NETWORKED THEATRE: A NEW PARADIGM OF APPLIED DRAMA PRACTICE FOR THE GLOBALISED MEDIA AGE

Creativity is increasingly located at the centre of curriculum innovation in cultures across the globe. However, the relationship between the performing arts (and in particular drama) and ICT is often viewed with suscipision by teachers and educational policy makers. C&T is an internationally acclaimed theatre company working in the field of applied drama that is tackling these tensions through its projects in schools. The company has developed a distinctive pedagogy that builds synergies between drama and it's processes and digital technologies. This presentation will outline the hallmarks of this practice, focussing on the company's international network of school partnerships and the range of social media and digital resources the company has developed to enable creative learning to flourish between students in often remote and diverse geographic locations and communities.

The presentation will focus on C&T project in particular, the living newspaper.net. In the first global recession of the twenty first century, theatre company C&T is re-inventing the classic documentary drama form of The Living Newspaper for the internet age. The Livingnewspaper.net is an online drama that invites young people to take on the roles and responsibilities of a previous generation of docu-dramatists and explore the subject matter that shapes young peoples' lives today. This presentation will demonstrate the online drama of C&T's Living Newspaper form and how the drama unfolds across C&T's national and international network of school and community-based partnerships currently linking young people in England, Japan, Australia and the Gambia. It will also show how some of the more conventional disciplines of theatre-making have been successfully integrated into the project form, for example, how a resident playwright is collaborating with students in a number of virtual spaces.

This presentation will demonstrate the website at the centre of this project and the social media tools the company has developed to serve the needs of students and teachers in its thirty partner schools, colleges and universities. The presentation will go on to describe and illustrate the pedagogic methodologies the company has shaped to enable this practice in classrooms and reference how these draw on established Process Drama techniques.

Finally the presentation will look forward to future international collaborations drawing on C&T's methods and digital resources and look to the potential that such activities have in the field of international collaboration and cross curricular learning.