Writer-Designer Intersections at MODULE Digital Alchemy Creation Lab: A Conversation between Taylor Marie Graham and Beth Kates

Abstract:Playwright Taylor Marie Graham and theatre/XR designer Beth Kates reflect on their collaborative digital theatre experiments throughout the week-long digital dramaturgy intensive Digital Alchemy Creation Lab: MODULE, funded by a Canada Council Digital Strategy Fund grant. MODULE was an experiment designed to provide playwrights and theatre artists with hands-on exposure to available and emerging technologies (projection design tools, virtual reality tools, etc.). The two discuss the need to dismantle rehearsal-room hierarchies, needed complications to the problematic binary of rural storytelling versus technology, creative process overlap between writers and designers, and theatremaking in virtual reality, as well as the expansive storytelling potential of writer-designer intersections at project inception.