weekend reading

March 22, 2020
Posted in News
March 22, 2020 fkirschner

Dear friends,

our school discord channel

Both faculty and students are currently in the process of continuously assessing the situation. In the coming days and weeks, we will develop a stronger online presence, to make our work and research, but also spaces for discussion and collaboration available to you. Right now, we are working internally to provide stable infrastructure for communication and social exchange.

We have had experience using the software Discord for organizing Spiel und Objekt, and will be using it more to provide classes, lectures and support. We have also moved the school proper to discord, recreating similar channels of communication to what we had when we still saw each other. It’s not the same, but it works well to provide a space for atemporal and documented discussion, when email and phone calls and skype can all only provide some part of that. It is also comforting to see hundreds of people checking in and out throughout the day.

With all these hastily established digital tools come new challenges. Limiting your screen time, organizing your availability, and, separating channels of communication between work and social life. Making appointments, even though people can get notifications on their phone, and providing help to those that have not had the necessity to develop their online literacy are super-important. It is new grounds for all of us, at least on this scale. The amount of notifications, experimental ways of creating culture and always online mindset can lead to heightened stress, especially when your day-to-day is changing so rapidly.

We firmly believe, that theatre is a shared social space. What we don’t know yet, is how these social spaces work without bodily co-presence. We will experiment and share, just as many of you do, and we will try to create groups for people to share their experiences, and create safe spaces for experimentation, where mistakes can be made and not everything has to be for everyone. For that, we want to take our time, and slowly establish these new channels, so as to make them robust and understandable and meaningful and not overextend ourselves. There are many weeks ahead of us, where urgent social and medical issues will rightful be at the center of our attention. But we will try to continually inform you about the services, knowledges and tools we can provide.

Impressum