PS
Paul Sutton and Max Dean
Solvitur ambulando: Using Applied theatre and psychogeography to solve the real through digital landscapes.
This paper presents C&T’s work combining psychogeography and applied theatre methodologies in three of the company’s Online Distance Learning (ODL) applications.
C&T are the UK-based applied theatre company creating online participatory drama projects for young people and communities across England and internationally. A key feature of this platform are geolocation-based technologies that construct synergies between psycho-geography and process-driven applied theatre techniques. This paper will chart, through three examples of practice-based research, how C&T works to harness these possibilities:
First will be an overview of C&T’s Stratar.net website. Stratar enables the building of multi-layered encyclopaedic performative maps using open Street Map technologies, exemplified by two schools-based projects, one in a rural Worcestershire primary school and a second in an inner-city London special school.
Second will be an analysis of Push/Pull, a web app that enables participants to research, dramatize and encode their stories of migration through transmedia. Cited examples will include migratory routes from rural Kenya to Korogocho, a Nairobi slum, Syrian migrants moving to Vienna, Austria, and ‘Dreamer’ migrants from across South America who have moved to New York.
Finally, the paper will map out how C&T has integrated these approaches into its Prospero technology, exemplified by a recent collaboration with RSC playwright Phil Porter and Royal Opera House, Covent Garden composer Martin Ward. C&T used Prospero enable these artists to author a geolocation-based smartphone guided walk around London and digitally distribute this media-rich narrative to residents and visitors to this vibrant, diverse district of central London.
The paper will ask questions about how effective digital technology can be in encoding the ethnographic stories of young people and communities and how questions of contextualisation and ‘glocalisation’ offer both constraints and opportunities for globalised creative learning.
C&T are the applied theatre company mixing drama learning and digital technology.
Dr Paul Sutton is the Artistic Director of C&T, where he has worked as an actor, director and teacher for thirty years. He is Digital Editor of RiDE and a contributor to many books on applied theatre, educational drama and digital technologies. He chairs the Worcestershire Cultural Education Partnership.
Max Dean is Director at C&T. He has worked extensively across C&T’s programmes in the UK and internationally and is currently studying for his PhD at the Univeristy of Warwick. His current research interests focus on synergies between video game theory and process drama.
