The Workshop

Organizations

Faculty

Program - 2012

Location

Application

REMAP

RITL

OMC

For advanced design students, educators, professionals, and theatre-makers with significant interest in design.

The REMAP / RITL Workshop for Digital Media, Theatre and Design explores how emerging technologies, materials, and media practices can provide new theatrical languages for designers, directors and other theatre-makers.

Each year, a set of technology platforms and tools are chosen for their potential impact on theatrical scenography in its broadest sense, as well as their connection to consumer and industrial technologies that shape our lives. 

A set of dramatic forms are also chosen for their fluidity of structure, potential relationship to the selected technologies, and narrative, aesthetic, and thematic connections to the world's evolving use of technology. 

Participating designers and theatre-makers are trained by and collaborate with visiting professional artists grappling with the fusion of dramatic action and technology, working with specific works-in-progress or short theatrical pieces. 

Through this pairing of performance practices with corresponding digital possibilities, the program interweaves creative processes and encourages participants to broaden their approach, seek new and wider audiences, and critically engage with the proliferation of new technologies in everyday life.

The program focuses on design but is open to participation from other disciplines. Actors (or theatre-makers with significant interest in performance) interested in training and performing within the laboratory processes of the 2012 Workshop, please email us at info@rhodopi.net for variances to the cost of participation and the alternative application process.

Approach

Pulling from the experience of two dynamic programs on opposite sides of the world, and leveraging the resources of the forming Telematics Park of Rome, the REMAP/RITL Workshop aims to equip its participants with new tools and techniques of emerging global vocabularies. 

A platform for intensive exploration, the Workshop invites participants to further their own unique perspectives and contribute to advancements within theatre practice by connecting digital technologies with classical and modern forms of dramatic art.

The REMAP/RITL Workshop aims to:

• be a living laboratory for artists grappling with the transformation of global communications, expanding definitions of “media”, and the emergence of “digital culture”, and seeks to promote development of new theatrical forms that incorporate, repurpose, and challenge cultural and technological foundations of these changes.
• offer resident artists and advanced students rare opportunities for practical collaboration and a significant, updating scope of technological tools and physical, theoretical, and dramaturgical frameworks.
• serve as a conduit for new ideas of theatrical interdisciplinarity, influencing diverse groups of artists and audiences.
• foster processes lead by accomplished professional artists, influenced by dynamic guest speakers, and contributed to by motivated resident artists and students – all of wide-ranging backgrounds.

REMAP, the RITL, and the Telematics Park of Rome consider the Workshop to be an evolving interdisciplinary, intercultural testbed that positions the institutions and participants to be at a forefront of artistic synergy and technological innovation. 

The program combines REMAP's activities within the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (interweaving storytelling, media-making, and performance with emerging technologies) and the RITL's exploration of the fusion of global theatrical traditions with the Open Media Cluster’s resources and focus on “open” technology.

The Workshop exists in dialogue with the RITL, as well as the communities of UCLA and the Telematics Park of Rome, both situated within global cultural capitals and centers for the entertainment and technology industries, with rich, distinct, highly-influential traditions of live performance, cinema, and digital art.