Tips for Making Better Zoom Theatre: Part 1, The Big Picture |

www.intermissionmagazine.ca: Having just marked the first year of lockdown, there is another dubious celebration ahead for theatre-makers and theatre-lovers: the one-year anniversary of seeing (or doing) our first online play. I’m not here to tell you that online performances are the future of theatre. I’m not here to say that cramped black-box spaces, or lavish thousand-seat auditoriums are dead. I can’t wait to get back into those spaces—sitting cheek-by-jowl with a bunch of strangers.

Captioning the Stream: Accessibility and Inclusion in Zoom Theatre

Intermission: Rainbow-hued block letters flashed across the screen to the thumping beat of electronic music. “We’re grateful to have viewers from all over Turtle Island. This feels appropriate, considering these new works were made by artists across Canada.” Listing the many Indigenous territories inhabited by the settler artists collaborating on the series, the land acknowledgement opening the second double-bill of The Stream You Step In asked us to reflect on the technology facilitating our digital gathering.

The Innovation of Theatre During a Pandemic

SoundGirls.org: 2020 was the year that Broadway, and so many other theaters, closed their doors. Consoles remained covered. Houses stayed empty. The lonely ghost light stood center stage. However, the year also came with great innovation, which is something that cannot be ignored by those who remain working in this industry. Though our theatre doors may be shut, many have turned to other ways to safely continue community involvement.

NewFest Film Festival: Ryan Spahn on Shooting his Play on Zoom

Variety: As an openly gay actor, Ryan Spahn was determined to tell his story. “Nora Highland” was originally developed to be an Off-Broadway play, but when the pandemic forced a shutdown, Spahn had to rethink. The story explores the casting process surrounding an iconic gay character in a new Broadway revival.

Hack to get rid of Zoom fatigue

www.fastcompany.com: Everyone keeps telling me to go outside! Take a walk! Get some fresh air! But here’s the thing: I like being inside. I like sitting. I’m perfectly happy opening a window for my daily dose of fresh air. Leaving the house (!) for a walk is not the kind of break I want. If I’m going to take a midday break, it’ll be to watch reruns of The Office or do a crossword puzzle.

WHAT WE DO Interview Series: Lavina Jadhwani

rescripted.org: WHAT WE DO is a visual interview series where we briefly talk to Chicago theatre artists about their art — what they do, why they do it, and what their creative process is like, even as it shifts in the midst of a pandemic. We’ve given each artist 8 written questions, as well as 3 prompts for photographs that capture their current headspace.

Today we’re hearing from Lavina Jadhwani, Chicago-based director, adaptor, and activist. She’s directed for Writers Theatre, Silk Road Rising, Remy Bumppo, the side project, and many others.

From ghostly to gothic to goofy, theater artists celebrate the season

Performing Arts Feature | Chicago Reader: Exal Iraheta grew up listening to tales from Central American mythology. “The stories, kind of like Grimms’ fairy tales did in Europe, didn’t shy away from real danger,” the playwright, screenwriter, and School of the Art Institute alum recalled. “For me, I’ve always thought of horror and scary stories as a way of releasing something, or experiencing life from a different perspective.”

Using ZOOM to Create Theatre by Suzanne Willett

WIT journal: When the news hit in the spring that theatres in New York were going to be shut down, I–like many of my fellow theatre-makers–was devastated. Our movement company, 10C, had been developing our third science-based piece throughout the fall and winter of 2019 and the quarantine felt like we drove 50 mph into a wall. Shortly after the shutdown, I began taking mental health walks in the city. As I continued venturing out, I could not help but notice new sounds: the silence, the birds, and ambulance sirens. I noticed that the sirens provided a morose counterpoint to these natural sounds.

A ‘Puppet Slam’ Hosted By Clowns Is The Most Joyful Meeting On Zoom

The Theatre Times: It’s late on a Friday night in July and I’m setting up my kitchen for co-hosting an online puppet cabaret, Slamalicious, with the Calgary Animated Object Society (CAOS). This raucous, interactive slam with a pirate theme is hosted by clowns and will feature new works by a roster of both established and emerging puppeteers.

Irondale and NYPD Use Theater To Build Empathy and Community

thebroadwayblog.com: Brooklyn theatrical think tank ensemble Irondale, with participation from the New York Police Department, will host a two-part zoomcast discussion with past To Protect, Serve and Understand participants, September 24 and October 1, to continue their mission of social change, activism and humanity.

