The Festival of Live Digital Art – FOLDA was founded before anyone ever heard or thought of a pandemic. In 2018, recognizing the need for this structural and artistic change, a Spiderweb Performance Company founded the Festival of Live Digital Arts – FOLDA in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The festival, born outside of major centers such as Toronto or Montreal, is a meeting point between in-real-life and digital worlds.
E-hui is an independent lighting designer and digital stage technician currently based in Singapore. She creates art mostly in theatre and dance, and more recently theatre for young audiences. Passionate about the melding of art and science in theatrical production, E-hui often approaches artistic creation from a practical and problem-solving perspective, and especially loves to collaborate with like-minded artists to produce works that inspire the audience to reflect and enact positive change.
An all new modern-day digital adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray featuring an all-star cast is set to run from 16 – 31 March. Created with the 21st Century in mind, writer Henry Filloux-Bennett has brought the classic story into the present day, aligning Gray’s character with the narcissism of social media culture.
As announced in our Mixed Reality piece, over the past months, we have tried various hybrid formats in our Extended Reality or Mixed Reality Studio (XR Studio), testing differences in the use and creativity of technical applications within this domain. We have also been working on real-life hybrid event solutions for a Fortune 500 client, as well as other digital activations for musicians and film screenings. It’s been a busy 6 months.
I look at the recent trends in Covid-19 theatre as a search for ‘Live’-ness. The concept of liveness takes from the word of experiencing a performance ‘Live’. This entails with the experience having to be immediate, to be in-person to experience the thing being performed. Most of the performing arts predicates on an audience member encountering the artwork in person. A theatre/dance piece is staged and blocked for where an audience sits, and even for music acts, the sound engineer takes into account the equalising of the sound for a curated experience of the music. The value of liveness is that it is the linchpin of the performing arts, and with Covid-19 unpinning that, the world is a tumble. A lot of us are now searching for new ways to make meaning with our craft, with the skills that promote and thrive on immediacy and liveness.
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