Co-creation brings artists and audiences into a dynamic shared space where both explore new creative ideas, concepts and perspectives. These new discoveries can be ‘Ah ha’ moments, developmental moments and/or togetherness moments.
In live streamed co-creation sessions, artists offer their creative ideas to audiences to play with, respond to and throw back as something new: as collaboration. This is a fun and progressive way of developing concepts, methodologies and new work. It replaces old ideas of artist as sole creator with the freshness of everyone as artist. As well as broadening artists’ areas of engagement, working in the hybrid model is dissolving boundaries between artist and audience.
Co-creation in the performing arts has plenty of pre-digital precedents. Research techniques, verbatim dialogue, street performances where audiences interact with photography, and even heckling are ways audiences have had creative input in performances. Today, live streaming and interactive technology offer a new world of ways to engage, interact and include.
The more familiar we all get with this creative flow, the more audiences become creative in their engagement, the more smoothly and easily these exchanges evolve. It’s an open door to infinite possibilities, with a plethora of new potentials to re-design interactivity.
In recent years, IJAD has used social media as creative media via audience use of text messaging, created interactive performances using sensors, and created Open Online Theatre (OOT), a digital playground and interactive streaming platform. These are all part of IJAD’s efforts towards democratising culture and bringing audiences into the creative process of arts collaboration.
Live streamed co-creation is a new skill-set for artists that requires flexibility, presence of mind, experience of the media through which creativity is being navigated, and sensitivity.
The OOT artist development programme offers artists the chance to interact with virtual audiences to inform the development of new work, creating a conceptual shared space and changing the status of the audience from passive observer to creative.
OOT artists enter the co-creation space with their experience and professional knowledge of their performance medium (theatre, dance, combined arts) alongside the subject matter and themes of their work in development. They guide participants through the collaborative methods and tools they’re using, balancing elements of creativity, inspiration and receptivity.
Participants can see how their own creativity is informed by the process, and how the artists metamorphose their ideas into a performance.
OOT is planning many more co-creation sessions from our current cohort of performing artists, to ensure we continue evolving this method of work.
See you in one of them soon.
