Performance – Page 66 – Hannah Nicklin

“Following the critically-acclaimed sell-out success of Word:Play 2, Box of Tricks has commissioned six new playwrights to write a fifteen-minute play inspired by a single word; for this cycle, the word “obsession”.

We’ve assembled some of the hottest emerging talent to rise to this unique creative challenge: six playwrights, who between them have already won a clutch of awards and accolades; including the Kings Cross Award, Best New Writing at the Lost Festival, winner of the Off Cut Festival, the Old Vic New Voices’ 24 Hour Plays and US/UK Exchange and the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme.”

This is just a quick push on a new 15 minute play I have on at Theatre503 as part of Box of Tricks Theatre‘s Word:Play new writing showcase. The evening will be made up of 6 new plays all stemming from the same word: Obsession. The evening will be running from the 30th March-3rd of April and details on how to grab tickets can be found on the Word:Play3 page.

My piece is called Awake, and traces the liminal experience of an MMORPG gamer who passes out whilst gaming. To mention any more is probably giving the game away, but it basically explores being and nothingness in a virtual context. I hope. I mean the fullest expression in the form of a third and final draft will be happening this weekend. I’m sure it’ll be awesome. I’m certain all the other pieces will be (for more info on the other pieces check out the Word:Play3 page again).

For more info on the evening, do follow @bottc and the hashtag #wordplay3 – if you go and see it let us know what you think via the hashtag too. I should hopefully get to some of the rehearsals, so I may even throw together a teaser trail for my piece, who knows.

I have been thinking a lot over the past few days about the new narrative strategies emerging in the digital age- moving on from why and what they are, and what has provoked them (pretty much everything that I put into my two speeches at Notts Trent and Leeds Met in January) and instead considering the implications for us as a society, in their being our main way of consuming stories.

Stories are a massive part of how we learn and grow as a species. They allow us to try out other eventualities, other roles, understand the feelings of others, and our own place in the world. Stories are intricately linked to play, and playing (whether actually, or theatrically) is a recognised learning technique for both adults and children. (See the massive success of TIE in schools, prisons, and deprived areas, as well as the ways that children learn about their world). Likewise play – the ability to try and test for no reason other than the fun of it – is vital to creative thinking, whether in business and tech (where it’s called ‘innovation’) or in the humanities and social sciences, play, and narrative, is at the very basis of our evolutionary and inventive potential.

There is largely considered to be a point when we ‘grow out of’ playing. It is in evidence, in teasing, between friends, but proper immersive narrative experiences are thenceforth ring-fenced. There are areas where they are ‘ok’, and they include theatrical spaces, board games, TV, music, video game, radio, film, books. The arts, in short.

The film/television experience is inarguably passive when compared with the play that we experience as children, and with the ‘old’ narrative strategies of books (and to a certain extent radio – though ‘old’ perhaps not) where we are placed, if not in the position of another, at least in a world-constituting position of one type or another. We build worlds of the books we read with our imaginations, likewise theatre is necessarily world-constituting, the tension of live-ness with narrative, reality with suspension of disbelief, is an inherently world-constituting process – and a collective one at that.

Film and television are passive forms of narrative consumption, they are involving, largely individual, and can pretend to be interactive (the arbitrary decision of whether someone stays or goes is not world constituting) and are no less a form for that, but in terms of play, in terms of one key aspect of play – there’s something missing. Empathy. The process of placing yourself at the centre of creating a narrative – constituting a world – seeing it through anthers’ eyes is largely missing (though of course there are exceptions to this). I’m not arguing that film and television is bad art, but I do believe that to subsist on a diet of only filmic narrative will provoke illness.
Continue reading Ourselves, in Other Contexts.