Miskatonic University PressAshley Williamson and I were supposed to be in Montreal in May for Partition/Ensemble 2020, this year’s joint conference of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and la Société québécoise d’études théâtrale. We were going to do a workshop on Theatre Science.
The in-person conference was cancelled, of course, and instead they’re having a relaxed digital conference. It started on Monday and runs to 09 August: everyone who was going to do something has instead either posted something online (a PDF, a narrated presentation, a video) or (in a few cases) will be doing a live talk. For example, the panel discussion on Theatre and Climate Change was done a little while ago in a video call, recorded and then transcribed. All the conference participants can watch it and leave comments. (An advantage of moving online is that all the content is available for free for everyone else, too.)
Ashley and I decided we’d do a “thirty minute immersive audio experience,” which we later realized was really a “forty minute radio play.” It is made of seventeen scenes that start with the conception of the idea and end with a brief excerpt of Experiment One, the full performance. There are three audio environments: flat narration (for facts), phone conversations, and meetings in the Great Hall of the Arts and Letters Club (which we recorded over Zoom; I added room tone from recordings I’d made last year).
See the Theatre Science site for the downloads. An MP3 and the full script are available (both under a CC BY license).
Only participants will be able to leave comments on the conference web site, but feel free to email Ashley and me about it if you like.