Scratch Interact- Ideas for a scratch night for interactive theatre

Convener(s): Sam Howey Nunn, Chris Gage

Participants: Tassos Stevens, Annette Mees, others, didn’t get the names sorry! 

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

We wanted to ask people what they wanted from a scratch night for interactive theatre because we are starting one this week, quarterly (to begin with) at the Southwark Playhouse (for now).  If interested sign up for the mailing list at www.gluehq.co.uk  (self promotion bit done with)

Points that people made 

• want a safe environment; the opportunity to choose between trying stuff out on other makers or on the general public
• why not a platform rather than a scratch night? We thought the point being that people who make interactive theatre need a scratch night because they need to test their work out on real people, and develop it by working with real audiences so scratch opportunities are essential
• point that we have a responsibility, duty of care to our audience, lots of them wont have had an encounter with interactive work so we mustn’t put them off by allowing their first impressions tobe negative-we owe that to the rest of the interactive theatre makers. Scary thought!
• Point that scratch nights can be annoying when they are too assuming of an audience’s good nature- the audience give feedback etc so they need to be treated well, and interactive scratch asks them to interact too. We need to respect all that.
• Make the feedback and the peer review part of it a little bit open space technology. Give people options to get more intimate feedback and group feedback as appropriate.
• Nice idea to ask the attending ‘playing audience’ to buy a beer for the artist whose work they liked most. A nice way of getting people talking too..  sets the right tone
• Perhaps grade the work we are scratching according to levels of development so that people come to it with the right level of expectation. Or like the Sandpit, start off with more scratchy stuff and build to more finished pieces.
• The danger that we become a night for small intimate work (1:1) rather than interactive theatre because we cant accommodate any ambitions of scale.
• Finished with a general discussion of what interactive stuff we’d all seen and thought was really good.   General sense that a lot of the good stuff is happening in Holland, finland…