I hosted an immersive workshop with the Brooklyn based Arts + Democracy about how to create joyful and participatory art online, and more broadly how to be an inclusive facilitator! I interspersed scenes from my favorite Zoom theater performances (Ad Nauseam and Divine Feminine) - showing the audience what the scenes looked like with Zoom interventions, and as a standard staged readings, then inviting the audience to re-direct the scenes.
Ever since the pandemic started, my ensemble shifted to producing performances, workshops, and political discussions across dozens of time zones over Zoom. This new genre and form of theater has been a rewarding experiment in how to cultivate a noisy, empathetic, conversational, dissenting, and lively audience over zoom. On the surface, there is a lot lost when creating theater online: the symbiotic relationship formed between the performers and audience, the spontaneity of liveness, and the fullness of a shared physical space. At the same time, Zoom theater can place every audience member in the front row (or closer) as a co-creator, breaks the false binary between performer and audience, and ruptures Western classical theater norms and hierarchies. In this workshop, we explored how to create participatory and welcoming community theater online. We’ll test different interactive interventions, asking – is this generative and inclusive? Is this extractive and fatiguing? And perhaps most importantly, is this entertaining and fun? Aunties who attend my performances hate the Zoom chat (and tell me so very explicitly), so we’ll talk about how to balance critique and accessibility, too. All you need to bring is yourself, and even if you’re not a theatermaker, this workshop has broader implications into the worlds of cultural organizing, urban planning, and facilitation.
This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Thank you to City Council Member Brad Lander, New York State Council on the Arts, Humanities New York, and National Endowment for the Arts. (I LOVE LOCAL GOVERNMENT!!!)
A few weeks after the workshop, I was inspired to write an article about the Zoom chat, and published it in Catapult Mag!
