Blogging: The Basics

The term ‘blog’ comes from the amalgamation of ‘Web’ and ‘log’. The original Weblogs were literally ‘Web logs’ or lists of sites gathered together by an author, published using HTML and shared with a web audience.

Today, blogs are essentially easily-updatable websites that use open source or low cost software, and allow an author to publish frequently on the web. Most blogs are primarily text based but there has been a surge in recent years of multi-media blogs incorporating audio and video. Blogs contain ‘posts’ – usually time-stamped articles or snippets of information posted in reverse chronological order, allowing the most recent content to appear at the top.

Blogs can be categorised by type of audience interaction, by genre (such as education blogs or travel blogs), by media type (video blogs or vlogs, audio blogs, and written blogs) and by device (a mblog) is a blog written on and for a mobile phone. Blogs can also be defined by professional distinction i.e. ‘hobby’ blogs and professional blogs.

Most of the early blogs were simply online journals or web-based diaries which authors used to publish their thoughts and experiences. Motivated by the need for self-expression, some blogs built a captive audience such as the infamous ‘diary of a London call girl’ - Belle de Jour, that recently made UK newspaper headlines.

Setting up a blog has never been easier: using free programmes such as Wordpress.com and Blogger, you can set up a blog and start publishing content within a matter of minutes. If you wish to have a blog hosted on your own domain name, you can follow the steps in the previous articles on Wordpress. For creative people, a Tumblr blog or a posterous blog can be a great way of blogging about individual projects with the tools to post snippets of text, photos, quotes, links, dialogues, audio, video and slideshows from the web or direct from your smart phone. See the Wellcome Trust funded art project Exploring the Invisible for a look at Tumblr in action.

The Benefits of Blogging

Blogging can be a great way of building your personal or company brand and profile. Theatre companies such as Frantic Assembly and Hoi Polloi are harnessing video blogging to provide insight into company working practices and in doing so, they are building on their approachable and ‘young’ profiles. The new non-building based National Theatre Wales is using blogging to allow members of their online community to share information and debate and discuss the future potential of the theatre for the community.

Writing a blog can be a powerful learning tool, it can promote critical and analytical thinking, both with regard to your artistic process and to issues at stake in the wider world. A blog can allow you as a practitioner to reflect and comment on the artistic process of making work which can also be a powerful audience development and marketing tool. The dance company Ludus Dance have embraced the multi-media nature of blogging and use this to share the devising and rehearsal process with their audience.

One of the key elements of blogs is the ability to link from one blog to another. In the early stages of blogging, this took the form of a ‘Blogroll’ – a list of your favourite blogs. Today linking to other blogs and websites is a key part of the ‘conversation’ of blogging. If others link to your blog posts, this can drive traffic to your blog and increase your audience. A ‘trackback’ is an automatic link to a blog that commented on your post allowing your readers (and you) to see who else is talking about your posts. Harnessing the interactive nature of blogs, including commenting and linking can be a great means of collaboration and networking.

In a practical sense, a blog can be the ‘hub’ to which you drive traffic from other online media such as social networking sites. Wordpress is particularly good at integrating feeds and content from other sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Blogs are loved by search engines for three practical reasons; firstly they love new content which blogs deliver regularly; secondly, the ‘permalink’ structure of blog posts (see previous articles on Wordpress) allows for relevant content to be found and indexed easily; and thirdly, search engines rate your site based on the aggregate of other sites that link to it.

Making a Great Blog

Space here does not permit a step-by-step guide to the ‘perfect blog’. Many well-known commentators in the ‘blogosphere’ have excellent articles on how to make a great blog. A good place to start is with the ‘pro bloggers’ such as Darren Rowse, Chris Guillebeau, Seth Godin, Brian Clark and Chris Brogan.

Nevertheless, it’s worth taking a few moments to recap some basic points about successful blogging.

Consistency. If you’re serious about engaging an audience through your blog, using it as your ‘hub’ to disseminate your work and build an audience related to your business or artistic practice, then you will need to establish a rhythm. If you write once a week, then let your audience know when you post (Monday mornings tend to be good posting days) and make sure you deliver.

Quality. You don’t have to write the next War and Peace, but you do have to make sure that you’re passionate about what you’re writing and that you’ve done your ‘homework’ on the topic you’re blogging, vlogging or audio-blogging about.

Variety. They say that variety is the spice of life, and there’s nothing better as a reader than being surprised by a blog that you follow. So once in a while step out of the mould and try something completely different. If you run a written blog, why not try doing a podcast or a short video? You could also invite someone to post a ‘guest article’ on your blog. You might want to interview someone or you might just change your approach to the way your write and present material.

Audience. It should be quite clear from the paragraphs above and from previous articles that social media in general is a dialogue between you and the people your work seeks to engage. If that is the case then why not address your audience directly? Ask questions. Run competitions. Create opinion polls (insert polldaddy link) and most importantly respond to comments on your blog and across your social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr etc.).

The Pitfalls of Blogging

Since anyone with an Internet connection can be a publisher and promoter of their own work, the key issue is no longer one of distribution, but one of authority and relevance. If you don’t have anything worthwhile to say that will engage your audience and keep them reading, blogging on a regular basis will be a chore. One of the hardest things about blogging, and why many blogs fail, is the constant need for new content. As mentioned in my Introduction to Social Media article, any forays into social media, including blogging, should be accompanied by a well thought out strategy. It is pointless to start a blog with no clear idea of the strategic reasons behind it.

It is important to recognise that blogging has changed the landscape in which we interact with our audiences – we now need to talk and listen. Traditionally, marketing has been one-sided – we talk, our audience listens. Through blogging and social media, audiences want to be part of the conversation: this needs to be considered when setting up a blog.

Staying on Top of Other Blogs

With so many interesting blogs to read, how can we stay on top of developments without having to visit 30 websites everyday? RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is one solution that allows you to subscribe to any blog or website that supports RSS (look for the orange square). If there is new content on the blog, this gets sent to your RSS Reader. For a free RSS Reader try Google Reader. Many blogs will also allow you to subscribe by email enabling new blog posts to pop up in your inbox. A third, and increasingly common option, is using Twitter. Many professional bloggers will ‘tweet’ a link to their new blog post enabling you to quickly scan your Twitter feed for any new items. And since Twitter now allows you to create ‘lists’, you could set up a list of your favourite theatre bloggers or tech bloggers etc.

The Future of Blogging

Despite recent musings in the online world that the rise of blogs is coming to an end, the statistics appear to suggest the opposite. In its annual State of the Blogosphere report, Technorati revealed that it had indexed 133 million blog records since 2002. However, the rise of microblogging using services such as Twitter and Tumblr is providing a popular alternative to blogs based on immediacy and minimal content input. Delivering bite-sized pieces of information and valuable links, these services appear to be drawing readers away from commenting and engaging with blogs.

Susan Mernit, co-founder, People’s Software Company disagrees and comments that:

“Although new ‘right-now’ web tools like twitter and lifestreaming aggregators like friendfeed have shifted some attention from classic blogging, they’ve actually deepened the conversation and made the blog, as a place to comment, reflect, and analyze, more central than ever. Blogging has become part of the daily discourse within many communities, and more and more essential is a growing number of disciplines outside of the technosphere.” (Source)

In my opinion, the urge to publish content and communicate with the world is stronger than ever. Whether through a blog or Tumblr page, Twitter or Facebook updates, the potential is there for all. Marketing guru Seth Godin sums this up more eloquently than I can when he concludes that:

“The word blog is irrelevant, what’s important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world.” (Source)

Blogging is dead. Long live the blog!

