Creative Ecologies Category
INNovating: going digital with community performance
by Kate Valentine
Community performance has evolved through sharing stories that often combine heritage, site-specific locations and immersive audience experience. As part of my creative practice at the University of York, and supported by the Bristol + Bath Creative R+D programme New Scholars, I have developed the community project INNovating.
Inspired by the history of the City of York’s coaching inns, INNovating is a three-part audio drama that evokes the sounds and stories of these vibrant places of hospitality for travellers in the 1820s, stopping off on their journey along the Great North Road.
As a director of theatre and audio drama, I have long been interested in telling stories from the past of people who may have been overlooked by history books. 10 years ago, I set up the production company Digital Drama. We work with project partners to create plays, short films and podcasts involving local communities in the production process.
Undertaking a PhD during a Covid lockdown meant having to adopt hybrid methods of production. The main focus of my research became how community performance could embrace digital practices in order to widen the scope of participation, support the co-creation process and gain a wider audience.
The result of my creative practice is an audio drama that is a binaural experience, co-created with community volunteers as researchers and performers. We worked together in hybrid online and in-person workshops in a production process that included local archival research, devising and script development, and the subsequent rehearsal and recording of three episodes of audio drama. The project became part of the York Festival of Ideas in June 2022 and can be downloaded here or by using the QR code we printed on beer mats and distributed around the city.
One of the eventual outcomes of the research will be recommendations of how other communities could use the hybrid production methodology to create their own site-specific audio drama experiences. The ultimate ambition is to link communities along the Great North Road through audio dramas, made in different locations on the route. Characters will travel from town to town and the stories would change as they journeyed, picking up passengers and interacting with the innkeepers and fellow travellers in the coaching inns along the way.
Once that ancient route has been conquered…next up, the Bath Road…