The Friday before last, Katherine Jewkes, who recently joined the Studio as REACT producer, gave a Lunchtime Talk about her previous work at National Theatre Wales and the creative use of digital in theatre productions. Here are a few of the key points I took away from the talk.

National Theatre Wales was set up as Wales’s English language national theatre company in 2009. The company is made up of a small core team who work with a fluctuating group of collaborators, often nomadically travelling from place to place to set up office in coffee shops, pubs and W.I.’s in cities, towns and villages across the country. Katherine showed us a video, illustrating the breadth of NTW’s work. 

NTW coined the term ‘digital dramaturgy’, clarifying that digital is never an afterthought, but is woven into their productions from the very beginning (although sometimes the digital strategy could be ‘no digital’). Katherine described digital dramaturgy as ‘using the affordances of digital to shape a story for different types of audiences’ - from creating physical immersive environments to allowing people 'from Port Talbot, Wales to Portland, US' to follow and participate in live narratives online. 

In National Theatre Wales’ first year, the shows ranged in scale from Outdoors, a small piece for 12 people, where audiences navigated their way through a town using an ipod touch, headphones and video, arriving at a choir rehearsal to sing alongside the voices they had heard on their journey, to The Passion, a giant performance involving 12,000 people, playing out across a whole town for 72 hours, culminating in the crucifixion of Michael Sheen.

Regardless of scale, people and place lie at the heart of everything that NTW do. Despite very much being anchored to the places and stories of Welsh communities, their work often reaches much further afield. Katherine told us about The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, a ‘hyper-connected’ production, which was live streamed all over the world, combining real-time footage with links to other videos and articles, and a curated live-chat stream where the audience had the chance to converse with activists, politicians and the NTW team. People tuned in from the US, Japan, Canada and someone was even watching the performance on a bus in Australia.

As well as using digital to connect people with a story online, NTW use digital to place audiences physically at the centre of their productions. Coriolan/us was staged in an aircraft hangar, 20 miles out of Cardiff. Despite the vast expanse of the space and stark staging, Katherine felt that Coriolan/us was one of NTW’s most immersive productions. The audience were free to wander among the actors, while a camera crew filmed the action in the style of warzone coverage. The live footage from 8 camera feeds were shown on two huge screens, which loomed over the space. None of the technology was hidden and the camera crew rehearsed with the actors. This digital element and everything that came with it made up an essential part of the play’s narrative.

Katherine talked about the differences in fast and slow content, comparing The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, which was about immediacy and fast curation of online spaces to The Gathering, which was composed around the annual sheep-farming cycle, and played out slowly across the slopes of a working hill farm on Snowdon. in The Gathering, the physical audience traversed the production on foot, happening across installations, performances and a cast of 600 sheep on their way. The production was live streamed, but as it was a four-hour performance, NTW had to come up with a new, engaging approach to streaming the content. Online audiences could follow the walking camera, or watch prerecorded content, mapped to different points along the mountain path.

National Theatre Wales don’t often make productions that are confined to a stage, so their digital work (especially live-streaming) will never quite be straightforward, but Katherine feels that this creates an exciting challenge, pushing NTW to sculpt with digital in all kinds of new ways in order to tell visceral stories.

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