What’s Next?

In the next article, I will look at microblogging platform Twitter and its many applications in a business context.

The Hall itself, a secret location divulged only after you’ve signed up for your audioguide, is vast, varied (with a pleasing balance of long corridors, poky cupboards and cavernous junk-filled auditoria) and eerie, especially after dark. A number of performers bustle around some areas; in a spooky contrast, others are deserted and echoing. Participants’ audioguides must be started precisely on time, and the cast’s choreography has to be timed to the second, otherwise the performers won’t be doing what the guides say they’re doing where the guides say they’re doing it.

As if that wasn’t enough to handle, the audioguides vary depending on the participants’ start times, so the performers aren’t just repeating one sequence of movements and lines, but a whole cycle. No wonder the company ended up overreaching themselves.

There are just too many things that can go wrong, on the company’s end and on the participants’. I started my audioguide ten or fifteen seconds too late, which made me very slow to respond when asked questions by performers. My fault! At one point I was led to an office where a man at a desk issued me my Freedom Pass. My guide drowned him out with instructions to read a magazine while I waited; there were none. Not my fault! Later I was directed to enter a specific numbered door. It was too dark to make out the door numbers, I entered the wrong one, and the next five minutes of instructions demanded interaction with objects and performers I couldn’t find. Partially my fault, but not entirely.

Issues like the production quality of the sound file, or the minutiae of the synchronisation between audio and live performance, are infinitely less interesting to discuss than the story the production is telling, or the atmosphere it creates. In this case, unfortunately, I can’t criticise the narrative because I missed chunks of it; the best I could do was notice recurring characters, like the architect (female, but referred to confusingly as “he” by the audioguide), the shy young actress and the corporate spy. And I can’t criticise the atmosphere because I was too busy checking that my problems weren’t due to my mp3 player having accidentally paused itself or skipped ahead to breathe any of it in.

Viewed in context, HALL is a necessary step in the evolution of audio-instructed performance to a form capable of telling big, sprawling stories as well as brief, compact ones. Viewed in isolation, unfortunately, it’s a logistical shambles with potential but no punch.

The company’s ten-year story has not been without difficulty or probing from its critics, but as Shunt prepares to leave behind the much-loved Vaults, closing the door on that Carrollian hole at London Bridge station, I caught up with artist, academic and Shunt lighting designer, Mischa Twitchin, to take stock of Shunt’s achievements, to talk Money, and to ask what the future may hold.

Interview contents / Quick Reference 

Please note: in editing the interview transcript and dividing it up into ‘bite-size’ sections, I made several alterations to the chronological order of the original discussion. Any incongruencies in the text are therefore my doing. All photographs used in this article belong to Shunt and must not be reused without prior permission.

1. Origins     (↑ top)

(Two SHUNT Cabaret flyers from September 1999)

Andrew: How did Shunt begin?

Mischa: Shunt is a collective of ten artists – we met on a one-year postgraduate course at Central School of Speech and Drama ten years ago. That course then was about fostering companies. You worked in different groups throughout the year and then the last term was given over for each company to make a show. The task we set ourselves was to explore medieval representations of torture. On the whole, the company for that project was self-selecting and before the course was over we had agreed to rent a space to continue working together. So, being a member of Shunt in the first few years meant paying £50 a month cash to rent a railway arch in Bethnal Green!

We made The Ballad of Bobby Francois there and Dance Bear Dance, and we also did bi-monthly cabarets. Dance Bear Dance came at the end of a five-year period by which time we’d taken over the arch next door and the performance explored the relation between these two, parallel spaces. As it turned out, it had some big theatrical coups in it. It also happened to coincide with the change of Artistic Director at the National Theatre (NT). Part of Nicholas Hytner’s new strategy was to open up what counted as “theatre” for his audience at the NT.

Several people from the NT saw that show, including then Nick Starr and Nick Hytner. After five years, we were looking to move - having exhausted the arch spaces - and they invited us to do something in one of the non-theatre spaces on the Southbank. We thought what could we possibly do there? But all credit to them, they acknowledged that, and when we found this space [Shunt Vaults] Nick Starr hosted the negotiations with Railtrack in his office. It took about a year to get into this space. They also supported us with a couple of fundraising evenings - obviously, we had no money – and, then, crucially the tickets for our first show here, Tropicana, were sold through their box office, so there could be credit card bookings in advance.

However, that also meant, in contrast to our experience in Bethnal Green, that we opened the show with 200 people outside – which rather pre-empted our usual practice of working on the show with an audience in previews. We had this whole choreographed beginning, for example, and it was obvious on the first night that it wasn’t going to work. It took a couple of months of really learning what it meant to have an audience in this space for that show to come to fruition.

The tie-in with the NT also meant we were committed to a press night, which we’d never had before. So, there was one evening with a raft of critics who’d never seen any of our previous work and had no particular interest in our way of working. Indeed, why should they? They were waiting for the show to start, with no real sense that they might already be part of it when they came in. So, the main press record is not so good for Tropicana – but then it ran for nine months! In a way, that scenario had changed a bit by the time of Amato Saltone, and it helped open the door for work off-site associated with the NT.

2. Money     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Money)

Andrew: Shunt is launching a new show in September in a new space close to the Shunt Lounge at London Bridge. It’s your first show since Amato Saltone in 2006. What’s the basic premise for Money?

Mischa: Conversations started over a year ago about what might be the material or the starting point for a new show. We have used a common text source – not necessarily literary – as a point of departure before. With The Ballad of Bobby Francois, our first show, it was a book called Alive; and then the handbook of rules for lawn tennis for The Tennis Show; or for Dance Bear Dance there was material around the Gun Powder Plot. It’s about coming to an agreement around a shared source that’s accessible through that reading. That’s not to say that the book is the source of the work; it’s just one element together with the people and the space. Then the key question will always be what is the journey of the audience that we’re constructing with these elements?

The conversations started before Easter last year, so before Northern Rock, but after the Enron scandal. One topic in discussion was the hubris of the financial world. Then for other reasons too, we were reading various novels by Émile Zola.

Andrew: Why Zola?

Mischa: One strand of conversation at a certain point was “why not take a novel?” Thérèse Raquin seems to be used every other year! So, there was a sort of curiosity about that. Then, of course, any individual Zola novel is part of a bigger cycle, so different people were reading different books to comment on in meetings.

Andrew: Were any of these books connected to the company’s prior discussion of the global financial situation?

Mischa: Well, as the crisis unfolded then people were reading about it. A couple of us had already read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, for instance. There were other books too. Lizzie [Lizzie Clachan] brought in a book from around the 1880s I think, a sort of an encyclopedia of the future, illustrating the technology of one hundred years’ later (so, in our time) as imagined by people in 1880. Then, I think, David [David Rosenberg] came across Zola’s novel Money (L’Argent), which has in its background Zola’s diagnosis of the corruption of the Second Empire. This, of course, chimed with our own times. Indeed, it’s interesting that the preface to the English translation, which was made around 1900, references specific financial events at that time, suggesting to readers how interesting it would be for them to read Zola’s account of similar events forty years earlier. So, you don’t need to be a Marxist necessarily to recognize cyclical, structural crises within capitalism.

