Cyber Studio

From a project concept by Anna Furse with Zeljko Hrs. The term 'cyber studio' was used by Anna Furse, Artistic Director of Athletes of the Heart, UK, who commissioned this programme to facilitate collaboration across 3 countries by a company of dispersed performers for the purposes of creating a text for her production DON JUAN.WHO?/DON JUAN.KDO? in 2007 with Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The 'Cyber Studio' assembled by Marko Plahuta was conceived to mimic all the requirements of an ideal theatrical research environment ie a space for live practice, a space to record and store such practice, a space for reflective writing and a facility for collecting research in various media. We also wanted to have a public face during our two year research process, which was our blog. The manual explains basic procedures to create an interactive, multiuser computer environment for collaboration in groups with an emphasis on live performance creation ( though it may be used simply for collective research and/or cyber-performance). It also details main software requirements for setting up such an environment. The purpose of the environment we created was to enable a group of artists scattered around the world to collaborate on a theatrical piece. In our project anonymity was essential in our collaborative online writing process. As was the possibility of storing our live writing sessions for future editing. We found the open source 'Upstage' programme extremely user friendly, and eventually worked more in the dialogue box than the stage, though avatars did assist in our 'masquerade'.

The Studio provided:

* Components of collaborative environment:
Upstage - a tool for writing the show/ live improvisation and/or rehearsal

* Blog - a multiuser blog that worked as a publishing platform for the authors and actors to publish their thoughts, comments, questions and creative material.

* File repository (wiki) – a multiuser environment to store Word documents, pictures, movies and all material that for various reasons (size, ease of publishing, creative reasons) was not suitable for the blog.