The Savvy Sessions - Social Design for Performance

Saturday, March 17, 10 AM – 4 PM
Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal – #103
7250 rue Clark, H2R 2YR
Montreal, Quebec

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Please note the new date and venue. This workshop is taking place on March 17 at Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal.

Register now!

How to Register:

1) Email admin@quebec-elan.org to register for this Savvy Sessions workshop.

2) This event is made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The cost has been subsidized to allow for true accessibility. There is a PWYC fee ($10.00 suggested) to hold your spot. You may choose to pay in-person on the day of the workshop (cash only) or you may pay by Paypal.

About

Increasingly, people are spending more time in spaces mediated by digital technology. How is that tendency affecting and affected by the creation of performance works?

This workshop will take participants through an understanding of digital integration through the lens of ‘social design’. This approach creates a distinction between the use of digital tools for marketing and their use artistically in a project. This workshop will centre primarily on the artistic implementation through an emerging design department: ‘social design’. Participants will be provided an understanding of the concepts through examples and concepts before being encouraged to develop their own designs for feedback.

“There are subtle and profound ways that the internet will impact the theatre in the 21st century. A new generation is being raised with a supremely intimate and agency-fueled relationship with narrative… It’s something eminently democratic, where ideally anyone can share an experience and anyone has the ability to watch and respond to it. Theatre has to increasingly contend with this new relationship to narrative and audience agency… The internet is reconditioning us to experience narrative in increasingly new ways.

– “Theatre of the Unimpressed, Jordan Tannahill, Coach House (2015)

Workshop Leader

Michael Wheeler is the Artistic Director of SpiderWebShow Performance, Canada’s first live digital performance company. He was previously Executive Director and Transformation Designer of Generator, a mentoring, teaching, and innovation incubator that empowers independent artists, producers and leaders in Toronto. He has also been a co-curator of The Freefall Festival with The Theatre Centre, co-curator of HATCH emerging artist projects with Harbourfront Centre, and an Intern Director at The Shaw Festival.

He is a regular instructor at Queen’s University and The National Theatre School where he teaches the integration of online and digital technologies with live performance.

As Artistic Director of Praxis Theatre Michael produced and created theatre for over a decade, including Rifles (2 Dora nominations), Jesus Chrysler by Tara Beagan in association with Theatre Passe Muraille, and a National Tour of the award-winning G20 drama “You Should Have Stayed Home”, which crowd-sourced over 300 volunteer performers, including 2 Members of Parliament.

He holds a Masters of Fine Arts from The American Repertory/Moscow Art Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University.

Twitter: @michaelcwheeler
Website: spiderwebshow.ca

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Land Acknowledgement

ELAN is an official minority language organization within a country that recognizes two languages as official. ELAN is located in Tiohtià:ke, the original name for Montreal in Kanien’kéha, the language of the Mohawk—also known as Mooniyang, which is the Anishinaabeg name given to the city by the Algonquin. While we are based in this city, our projects have also taken place in many regions across Quebec.

We acknowledge the colonial origin of English and French in Canada, and recognize that both languages benefit from official status throughout the land. The province that we know as Quebec is an amalgamation of the traditional territories of the Innu and Inuit nations, Algonquian nations, as well as the Mohawk nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Kanien’kéha and Anishinaabemowin are but two of the original languages of this province; Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, and Innu-aimun are also among the many Indigenous languages spoken across Quebec as majority languages, all well before French and English.

ELAN acknowledges the important work being done by First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples to revive the traditional languages of these territories, and their advocacy for the official status of Indigenous languages.

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