We kind of settled on Money as a common source in a similar way that we had settled on the works of Cornell Woolrich for Amato Saltone. And also there’s a slight theme from Zola’s La Bête Humaine, with the image of a train that’s out of control.

3. Space     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event The Tennis Show)

Andrew: Money is being performed in a new space, an old tobacco warehouse not far from the Shunt Vaults. I’m interested in the relationship, if there is one, between the genesis of Money and the new space; whether there’s any element of site-specificity to it, and whether artistically the space has been a source of renewal for Shunt as a company.

Mischa: We’ve been in two spaces over the past ten years: Arch 12a in Bethnal Green and the Shunt Vaults, here at London Bridge. Essentially the company has always been committed to having a space of its own.

To the degree that it’s possible, then, we have control over access to it. Like the company name, ‘Shunt’, the space doesn’t already say “theatre”. It means that the invitation to an audience can be part of the work, part of the dramaturgy, part of the scenography. The actual entrance to the space can be materially reinvented for any particular show.

One of the things that the ten members of the Collective could agree on artistically was that, even if any individual had an interest in working in theatres, there was a shared commitment to working in our own space. For the public – distinct from the critics, perhaps – the work needn’t then be prejudged in terms of “a night out at the theatre”.

Of course, there will always be those associations, particularly for Tropicana because it was marketed through the NT. But, nevertheless, having our own space meant that it was possible to build a whole journey for an audience coming out of the tube station. The first quarter of the space of that show was wholly constructed, complete with a lift! So, in that sense it’s not site-specific – we make a fictional world for the audience. In the case of Money, we’ve built a vast machine.

So, there’s a relation to a space that has atmosphere, but which is, in a sense, neutral in theatrical terms – such as a railway arch. It can be more or less atmospheric, which already gives you something, but we’re not making a show about railway arches. We’ve not made a show at the Vaults about the construction of the railway in London. We’ve made fictional worlds for an audience that nevertheless are, of course, informed by, and produced in relation to, the space that we are in.

We’ve been at the Vaults for over five years and obviously at some point we will have to leave here. We’ve had three stays of execution and we’re here now until November [2009]. The idea was to set up the new show in its own space, and there was this warehouse just round the corner. It’s an empty shell, totally uninteresting as a building, but now there’s an extraordinary machine inside it. It’s great when people ask what it used to be before!

4. The Gaze     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Amato Saltone)

Andrew: I’d like to talk about the ‘gaze’ as a leitmotif in Shunt’s work.

Mischa: I suppose that was largely thematized in Amato Saltone.

Andrew: Yes, in Amato Saltone, but also in The Tennis Show, where you have that wonderful moment between female and male audiences who see each other on two sides of a tennis court, after having spent most of the performance in gender separation.

Mischa: Yes, in the Bargehouse. There were two points of access to the space, which already suggested the possibility of separating the audience. Then there were the rules of lawn tennis. Many games have this separation between men and women. So, you had this play with the men’s game and the women’s game. The same sort of social structure exists in dancing. So, the idea of the point of meeting was to have the two audiences facing each other across the tennis court, and once the lines of the court had all disappeared - down a hole that was there in the floor! – we had this voice-over invitation, using everyone’s names thanks to the tickets, with some schmaltzy music: “Would x like to dance with y?” Although it only actually happened once, I think.

With Amato Saltone, it was one of the initial ideas: trying to construct a scene in which the same thing could be seen by two different audiences. That was the initial idea and then the Cornell Woolrich theme was something that emerged out of other strands of our reading. As it happens, he is the author of Rear Window, which follows precisely this structure. Besides that, there is also an interest amongst most people within the company to have at least some moment in which there’s a common experience for the whole audience to share the image of something together.

Another key visual moment was in Dance Bear Dance, this point where the parallel audiences were revealed to each other. It was interesting the way in which audiences went through the process of asking whether it was a mirror or another set of performers, before acknowledging that they were part of a show that included them, in this image of the other audience. That was quite a theatrical coup, as it turned out.

5. Audience Participation     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Dance Bear Dance)

Andrew: In terms of the two productions at Shunt Vaults, Tropicana and Amato Saltone, I’m curious about the extent of ‘freedom’ that you give the audience to roam, search and explore the space. Sometimes there is a given set of parameters whereby in Amato Saltone, for example, the audience was given names, keys and a party invitation message; or more loosely in the case of Tropicana, where upon exiting the lift you were able to explore the space before a narrative sequence unfolded in the operating theatre and encroached on that sense of liberty. From my perspective as an audience member, the effect this sense of freedom has is one of participation, of straddling the line between actor and spectator, and that’s exciting and exhilarating. However, more often than not in Shunt’s work, I find that sense of freedom gives way, as the shows evolve, to a more traditional, proscenium-type configuration in which the lines are more clearly defined. Could you talk about the notions of freedom and participation?

Mischa: I suspect that this “freedom” is rather spurious. It’s the way you describe the experience, but the part of the experience that you’re calling “freedom” is no less conventionalized and constructed than the part of the experience that you’re calling traditional. There are a whole set of accidents that compose these possibilities as well as the decisions, of course; but, as I said before, one of the main interests of the company is to consider the journey of the audience. The work includes “an audience”, distinct from a group of people wandering randomly. How they are included is our responsibility; we are making an experience for an audience, in an environment that we are constructing. It’s not a Happening, it’s a rehearsed show and even if it’s not apparent to anybody - even ourselves sometimes! - there is a narrative structure.

The audience doesn’t have “a role” other than that of being an audience. There’s absolutely no role-play - the audience is not invited to perform.

Andrew: Even when a telephone rings and doesn’t stop until an audience member plucks up the courage to answer it?

Mischa: It’s a contrivance. There are moments in which there’s the invitation to the audience to act in the situation, but the production isn’t putting the responsibility of the performance onto anybody doing it. But it makes a difference, of course – and that’s the fun of it. It’s exciting and interesting to keep open the sense of possibility in the present moment, but the key thing is to keep open the sense that something can be imagined, which doesn’t mean you’re going to have to do it or take on a role.

So, what is the place of an audience? How to make coming to see a particular show already part of the experience of that show? With Amato Saltone, the first week it was people coming into a surprise birthday party, but that wasn’t going anywhere; so, by the end of the first month it was people going into a swingers party, in which we were giving people the fiction of an identity, with a name and a key. Curiously, that was something that appealed to a lot of people, but all it actually meant was that you had a secret name. You didn’t have to do anything, but it made your imaginary relation to being in that environment more active. After all, it was an environment that consisted of the other people that you were with. In that sense, it wasn’t a case of: “I’m watching a swingers party over there on stage, which they’re representing for me”; rather, “I understand that I am part of a swingers party, although I know that I’m not - but that is the story of what I’m doing here, and so where’s that going to take me?”

6. The Collective     (↑ top)

(The 10 members of the SHUNT Collective)

Andrew: What is the organizational basis of the Shunt Collective?

Mischa: There’s no need for rose-tinted glasses, sometimes it’s fraught and difficult, but there’s an ethos. With the last two shows and, of course, the Lounge, a team of people has gravitated to the space – some really fantastic souls. There is a wider sense of individual work that is equally part of a larger project.

