[okfn-coord] funding gang: open shakespeare/open performance

Wed Jun 24 12:03:06 UTC 2009

Hi Funding Gang,

I am very keen to pursue an idea I was kicking around a few months ago -
which I am just calling Open Performance for the moment.

Just a reminder of the idea (this is rough and nasty and very prosaic but
hopefully you get the idea):

*All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players*

As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad program, Shakespeare has been given
major project status -
http://www.london2012.com/get-involved/cultural-olympiad/projects/world-shakespeare-festival.php
*

*Strikingly absent from the project are any opportunities for the public to
give their own voice to Shakespeare's work. Open Performance would therefore
be the public layer of the project.

The public would come to OpenShakespeare.org/LetsPerform (or something
hopefully considerably less naff) and be presented with a very simply
interface that lets them enter either a preferred scene or to enter
attributes such as how many actors they have available, gender of actors
(including don't care!) and the type of scene they are interested in
(fight/love/political etc) and we would spit out suggested scenes for them.
They would then be encouraged to take the scene and go and perform it and
capture it on video. They would then upload the video to a collection site
where they can tag it up with all sorts of attributes. Over time we would be
able to do things like link together scenes to have entire plays in a
patchwork of British performers. But ultimately the idea is to create a
library of Open Shakespeare performance.

OK that is the kernal of the idea - very simple in concept a bit trickier in
realisation but all doable I think. I have had no contact with the Cultural
Olympiad folks as yet so this may not come to anything but I figure it is
worth a try.

Obviously lots of details to be worked out but wanted to share this with you
before I start talking about it in wider circles. Please let me know what
you think. I have posted to the OpenShakespeare wiki some feature ideas
around text segmentation based on scene and scene attributes like number of
characters etc.

Regards
Paula

ps. haven't put this on discuss for the moment but only because I am
slightly concerned about it getting to the cultural olympiad folks before it
feels coherent.
 *
*
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