Paradigm Shift: Making Theatre with Social Media

Abstract

In The Society of the Spectacle, first published in French in 1967, Guy Debord has a sense that “the show is not a collection of images, but a social rapport between people, mediatized by images.” While his observations certainly ring true in the internet age, it is unlikely that Debord could have envisioned the extent to which mediatization has transformed the making of theatrical work. Social media, being at the heart of everyone’s day to day experience, is a central part of the two works under discussion here: Semblance (2013) and La fin de la fiction, which is currently in development and scheduled for production in 2022. This paper focuses on these two experiences of professional theatre-making and explores the distinction between creating work with social media and making work about social media, given how the complexities of it proliferate and change so rapidly.

Keywords

• social media
• theatre creation
• process
• product
• collective