That spirit of collaboration is something special; it’s about the quality of the particular person, not simply their extraordinary skills, but their own ethos. Professionalism is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient. You can’t institutionalize individuals’ sense of commitment to their own work within a situation like that.

7. Cabarets     (↑ top)

(Flyer for a SHUNT Cabaret event)

Andrew: Could you talk about the significance of Shunt cabarets in the development of the company’s work and how they fed into the creation of the Shunt Lounge?

Mischa: We did two big shows in our Bethnal Green space: The Ballad of Bobby Francois and Dance Bear Dance and we also had a bi-monthly cabaret – on a Sunday. The only condition for performing in the cabaret was that nothing could last more than ten minutes, but otherwise you could do anything you liked.

It was important in the sense that you were participating in collective projects, which were things you wouldn’t necessarily have envisaged by yourself – with the excitement of realizing something that you couldn’t do or imagine by yourself, as the creative possibility of the group. And connected to that, the cabarets provided us with the circumstance in which people could individually show to other members of the company the different kinds of work that they wanted to experiment with. I think that’s important.

With Dance Bear Dance, we did a week of cabarets trying out ideas; a series of individual responses to a particular theme that fed into the production. And certainly, individual shows have developed from things that people have tried out in various forms in cabarets for themselves.

The Lounge was in some ways a continuation of this. It is a space in which people can come in and experiment with something. It’s been a unique thing in the London theatre scene.

8. Shunt Lounge     (↑ top)

(A short musical documentary by Susanne Dietz about the Shunt Lounge)

Andrew: To what extent, both artistically and commercially, has the Lounge Project been a success?

Mischa: The Lounge has been a huge success. It has been going for three years and the number of artists who have been able to experience for themselves what their idea could be in relation to an audience is remarkable. The key thing is that we provide the space, the technical support and a diverse audience coming in and experiencing the work. If you perform here it needn’t be to a coterie audience or just your friends.

There are over 2000 people a week in here – so, in relation to other things the Arts Council support it’s an extraordinary benefit, particularly when considering the phenomenal level of work produced, consistently, forty-eight weeks a year.

It’s spectacular here every week, but not necessarily a spectacle. It’s not advertised, there are no reviews, you pay to come into the space – a fiver on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and a tenner on Fridays and Saturdays - and then you have access to everything for free. So, whether it’s Stationhouse Opera trying something out, or an opportunity to tattoo bananas, there’s no prior judgment. That’s important where artists are experimenting with an idea. Their work is part of a whole evening that includes a lot of other work, installations, maybe a band, the bar, and so on. Each week – or fortnight – is curated by a different Shunt artist, supported by Andrea [Andrea Salazar] and her team, and it will be different in its dynamic, depending on all the work that’s being shown then.

9. Working Process     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Sightings)

Andrew: In the case of the collective, you don’t take on hierarchical roles so how do you actually go about creating a piece? What’s the Shunt working process, particularly given that your productions seem to be in continual evolution?

Mischa: The work is always in development with the audience. There are always company members watching the show, and then for the performers, as often as not, proximity to the audience is like ours in this interview now. If any particular moment is rubbish, you know it. Why would you want to do it again tomorrow? Of course, there are periods at which it’s exhausting and it takes a lot more effort to initiate bigger changes. But with Amato Saltone, for example, we changed the end in the last week of the run.

So, once there’s a sort of agreement on a common topic, there are basically a lot of improvisations and then proposals for other exercises, games, other things to explore, get sedimented out those. People also have responsibilities then in order to realise the structure of a production. So, there is a director, there is a designer, there is a lighting designer, a sound designer, and there are performers. But the work is a collective realisation. It’s not that any one of those roles has simply instrumentalized the others to realize a particular artistic vision that could otherwise have been achieved by just employing other people to do the work. What has been produced is the work of this particular group of people – both the Shunt members and our collaborators, the Shunt Associate Artists. In a sense, even if for any one person, they don’t feel they particularly “own” very much of it, it’s owned by the collective.

The tag line of “designed, directed and performed by Shunt” doesn’t necessarily refer to just the ten of us, it includes other associate artists like Nigel [Nigel Barrett], Tom [Tom Lyall] and Simon [Simon Kane], or people who have regularly worked with us like Steve [Steve Royle] with the lighting and George [George Tomlinson] with the whole scenic production - people who are also part of creating the work. So, there’s Shunt in so far as it’s the name of the collective of ten people, and then it’s the name of the event, which involves a much larger group of people.

10. Archives & Documentation     (↑ top)

(Image taken from the SHUNT website archives)

Andrew: You mentioned earlier the idea of documenting the Lounge. If that project were to go ahead, whom would the documentation be for and what form would it take?

Mischa: There are various bits of documentation. There are two films on Youtube, with links from the website, one by Inigo [Inigo Alcaniz], who has taken photographs at the Lounge for a long time, and the other by Susa [Susanne Dietz], a video artist who is one of the Shunt “family”. She has done the video work in all the shows and also has an archive of material that goes back to the early cabarets in Bethnal Green. I think she has plans to work with that material.

The problem with a lot of the shows is that they were lit for the eyes, in the actual space – not as a picture to be looked at separately. So, there’s a lot that is too dark for the camera. For me, lighting is about the contrast between light and dark. In “professional theatre”, there’ll be a photo shoot for the press and nobody could care less. It’s just a case of “put all the lights on”, and that’s fine, of course, because it’s just some random press photo. Also, with most of our shows there hasn’t necessarily been one point of view. What would it be to film a show like Tropicana? There’s the autopsy scene, of course, but apart from that it would be fairly difficult, since the first half of the show was about the spatial distribution of the audience – in darkness! Nonetheless, there is video material, but there isn’t really any narrative documentation.

I am interested to gather stories though – I’ve set up a little postcard link on the website with Nahum [Nahum Mantra], to try to elicit testimony as to what the Lounge means to people – anecdotes, memories, things that will otherwise be unrecorded but which concern the real experience of being here. Not just for the audience but also for the amazing people working here and their contribution each week.

So, who would it be for? Well, in the first instance it would be a sort of present for all those people, to be able to say retrospectively: “Oh, that’s what I was doing!” But it would also be an historical testimony.

Like the Lounge itself, perhaps the documentation could encourage and support the development of confidence for somebody to explore ideas and a practice in relation to an audience – if that’s what they’re concerned with. Wouldn’t that be great?!

11. The Future     (↑ top)

Andrew: What direction will the company take over the next five years?

Mischa: There’ll be the new show in September and then by sometime early next year – we trust - there’ll be a new space for the Lounge. Those two things mark a big change for the company.

Andrew: Why do you have to leave the Shunt Vaults?

Mischa: Because London Bridge station is being redeveloped. There are issues to do with access and the structure of the viaduct. I don’t know what the long term plans are for this space, but it’s part of the development of the station. But even if this space becomes sanitized and turned into a series of Starbucks, there will be a number of people who pass through to the station and think: “Oh, isn’t this the place where I saw people snogging dogs?”; “Isn’t this the place where there were two people sitting in hoops for six hours?”; “Isn’t this the place that had that strange concertina box that extended the whole length of it?”

