Cross-platform Play: A Hybrid Pedagogy for Devised College Theatre

During the spring semester of 2020, I taught a performance course with the intention of integrating consumer technologies and social media platforms with practices of devised theatre. I named the class (Un)mediated Performance Project to emphasize the fertile tensions between performance in front of a live, in-person audience versus digitized performance for a remote audience. By designating unmediated and mediated as two ends of a spectrum, I encouraged students to utilize the language of theatre to critically investigate how media technologies affect their creative impulses and support communication—not only in the heightened conditions of theatre-making, but in everyday life. The course’s major project involved developing a new theatre piece in response to an existing text: American Dream by Edward Albee. This was accomplished via a series of group improvisations, games, and individual research assignments. To allow digital technologies to become an integral part of our performance language, we devised the story by creatively engaging with readily available devices such as cellphones and laptops, as well as web-hosted applications (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) and other online tools. Throughout the semester, we shaped, refined, remediated, and organized the material we collectively generated, with the goal of a full-length performance in front of a live audience. Plans were derailed, however, by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent migration of a highly collaborative and action-oriented process to an online-hosted virtual classroom. As the students and I made the transition to working via video-conferencing software, I discovered that much of the foundation we had put in place through our earlier engagements with communication technologies appeared to carry over well to an exclusively online process. Before stay-at-home orders were issued in Houston, the students were already utilizing video cameras, software, and the internet as a means of character development and experimentation. While the limitations of being physically isolated from the ensemble were immediately apparent within the flat confines of a computer screen, we were nonetheless better prepared to rely upon digital tools as the only means of communication, collaboration, and creation than I anticipated. I attribute our ability to persevere under such challenging circumstances to the intrinsic flexibility of devised theatre practices, and, more to the point, the form’s