Live action theatre on facebook/Twitter

[sobrique]

A thought that crossed my mind this weekend - could you do a piece of theatre or performance art using Facebook or Twitter? Y'know, create a scripted but improvisational drama in real time.

What sorts of things could you do, and how would you deal with an audience you did or didn't tell in advance?

One that crossed my mind is a sort of murder mystery type thing - get a bunch of the characters to relay 'parts' of the story as it's developing, with maybe a detective thread in the middle of it?

Ideally something geared up towards some manner of audience participation.

Comments

[elrohana.livejournal.com]

Course you could. We ran a few things like this on the old Sinergy board several years ago, if you think back. Ok that was a closed community but the principle is the same.

If you could get everyone involced to post from mobiles, you could run pretty much anything - e.g. the car crash and rescue that I ran as Cleo, with the Doc, and the Temple guys (Broz, Nigel and James).

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Hmm, had kind of forgot about that - SINergy to my mind never quite gelled with the "forum events" nit least because of the ... well sort of question of why they were forum posting about what they were doing, if you see what I mean.
But I suppose it is a good start - I was sort of thinking a little more in terms of "things you would post in facebook or twitter" and with a cast on standby to deliver the "script".

Hmm. Little more thought needed I think, but I am starting to like the idea.

[elrohana.livejournal.com]

Ah, but if you consider that the forum was meant to be the Net/Matrix representation of the phone/radio calls that were being made, it makes more sense. They weren't posting, they were talking and the 'Matrix' logged it. If you had VR software on your phone, you could probably do that very thing with Twitter right now. When those Sinergy things were happening, we didn't have Twitter, else we would probably have used it!

[absintheskiss.livejournal.com]

They were bloody good fun, I enjoyed those.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Even then though - you end up having to describe what you're doing some of the time, or end up remarkably awkward about not doing so.

*shrug*. Maybe that's just me.

[elrohana.livejournal.com]

PS I'd say Twitter was better suited, just because its so easy to use from any mobile phone, even a fairly basic one. I find FB is hard work on my phone.

[jorune.livejournal.com]

If it was on twitter then your story would need to cope with the possibility that the whole world could intervene at any point. There are people on twitter who continually search for key words/phrases and then comment on them. Therefore the possibility of the story being hijacked by unexpected forces and being completely derailed is beyond non zero.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Which would be largely why I'd be looking to present it as ... well, as if twitter were a report on a 'real' event of some form, rather than something explicitly 'interactive fic'