The point is there’s the company with the wider group and its organization. Before moving here, the company was essentially the ten members. Since being here the company has grown as an organization. There needs to be another way in which the collective can develop with the shows and the Lounge - something new needs to be explored in relation to all of that experience. Let’s just hope that in another five years’ time we will still have an audience!

What is Social Media?

As we discovered in the first article in this series, social media can be defined as the sum of online tools that facilitate communication and multimedia content sharing. When used effectively, social media can help market your work, raise your profile and enable you to connect with potential audiences. It encompasses technologies and platforms such as blogs, podcasts and social networking sites to name a few. I will be looking at the most useful applications and platforms in some detail, but as an introduction, I want to explore some key social media concepts and their relevance to artists and professionals in the performing arts. I will also address some of the issues and common concerns that can arise when using social media.

Why use Social Media?

One of the main reasons why you might use social media tools is that the entry barriers are low, both technologically and financially. The explosion in online content creation in recent years has been facilitated by the mainly free and easy to use tools and applications of the ‘Read/Write Web’. With the availability of free blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger, anyone with basic word processing skills can publish a blog at zero cost. Free-to-use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are some of the biggest in the world, the former now has over 300 million active users. Traditional marketing methods, particularly in the theatre, involve spending money on printing, ad placement and poster and flyer distribution, and while social media is unlikely to fully replace traditional marketing strategies, it certainly can complement and enhance any campaign, and provide a good return on a small investment.

A second reason is that social media harnesses the most effective of marketing methods: word of mouth. The tools and networks of Web 2.0 allow you to build and maintain a solid network of friends and followers – a targeted, niche audience that you can communicate with directly. Social media gives these online ‘fans’ the power to recommend or pass on marketing messages to their own networks of followers. The Royal Opera House has employed this strategy effectively with their Facebook group that boasts over 17,000 ‘fans’. If you think of social media as nothing more than a sophisticated recommendation system, then you can begin to see the power of these media.

In a similar vein, Web 2.0 has given rise to Viral Marketing. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, and like a virus there’s the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. The viral capabilities of online video and photo sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr have enabled the circulation of image-based media at the click of a mouse and without charge. I will be looking in more depth on how to utilise social media to create both word of mouth and viral marketing campaigns in the coming weeks.

The third reason why social media can be of benefit is that it allows you to expand your marketing potential and reach a wider audience or client base than would be possible in an offline scenario. This concept is called ‘The Long Tail‘, and was first named by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, in October 2004.

Perceived Problems with Social Media

So far so good…but if social media is so effective and simple to use, why isn’t every artist and company jumping on board? And perhaps more alarmingly, where many have dipped a toe in the social media pool, why have their efforts amounted to so little?

The number one reason why creative people do not engage with social media is lack of time and more specifically the concern that if they do commit, it will eat up large chunks of an already busy day. However, with some simple strategic planning and a little Web savvy, this does not have to be the case. Rebecca Coleman, a Canadian PR consultant in the performing arts has written an excellent guide to getting started in social media. She recommends that artists create a Social Networking Marketing Plan outlining what you want to achieve with social media; which platforms and tools you will focus on; and lastly, how much time are you going to dedicate to being online. Think of social media like email: a brilliant innovation that when used strategically can enhance your business and increase opportunity. Of the social media-savvy people I know, many deliberately limit their time online to one or two hours a day for this very reason.

Another issue to be aware of is privacy protection and safeguarding intellectual property. Many online applications will require that you submit a certain amount of personal data in order to set up a profile and there have been a few cases of identity theft including Facebook. However, there are ways of reducing any potential risk such as limiting the personal information that you post as well as being aware of the privacy settings on social networking sites. A recent article on the ReadWriteWeb blog suggests that it is safer to set up real social networking profiles for yourself to ward against identify thieves setting up fake profiles in your name. Users also need to be aware that any content you create and post online forms part of your ‘web portfolio’ – be conscious of what you post online, especially in a professional context, and ask yourself ‘will I be happy with this content in five years time?’

Data portability can also be an issue with social networks. At the moment you have to set up individual profiles across individual sites, many of which do not allow you to export your data when migrating to new services or in the case that you want to keep a personal record on your computer. This is particularly important if you’re thinking about using a service to input large amounts of data on a regular basis.

Copyright violation can be a concern when showcasing your creative work on the Web. Initiatives such as Creative Commons with its tagline of ‘Share, Remix, Reuse – Legally’, provide a useful framework for thinking about how to safegard and license your work on a platform that allows almost any type of public-facing data to be copied.

Lastly, there can be a fear of the technology itself and the fact that it is yet another thing to learn. I hope to allay some of these fears in the coming weeks by looking at some of the most useful platforms in more detail.

Basic Principles of Social Media

Before we jump into ‘the case studies’ (starting with the wonderful world of blogging in the next article), lets take a look at some of the basic principles and ‘rules’ of social media that apply to many of the platforms.

Much of social media is about collaboration, connections and participation. It is about starting conversations, increasing your profile, connecting with your audience or clients. It is not about directly selling products and services, but using social media well should help your bottom line.

Conversations are two way and therefore to really get the most from the experience, you need to be generous with your involvement. Like offline networking, the more you give away, the more you will benefit. By helping others achieve their goals you will build strong relationships online that will ultimately benefit your business.

Don’t expect to see results straight away. It takes time to build a presence on these networks. If you have something specific to promote, start at least three months in advance to build momentum.

Have a plan. Do not set up a Facebook group because you can. Have a good reason why this is going to help your business and a plan on how to achieve your goals. Dedicate some time to maintaining your social media profiles but don’t get lost in the world of cyberspace! In the coming weeks, we will look at some suggestions for connecting and cross-linking social media profiles, expanding your social media reach, while potentially reducing your time online.

What’s Next?

In the next article, I will look at the world of blogging and attempt to answer the question: is blogging dead or should it be a vital part of your social media strategy?

Mika Eglinton: You performed Resurrection in Bradford earlier this year and you’ve just opened Visions at the Barbican in London, both pieces are part of a trilogy of works called They Only Come at Night, could you talk a bit about where the idea came from?

Alan Lane: It started a long time ago. We all live quite close to each other in Leeds and there’s a petrol station round the corner from us where a man was beaten to death one night. It was a horrible and disturbing incident, but by the end of the week the local papers and people had come up with different ideas as to why it had happened. No one knew the truth, but everyone was willing to speculate. Some people were saying the man was definitely from Eastern Europe, and others were saying he was into drugs, but what became increasingly clear was that people were happier with the idea that this was just a piece of mindless violence, a horrible accident. It was quite strange that a community presented with something so horrific should start to create myths - stories based on very little truth.

Then a few years ago we spent some time in the Balkans, in Bosnia. A woman was telling me one day that after some of the massacres, in which all the older men had been removed, they would tell their younger children that vampires had come for their fathers, because it was easier to believe that vampires had killed your dad than it was to believe that the man down the road had done it.

We started to think about vampire myths and how we tell stories to shield ourselves but also as a means of understanding the extremes of life without having to be horrified by our fellow man. The world is a mad place at the minute, so we thought the most comfortable way for us to talk about it was to make up a massive, new vampire myth with different rules so that we could have a look at the world, because it’s a bit too scary to look at head on.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Could you talk about why you’re interested in subjects that are often related to traumatic histories or memories?

