say about how exploring a greater variety of queer experiences in our storytelling works to EVERYONE’S benefit! Check out the full podcast here.
We touched on a ton of different things throughout the conversation, and I wanted to throw some links out for anyone who wanted to look into any of these things further:
We talked a little bit about what it’s like living as an ace/aro person in a society with very heteronormative ideas of what personal fulfillment is. Angela Chen’s book Ace is a great deep dive into what this is like, and why our perspective is valuable to a society trying to get healthier about how we self-actualize: Ace - ANGELA CHEN
I brought up reproductive futurism and how it impacts the way we imagine the future. Rebekah Sheldon explains this in much more detail in The Child to Come using examples from sci-fi media (and real-life ad campaigns, for that matter) and discusses how this frame of mind influences our approach to addressing climate change: The Child to Come — University of Minnesota Press (umn.edu)
Figuring out a new relationship with time, growth, and the way we imagine the future has been a part of queer storytelling for a long time. Sara Jaffe does a great job contextualizing the idea of ‘queer time’ in this article: Queer Time: The Alternative to “Adulting” - JSTOR Daily
(Sara Jaffe is different from Sarah Jaffe, whose labor reporting is also relevant to how we imagine the future and hugely influential to me. I am also deeply relieved that they are different people, because my god who has that many hours in the day???)
I got a bit tongue-tied at the mere IDEA of the sheer number of AMAZING things we can and should be doing to make theatre easier to access. (I think I also said it’s ‘become’ harder to access, which is true, but implies that it was…easy in the first place? It wasn’t.)
I’ve bitched before, but I was so excited by what some of the theatres started to do to make theatre more accessible during lockdown, and so disappointed by the lack of follow-thru.
I like livestreams, and I like archive footage, and I’m okay with the NT cinema experiences though sometimes it feels like they cut the audience’s laughter off if they think it went on for too long? Deeply unfair.
The further I go along with stuff, the more I realize that musical theatre as a business and production model baffles me. But cast recordings sustained me and my MT friends when we couldn’t go see the shows we loved.
Really what I want is hybrid models of production. I want livestreams of shows so the actors can share their energy with an in-person audience, but people can still participate remotely. I want archival footage and I want audio recordings of performances. I want separately recorded radio drama versions of plays. I want interactive games available online where you can start getting immersed in the world of the play before you go to see the show, or even if you never get to see the show at all.
I want stuff you can use and enjoy from far far away so that you can experience some of the show even if you can’t be there in person. I’d love audiences to have multiple ways of accessing a production.
I’ve been following the development of platforms like LIVR, which offers a catalog of past fringe theatre shows recorded specially to be viewed both in VR or just on your phone: LIVR
One of the many things that made me want to do further research at the University of York is the TFTI department’s ongoing research into interactive and immersive storytelling techniques. When I talk about more VR theatre and other kinds of theatre experiences in the future, this is the kind of stuff I’m talking about.
More soon,
Bee