Studio Theatre?s virtual ?salons? offer a cultural gathering place during the pandemic

The Washington Post: Before he began hosting Psalm’s Salons for Studio Theatre, playwright and director Psalmayene 24 didn’t yearn to interview fellow artists in public — with or without his preferred soft drink (ginger beer) in hand.

How Theater Programs Are Adjusting to Online Learning

Teen Vogue: As schools reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic, students are facing challenges they've never imagined. Teen Vogue's Fear and Learning in America series is exploring what back to school means for students this year, and what they think about learning during the coronavirus crisis.

Hannah Baity, 18, and her ensemble were nearly performance ready for their next play in a year-long theater program when things took a turn at the end of March.

Seattle theaters get inventive, finding ways to perform even during pandemic closures

The Seattle Times: Audio dramas. Online choose-your-own-adventure experiments. Live performance over the telephone. And, of course, Zoom.

In late summer, Seattle theaters began to roll out their answers to an unnervingly big question that’s threatened to swallow them since March: How are we going to do what we do in the middle of coronavirus?

8 Tips for How to Live Stream Theatre

Playbill: As a theatre artist or teacher, the prospect of moving theatre online can be daunting. But any theatre artist knows that ingenuity and creative problem solving is the name of the game, a concept made only more vital in this extraordinary time.

We talked to theatrical video guru Jim Glaub about the wild new world of online theatre to answer some of the most common questions and learn some best practices for producing theatre online.

The Challenges and Surprises of Making Theatre on Zoom

rescripted.org: In early March, Emma Durbin was midway through writing her capstone project for her playwriting BFA at DePaul University. The workshop of Durbin’s landscape was to be the first time she had worked with a team of professionals on a script of her own. The self-titled “playwright, dramaturg, and amateur sports climber” had been developing landscape for over six-months: drafting proposals, consulting with mentors, researching rock climbing in early-1900’s Scotland — and, of course, writing, rereading, and revising.

Beyond Zoom plays: The future of theater in the age of coronavirus

Datebook: In the early days of the pandemic, theater adapted with plays on Zoom, which so far has not proved an ideal medium.

It’s “a platform that was intended for conference calls, and that never quite goes away,” says San Francisco playwright and director Stuart Bousel. He’s open, though, to the possibility of a “forward-looking” mode that is built for Zoom’s tools and strengths, as opposed to one that’s “nostalgic,” one that futilely imitates in-person theater.

In this choose-your-own-adventure production, the audience guides the show

CANVAS Arts: New York’s Public Theater streamed playwright Richard Nelson’s “What Do We Need to Talk About?” — often considered the first play created for Zoom, a video-conferencing service. In L.A.’s Westwood neighborhood, the Geffen Playhouse has extended illusionist Helder Guimarães’ “The Present,” another hit on Zoom, for the third time, with virtual admission selling out into October. And now comes “Fairyland Foibles,” presented by the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts program GRoW @ the Wallis, which allows the audience to play a part in shaping the narrative of each 15- to 20-minute episode. It streams every Saturday through August 15 at 7 p.m. PT on Facebook and Instagram and subsequently on demand.

‘The Present’ Revives Live Theater With a Magician and a Zoom Meeting

Observer: I’m always baffled by applause at magic shows. Appreciative clapping never seems the proper response to the base trickery by which a magician guesses the card in my hand or regenerates a rope cut into pieces. I will gladly cheer a barnstorming speech or virtuosic dance, even circus acrobatics—but my own gullibility? Nevertheless, illusionist Helder Guimarães had me slapping my paws together like a five-year-old at The Present, his gently bedazzling Zoom solo from Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse.

Finding Hope in Theatre That Hasn’t Happened Yet: How to Survive a Global Pandemic

Sightlines: To be a university student right now is to occupy a space of uncertainty and blame. Will universities meet face to face this fall? The plans that have been announced range from fully in person like Perdue University to full online like the entire California State system. Young people have become the nation’s favorite guilty party as everyone from the governor of Texas to U.S. Vice President hold them responsible for explosion of coronavirus outbreaks. This is all while many of them struggle with their own and their families’ health, financial precarity, and their worries about the world they are expected to join upon graduation.

Microsoft Teams’ Together mode could help cure Zoom fatigue

www.fastcompany.com: Microsoft believes it has an answer to Zoom fatigue, and it comes in the form of superimposing people onto a virtual auditorium in Microsoft Teams.

The new feature, called Together mode, acts as an alternative view for video calls, which you access through a menu button in the chat window.