Alan: It’s to do with how we turn our own personal histories into a set of stories, and then we turn our collective history into a set of stories too, so to an extent we’re defined by and made up of stories. We tend to look at what we call the ‘macro myth’ in traumatic events; so for example what is the place of Dresden or Srebrenica in a shared national history and how does that end up filtering down and affecting a single person? It’s to do with how ideas at the level of nation, culture or community affect the individual in that tiny moment when it’s just a man and woman having a cup of coffee. All that pressure of history that we feel all the time but we ignore, sometimes it just explodes into a personal story and that’s really fascinating to us.

Mika: Did this interest begin when you were still students at Sheffield?

Alan: Yes it did. The company is made up of 8 people and 5 of us were at the University of Sheffield together ten years ago. We developed an interest in how theatre could reflect the pace and style at which we live our lives, how we read information, how computer screens are used and so on. That’s grown over ten years into creating immersive environments.

Mika: What do you mean by an immersive environment?

Alan: It’s where we put the audience into the middle of a film, except that it’s real, it’s 3D, you can touch it, and if there’s water you’ll get wet, because water is wet. It’s where you can look behind you, in front of you, above you and below you and there will be the world we create, and the world might only be 6” x 6”, or it could be the whole building, but until you actually decide to leave the world it will completely surround you. It will smell like we want it to smell and it will feel like we want it to feel. So it is a lot like being in a film that we’ve made for you; you’re the hero in your own film, but you just don’t have to do anything.

Mika: How much ‘free will’ does the audience have or in what way, if at all, do you control the environment?

Alan: We try and make the audience feel like they’ve got total free will and then we try and make sure they go where we want them to go. So in Resurrection for example, the audience can walk anywhere they like in a huge studio space, but they can’t leave the room. In the Barbican car park, they have to follow a path and if they leave that path then the show will stop working, because they won’t be where we want them to be; but hopefully when we take you around, it feels like you’re in complete control of your own experience. In reality of course, it’s a piece of theatre, it’s rehearsed and it’s timed. So I think that’s always a big challenge for us to try and constantly make the audience feel like they’re in control, but also for the show to feel like it’s got a discipline to it.

Mika: Moving on to methodologies, as a creative ensemble I know you spend a lot of time conducting research as well as actually building the piece, could you explain the basic creation process for one of your shows?

Alan: It always makes us laugh, because at the minute we’re working with the University of Huddersfield and the University of Salford, and we often get emails from students asking us to describe our process to which we always answer: “we come up with an idea and we sit round a table until the idea is much better than it was”. And on the one hand that’s a very flippant answer, but actually it’s quite truthful. We’re not made up of performers. There are performers in our company, but a lot of us aren’t and so as a result we tend to have quite a passive process in the sense that we don’t improvise, we don’t rehearse in that way like other companies do.

What we do is we sit down and we build the show in concept. We don’t just come up with the idea, we think exactly how much it’s going to cost to make it, how long it will take and so on. In other words we work through what would normally be called the creative process and the production process, and we keep fine honing it and asking questions of each other and that can take weeks. So we can be sat round that table for a month, and then finally when we’re ready to make something that’s worth making, we start making it.

It’s a very discursive process and it’s one in which the composer could come up with an idea for the script, and the novelist could come up with the idea for the video, we are all equals round the table, it’s just that we have specialities, but it’s basically a meeting of people with ideas and we don’t leave the table until the idea meets everybody’s satisfaction.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: I’m sure you’re aware of other companies that are working with disused or non-purpose built performance spaces such as Shunt or Punchdrunk for example, where do you see Slung Low in the UK theatre landscape today?

Alan: I think we’re clearly part of a recent interest and enthusiasm for installations, of being put in immersive environments, but we’re also from a very traditional theatre background in the sense that we start and end with a story and everything we do, no matter how experimental it is, is to try and push the story into being clearer and more compelling. It’s vital to us that the story is clear to our audience and that we are taking them on a journey that is both a literal journey, we’re moving through a space, but also an emotional one like theatre has always been. I hope that we sit in both camps, or we take our inspiration from both camps.

Mika: Where do you think this renewed interest in ‘installations’, as you put it, comes from?

Alan: Firstly, companies have been working with installations for a long time and it’s just that we tend to forget about those people and hone in on a new person, and that’s fine, that’s the way the world works, but I think it’s also to do with the way our world is changing. You know, I have an iPhone and that phone is my bespoke phone, it makes me feel special, I go onto Amazon and there is a shopping list made just for me. You have a choice in everything now, you can go into the coffee shop and ask for your coffee to be made exactly the way you want it, and that’s something that in the last 10 – 15 years has become increasingly important; that the world is set up to deal with us en masse, but as a group of individuals.

So it’s constantly about something that makes us feel unique and bespoke and that’s what this type of work does. You go into an installation and you might be with 200 other people, but you feel like you’re the only person who had the experience you had that night, that it was special, and that in some way you chose that experience for yourself, even though obviously it’s a collective experience, shared by many others. If you can find a way to make a show so that it’s a shared experience in which everyone feels they’re unique, then I think that’s a very contemporary way of looking at the world and I think that’s why this sort of work is so popular at the minute.

Mika: So in that case is it possible to say that the trend is to a large extent influenced by technological developments?

Alan: Absolutely, if you walk into a train station now, you’re listening to your iPod, you’re reading the headlines on the BBC big screen, you’re checking which platform your train is, you’re checking your emails, your Facebook page, you’re taking in information so quickly, much faster than our parents generation did, much faster than even we did 20 years ago. Just look at the way television is edited, the scenes are shorter, the snaps between each scene more abrupt and on the bottom will be some scrolling information that you’re also taking in.

So in a similar sense the immersive installation allows us to transmit information to the audience through a number of different ways: it could be through a live performer, or you could have a soundtrack, it could be through smell, you could be watching a screen at the same time, you could be reading something while someone talks to you, all of this is possible, and I think that’s absolutely the influence of technology. Our brains are soaking up information much faster than they used to be because technology has trained us to do it.

Mika: What are the company’s artistic influences?

Alan: I think the thing that influences us is just people who tell stories incredibly well, and so the last show that we all saw as a company was Robert Lepage’s Lip Sync. We don’t aspire to make work in the same way that Mr. Lepage does, but just watching someone who is that good at telling stories is inspiring. When you attempt to push form and content and try to innovate as a company, you have to be careful about inspiration, because otherwise you just end up being a version of someone else. So we tend to be inspired by great storytellers across genres rather than necessarily having a theatre company that we follow and adore.

Mika: What is Slung Low’s relationship with text?

Alan: In They Only Come at Night, we came up with an idea for a show and then we turned that idea into a graphic novel, a comic book, and then we took that comic book and we adapted it for the stage. In that sense there’s no play script, but we all have a copy of this picture book that we follow, and we work out what we’re going to say, how we’re going to act and what we’re going to make accordingly. So our first focus and priority is the story, not necessarily a play script or even a text, because we might not have one, but we would all have some form of artefact. With Helium last year at the Barbican, it was based on a short story and this year it’s a graphic novel, but we did a show earlier in the year that was a script, it was a text in a traditional sense, but it could also be a video or even a song.

Image © Tim Smith

Mika: Is there any sort of preference among types of technology you use in production?

