What have Shakespeare's Globe, The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Opera Factory, the Really Useful Company (USA) and the amateur Tring Festival Company have in common? Well, apart from their theatrical orientation each of these groups has started to promote itself on the Internet.
So what is the Internet and why have these groups decided to spend the effort and/or money making themselves citizens of the cyber-culture?
The Internet is a world-wide network of computers filled to overflowing with information, some of it useful, much of it specialised and with its own share of cupboards and skeletons, as the less well informed newspapers are all too keen to remind us. Until recently the Internet was the domain of the techno-head, as difficult to navigate and control as the oceans in the 15th Century - then came a Columbus to create the means for non-computing mortals to take a ride, with some expectation of getting to their destination.
In the area of the Internet our brave navigator was Tim Berners-Lee and the means he gave us is 'the Web'. Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist with a strong interest in amateur drama, has the rare attribute of doing what he does for the greater good of the community, rather than the greater size of his bank balance, for which we can all be truly grateful. Naturally, for a Brit with such vision, he developed the Web while working at CERN in Switzerland and will shortly be moving to the USA.
The Web which Tim, with colleagues, created provides a relatively easy to use interface to the wildly complex systems that are required to create and control the Internet. The Web also provides what is known as a hypermedia system …. the ability to display text, images, video and sound all interconnected to other, related, information: a sort of 'stream of consciousness magazine' which leaves you free to follow your thoughts rather than being tied to reading just what the author produced.
Other facilities of the Internet include on-line newsgroups where you can meet other interested people to discuss topics such as stagecraft and playwrighting and on-line chat groups where there have even been performances of (heavily adapted!) versions of Hamlet and Macbeth - but the centre of the Internet world remains the Web.
Enough of the techno-chat - back to the original questions. Why have drama people started to use the Internet and what do they expect to gain? Forget the computers, wires, magic incantations at the keyboard and even Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet and the Web are just another group of promotional tools. The Internet can combine the intimacy and immediacy of a local newspaper with the power and reach of an international advertising campaign.
My first experience in this area was publishing a page of information on the amateur dramatic group I belong to, Flat Four. We are only 13 people and we perform each play less at most a half a dozen times in one-act play festivals, but within a week of putting information about us on the Internet there were a hundred people or more, from all over the world reading about us every week. I started getting electronic mail from the USA, Japan, Australia, Eastern Europe and just down the road asking for more details.
It is the flexibility and speed of the system that provides much of its power. Web information can include text, pictures, sound and movies and can be made available worldwide in a matter of minutes or hours. It is this exposure and immediacy which attracts the aware drama promoters, both amateur and professional. A new, untapped, form of getting bums on seats - or students on courses. But its early days, the majority of the readership is still North American (largely because they get free local phone calls!) and the main bias of the readership is the professional mid-thirties married male.
There's a long way to go, but the Internet is likely to provide the definitive means of promoting performing arts in the UK. It is perhaps the only way to provide information to users 24 hours a day whether they live next door to the theatre or are travelling in from abroad.
If you want to experiment with the Internet yourself and don't have immediate access to a suitable computer then why not visit one of the many emerging cyber-cafés where you can have a hands-on guided introduction to the net. All the on-line site mentioned in this article can be found by connecting to http://www.uktw.co.uk and looking at the `Articles' page.
[771 words - Copyright UK Theatre Web, UK. 1995]
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