Alan: We’ve just don’t a show that was all based online, an alternative reality game called TOCAN Live and it had no sound or moving pictures. In other shows we use a lot of video and orchestrated sound. So in a sense the media we tend to use is not film but the components that are used in film. In Visions we’re using a very cinematic soundtrack and video in an atmospheric way, so we also try to make sure that we go across media.

Mika: Does part of your work have a documentary element to it?

Alan: I think although our work is always based on some thought about the real world, like the Bosnia story I told you about or the incident at the petrol station, actually what we’re creating are massive immersive metaphors in a sense.

Mika: What is the company’s artistic policy?

Alan: The artistic policy is firstly that it doesn’t matter where the idea comes from, it just matters that it’s a good idea. So even as the ‘boss’, if I come with an idea and everyone else thinks it’s rubbish, it’s rubbish. That’s very important, because otherwise it can be very ego driven for us. And the other one is that we will learn whatever we have to learn in order to accomplish what it is we want to do. So we edit all our own video, we make all our own music, but when we started we didn’t know how to do any of that. So if we need to know how to do animation, which is something that we’ve had to do for one of our projects, then one of us goes away and sits in a room until he/she knows how to do it.

Mika: Some of the company members teach at universities. How does teaching and creating theatre fit together?

Alan: Well one of the most important, pragmatic things for us is that we have to make a living, and this year we’re creating 4 large-scale shows which is incredibly tiring, so teaching is a different type of challenge. The other thing is that we make much bigger shows than our resources perhaps allow us to, and working with students means that we can let them into our genuine process. So we don’t go in and teach conceptual work, we go in and say “right in 6 months we have to make this show and we’re going to spend the next month making it with you”. We then break it up into little bits and get to work. So in that way, the student are learning new skills as they work on the show with us.

It also means that in terms of research and development and in throwing ideas around, all of a sudden we now have many more minds throwing the idea around, and that’s a really exciting artistic feat for us. So I think we’ve found a way to both teach and make work and the two aren’t in any way exclusive of each other, they are integral to how we make work. In a really practical sense we often need an awful lot of bodies and the students have been brilliant over the last 5 years in helping with that process.

Mika: The last question is what’s on the horizon in terms of projects over the next 5 years for Slung Low?

Alan: Well, hopefully within the next 6 to 12 months, we’ll find a residence, a premises. We want to take over a warehouse and turn it into our studio. The other thing is that we’re looking to collaborate abroad. We’ve spent the last 10 years working in this country, and hopefully through our recent British Council showcase in Edinburgh and with this show at the Barbican, along with all the things we’re doing this year, we’ll have the chance to work with artists from abroad.

Jo Combes‘ sensitive production weighs the play’s competing arguments with gravity, compassion, and a sharp eye for the comedy of those quietly-maddening frictions that infest family gatherings. Mark Arends’ Eben is a portrait of high-minded weakness, his thwarted aspirations flaring into petulant fury upon contact with his stiff-necked wife’s self-righteous moral manoeuvrings. As the careworn paterfamilias, Christopher Ravenscroft takes infinite pains to protect Georgine’s Anderson’s fragile, fussy Agatha, whose sweet-old-lady dithering masks a dogged defence of the family’s dark secrets. Nicholas Gadd is bright-eyed, appealing and period-perfect as the reporter who brings the new century in on his coat-tails, and Gráinne Keenan plays the fallen-woman of the clan with a mixture of solidity, regret, stubbornness and simple pride.

Intimate in-the-round staging suits the tense, candle-lit intrigue of the play’s final act, with spectators craning over actors’ shoulders to catch a tantalising glimpse of secret, perhaps scandalous, poetic manuscripts. And if unshakeable shades of Byatt’s Possession haunt this revival, the company tackle Glaspell’s 1931 drama with unflustered confidence in its own distinct terms of engagement. Even-handed and humane, Alison’s House is another timely and thought-provoking find from The Orange Tree, unofficial London residence of forgotten dramatic gems, and quietly riveting ensemble acting.

Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground is suffused with the furious lassitude which follows the discovery that rote piety is as poisonous a rote evil, that virtue and justice are polluted by the vulgar quotidian they purport to serve, and that neither the desecration nor the fetishisation of great wickedness is any substitute for the thing itself. Arbitrary wickedness is revealed as the only possible route to self-assertion in a world that has degraded all the existing atrocities into tourist attractions, philosophy, or (worse) art. And then Hitler arrives, placidly extolling the virtues and pleasures of long rural rambles.

This production has all the hallmarks of Barker directing Barker: darkness, declamatoriness, unnecessary female nudity and uncompromising cruelty exercised to the point of self-indulgence. The acting company are surreptitiously wonderful, like naughty children scribbling cartoons in the margins of their algebra. The pace is unremittingly funereal.

I personally suspect that Found in the Ground might be more rewarding to read than to watch. Also that it might be more rewarding to watch if directed by someone other than its author. Barker’s comprehensive contempt for spectators whose jejune theatrical tastes run to more than bare breasts and black curtains is conspicuous. A yellow dressing gown glows with rare opulence amid the gloom, while all those burning books emit no more than a wan, sickly seepage of paler darkness.

This is a style of presentation that Barker enthusiasts will recognise, and some will undoubtedly relish. But Found in the Ground isn’t calculated to accommodate the Barker novice, or anyone with a low-ish boredom threshold. So you’ve been warned.

Up until the final 15 minutes it’s a curiosity, an experiment for experimentation’s sake. We, the audience, are both stage and set dressing. Adrian , the archetypal gushing theatre enthusiast, speaks up from among our ranks, encouraging conversation, an exchange of views. Other performers, including Crouch himself, playing himself, reveal themselves in our midst one by one. Between them they recount a story surrounding a fictional production staged by Crouch.

Except they aren’t just relating their experiences of this notional production: an in-yer-face affair crammed with violence and abuse that has caused audience members both to walk and to pass out. They’re apologising for their part in it. Apologising to us, the audience, because theatre makers are beholden to their audiences. They need us, the consumers of their art, to understand their intentions and to forgive them.

And until those final 15 minutes that’s all The Author is: an acknowledgement of the absolute power the audience wields, seasoned with interrogations of the audience’s ingrained reluctance to exercise that power, to intervene in events onstage, however reprehensible they find them. It’s all necessary to prime us for what comes next, but it takes its sweet time doing so, and in the meantime it all feels a bit insular, a bit inconsequential, even a bit masturbatory: the mores of the theatre being discussed, by theatre makers, through the medium of theatre, using a fictional piece of theatre as an allegory, to theatregoers.

Then comes the turnaround, and in those final 15 minutes The Author is revealed for what it has really been all along: a daring act of self-flagellation by Crouch on behalf of provocative art and controversial artists. Personally present, without the ablative armour of a fictional character, and having questioned for over an hour why audiences choose not to act against onstage villainy, the playwright reveals himself as the worst kind of villain, or at least the most easily demonised. There’s nothing insular or inconsequential about his closing monologue, delivered to a pitch-dark auditorium – and yes, people sitting close to him do plead with him to stop, though not forcefully enough for him actually to do so.

The medicinal value of this bitter little pill remains to be seen. If next month The Stage reports mass walk-outs and stage invasions at Sarah Kane revivals, we’ll know it had some effect; but I suspect the thick sugary coating may well interfere with the active ingredients, and a few patients will undoubtedly refuse to swallow the pill at all.

Bear with the comparison. Provided you’re willing to risk a few unaided leaps of logic, it does eventually make a surprising amount of sense. (In that regard, it’s a bit like the production staged inside the machine: Money, a SHUNT event inspired by Émile Zola’s novel L’Argent .)

The machine is the undisputed star of the production, which, after a few deliberately confusing false-starts, eventually reveals itself as a parable about the dangers of stock market speculation. As a performance space, the machine is constantly, wondrously surprising; just when it seems it has nothing left up its sleeve, whole new rooms emerge from under ingenious camouflage.

Its steampunk pistons and flywheels also drive the plot, such as it is; we, the audience, are speculators suckered by the smug Saccard into investing in the machine, despite neither him nor us knowing what it does. SHUNT’s playful sense of humour goes to work here, as we’re shown a gallery of ‘artist’s impressions of the future’ – Photoshopped images of the machine in the desert, coasting along railway tracks or perched halfway up a mountain.

The production itself is a series of disjointed scenes and encounters, ranging from the Kafka-esque (as Saccard pitches his ‘vision’ to eccentric business moguls who entertain guests only in the sauna, or travel only by footcycle) to the Python-esque (as Saccard turns a board meeting into a blackly comic game of condolence one-upmanship) to the weirdly voyeuristic (as we sip champagne and observe events occurring two storeys below, through two layers of plate glass).

Each individual scene is entertaining, often humorous, but it’s difficult to identify the purpose of the whole by examining the parts, and a certain amount of imagination is required to fill in the blanks. In that regard, it’s a bit like the machine itself; and the machine itself, as I’ve mentioned, is a bit like investment banking. It’s inhabited both by presentable official staff and by unacknowledged, sinister unknowns. It has levels and mechanisms that aren’t revealed until the very end. And as it barrels towards disaster, the obvious exits are sealed off, forcing those foresighted few to abandon ship by less conventional means.

Note: Part 1 of this two-part series covered how to set up your website on your own domain name using WordPress and also reviewed some useful settings and functions of the software. Read part one »

Step Four: Choose a Design for your Site

WordPress makes it easy to change the design and feel of your site with what’s known as ‘Themes’ or design templates. The default WordPress installation comes ready with two basic Themes pre-loaded, but changing the theme of your site will start to make the site feel more your own. Themes range from simple variations on a colour scheme or layout to complex magazine-style themes. Whatever your vision for the design of your site, there will be something that suits.

There are at least three different ways that you can change the theme of your site:

1. Download a Free Theme: browse the internet for free themes designed by the great community of designers and coders. A great place to start is the official WordPress site. It is updated daily and currently houses over 1000 unique free designs. Another good source for free themes is Smashing Magazine and their review of 100 high quality free themes. Alternatively you can simply do a google search with the terms ‘WordPress” and “Themes” and refine the search to results from the past year.

2. Purchase a Premium Theme: while many of the free themes are perfectly adequate for some websites, many designers have gone one step further with the design and functionality of their templates. These so-called ‘premium themes’ are usually low cost and gave give a site an added design ‘edge’ over some of the free templates. Three great sites to hunt for premium themes are Elegant Themes, ThemeForest and WooThemes.

I personally use the premium theme Thesis for all my websites. It’s an SEO optimized theme that allows for complete customisation using the ‘Thesis Open Hook plug-in’ so it is perfect for those of us with little to no coding experience. You can read about my experiences of the Thesis theme here.

3. Get a Custom Theme Designed: you can also ask a designer to design a custom theme for your site to fit your personal or company brand image, either from scratch or using another theme as a template. The freelancing website elance.com can be a great place to find WordPress specialists or ask around. Another example, much closer to hand, is the bespoke design used on London Theatre Blog, built by the talented Chugs Designs. Any design company worth its salt should provide you with a free and open quote on your design needs - it certainly pays to shop around!

When you have found a suitable theme, download the zip file to your computer. To install the theme, log in to the Admin area of your site and go to Appearance>Install Theme. Click Browse to find the theme that you downloaded to your computer earlier. Once you have successfully uploaded the file, click on Appearance>Themes. To apply the new theme to you site, simply click on the picture of your theme to preview the design. If you are happy with how this looks, click Activate. The theme should now be applied to your site. Check by clicking on ‘Visit Site’ at the top of the Admin area.

WordPress makes it easy to play around with the look and feel of your site without going near the code. I would recommend uploading a number of themes to the Admin area and try each of them out for size.

Step Five: Widgetize your Site

WordPress Widgets were designed to provide a simple, drag-and-drop way of customising the sidebar content of your site without having to hack into the code. By removing pre-installed widgets or by adding new ones to your theme, you can start to make your site function according to your specific needs. Common widgets to use in a sidebar might include:

Pages – this widget lists your static pages.
Recent Posts – this widget displays the latest posts you have written
Tag Cloud – the Tag Cloud widget is a popular one that enables visitors to click on different Tags and be taken to relevant Posts.
Search – the Search widget displays a helpful search box on the Home page.

The Widgets SubPanel explains how to use the various Widgets that come delivered with WordPress, and the Widgets page at Automattic (the company that runs WordPress) explains how to ‘widgetize’ themes and plugins.

This image shows you an overview of the WordPress widget admin panel. To see a practical example of widgets in action on a website, take a look at the left and right-hand sidebar elements of my personal blog.

Step Six: Add Plugins to Extend the Functionality of the Site

One of the most amazing things about WordPress (and there are many so this is a tall order!), is the concept of Plugins. A plugin is a little piece of code that integrates with the WordPress architecture to add a unique element of functionality. If you can think of something that you would like your site to do, there is a fair chance that you’ll find a plugin for it; and just like free WordPress Theme designs, there’s a community devoted to creating free WordPress plugins too. Want to embed Google Maps into your site? Insert your Twitter feed? Or just change the order of your theme’s page navigation? No problem!

Previous versions of WordPress required some knowledge of File Transfer Protocol to upload plugins but with the latest version you can search for and add new plugins right in your Admin area. Just visit Plugins>Add New and do a keyword search for what you are looking for. After you have installed your plugins, don’t forget to Activate them. If you upload and activate a plugin and find it doesn’t do what you want it to do, you can simply Deactivate or Delete it, with no interference to the rest of your site. WordPress comes pre-loaded with the helpful spam killer plugin, Akismet. Don’t forget to activate this plugin as it will help you fight comment spam on your site.

Some great plugins that I add to all my sites include:

Page Link Manager: “adds an administration panel that allows you to pick which page links are included in your site’s navigation.”
WordPress Automatic Upgrade: “allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.”
Twitter Tools: “creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.”
Custom Post Order: “enables users to modify the order in which posts are displayed on all pages(or in selected categories) of the blog.”
Google Analytics for WordPress: “automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.”

Note: In future articles in this series, I will highlight available plugins for any social media applications that we look at such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

Coming Up

In six easy steps I have shown that it is possible to get a self-hosted website up and running with a minimum of design skills and no knowledge of HTML.

In the next articles in this series, we now turn to look at the heavily hyped area of social media (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook et al) and examine them to extract areas of benefit for your theatre company or practice.