Theatre Blogging

The Emergence of a Critical Culture

Megan Vaughan

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350068834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica teatrales

In this epic history-cum-anthology, Megan Vaughan tells the story of the theatre blogosphere from the dawn of the carefully crafted longform post to today's digital newsletters and social media threads. Contextualising the key debates of fifteen years of theatre history, and featuring the writings of over 40 theatre bloggers, Theatre Blogging brings past and present practitioners into conversation with one another. Starting with Encore Theatre Magazine and Chris Goode in London, George Hunka and Laura Axelrod in New York, Jill Dolan at Princeton University, and Alison Croggon in Melbourne, the work of these influential early adopters is considered alongside those who followed them. Vaughan explores issues that have affected both arts journalism and the theatre industry, profiling the activist bloggers arguing for broader representation and better working conditions, highlighting the innovative dramaturgical practices that have been developed and piloted by bloggers, and offering powerful insights into the precarious systems of labour and economics in which these writers exist. She concludes by considering current threats to the theatre blogosphere, and how the form continues to evolve in response to them.

PART ONE

HISTORY AND PRACTICE

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

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I’ll probably be accused of hyperbole for this opener, but… fuck it.

*deep breath*

The theatre blogosphere has made a more significant and far-reaching contribution to theatre – its practices as well as its profile – than anything else in the twenty-first century.

I mean, it’s probably not even that controversial a statement. Since its popular emergence in the late 1990s, the internet has revolutionized many industries. We order our groceries online, do business on our phones, and FaceTime our families on the other side of the world. We catch up with our friends in WhatsApp group chats and find new people to date on Tinder. We stream our telly now. Even my Dad, a man baffled by most technological developments since about 1982, lurks on the forums of his local fishing club, admiring photos of barbel and volunteering for riverbank clean-up sessions. Throughout the global north, we have integrated the digital realm into our meatspace lives, and theatre, even as an artform which depends upon presence, liveness and communion, has adjusted too.

Over the course of the last fifteen years, fuelled by technological change and inspired by writers covering music and politics amongst many other subjects, theatre bloggers have expanded and democratized the discourse around theatre more than any other group, professional or otherwise. Their interrogation of form, commitment to transparency and resistance to a paternalistic and parochial mainstream press has had a tangible impact on the way theatre is made and talked about today. Key industry issues – from the role of the playwright to the ethics of reviewing, from the nature of censorship to the politics of casting – have been debated and advanced by theatre bloggers, almost all of whom were writing without pay, simply because it mattered to them. For all its bruised egos and damaged reputations, theatre blogging is a fundamentally benevolent activity, undertaken through a genuine love and concern for this brilliant, exhausting art form.

But I am not here to proclaim blogging the saviour of theatre. With its high prices, limited audience capacities, and concentration in a handful of wealthy, Western cities, it is very possible that theatre cannot be saved. And any partial redemption will surely require a sea change in the way work is commissioned, funded and cast, plus mass resignations in its major venues and drama schools. The inherent exclusivity of theatre cannot be easily countered by the kind of large-scale digital reproduction and distribution which has altered other forms of art and media. While organizations like the UK’s National Theatre or New York’s Metropolitan Opera have additionally commodified their shows by broadcasting them live to cinemas, the essential irreproducibility of live performance prevents any real structural transformation. Theatre is fleeting, and it relies on physical proximity.

It does, however, have a chance of wider impact through the publicly disseminated recollections of its audiences and makers. But this means that every time – every single time – we hear or read about a show we didn’t personally see, our understanding of it is mediated by the person who did. When we read a review in the Guardian or the New York Times, we are having our impressions steered by those writers. When we only learn about theatremaking processes in the classroom, or from the memoirs of old white men on their retirement, a traditional way of doing things, and a traditional route into doing those things, is reinforced. When those with the power to communicate what theatre is, how it is made, what it means, how it makes us feel, all look and sound the same, and all share the same educational background and life experiences, then theatre stagnates. It is starved of new ideas, its audiences either get bored or get old and die, and it sacrifices its relevance to the numerous other (cheaper) art forms and cultural activities that do actually reflect people’s lives.

Many of the theatre bloggers celebrated in this book come from traditionally privileged racial and socio-economic backgrounds, but, increasingly, many do not. The emergence of the theatre blogosphere in 2003 established the conditions in which new voices and perspectives could be heard, outmoded practices could be questioned, and fresh ideas and initiatives championed. Its moments of greatest impact, which are chronicled in Chapter 2, demonstrated the potential of independent commentary to hold the theatre industry to account, often revealing the shortcomings of a declining mainstream press in the process.

Before we can start exploring that history however, it’s important that we understand what we mean when we use the term ‘blog’. It’s a word that has been used to describe a huge variety of websites, posts and projects, and, as our online habits shift, its meaning requires constant reassessment. To define the blog requires an understanding of blogging’s history, including the technological, economic, and ideological changes that have impacted its development; so that is where we begin.

The earliest blogosphere

Blogs were, of course, initially called ‘weblogs’. This term was coined by one of the form’s earliest practitioners, Jorn Barger, back in December 1997, a time when you still needed to know how to code in order to put anything online at all. The following year, another blogger, Jesse James Garrett, made a list of all the ‘sites like his’ he found as he surfed the burgeoning internet. There were twenty-three, and it reportedly took less than fifteen minutes to read all of them, every day (Garrett, n.d.). These first bloggers were all tech enthusiasts whose weblogs were link-driven; they pointed to the most interesting sites and webpages they found, supplemented with their own commentary and opinion.¹

Garrett sent his list to another blogger, Cam Barrett, who, in turn, added it to his main homepage. He used a sidebar so it would remain visible and accessible to visitors even as he continued to post other content. Before long, this practice of sidebar blog recommendations (which would come to be called the ‘blog roll’) caught on; it was in Peter Merholz’s sidebar list, in May 1999, that he playfully announced his decision to switch to a new abbreviation: ‘For What It’s Worth, I’ve decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee’-blog. Or “blog” for short’ (Merholz 2002).

By autumn 1999 this term ‘blog’ was firmly established, initially thanks to its swift addition to Jargon Scout, a popular catalogue of emergent web terminology, but also because a new piece of online software adopted the term in its name. On 23 August 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. It wasn’t the first free tool created to help coding novices self-publish online (Pitas, Open Diary, and a handful of others preceded it), but it quickly became the most popular, and, thanks to the simplicity of its user interface, was soon credited with instigating a small but significant shift in the nature of blogging.

In September 2000, Rebecca Blood compared Blogger’s back-end with that of MetaFilter, a community blog site which was launched only a month earlier. At the time, MetaFilter required users to complete three prescriptive fields in order to post an item to the feed there: URL, title and comment. It was built in the mould of those original link-driven weblogs, which were literally filtering the web for interesting things to share with readers.² Blogger, on the other hand, offered just one box for, well, everything, with each post automatically stamped with the time and date, and ordered chronologically, most recent first. These apparently minor technological choices on the part of Blogger’s designers, explained Blood, meant that before long, ‘increasing numbers of weblogs eschewed [the] focus on the web-at-large in favour of a sort of short-form journal’ (Blood 2000). We started to use the internet as a place to publish details of our lives, relationships and where we positioned ourselves politically. The sharing of interesting links still took place, but were now just as likely to direct readers to the blogs of our friends, or the websites of our favourite bands, than to random sites we had stumbled upon. We revealed much more of ourselves and our personal lives, and as readership grew, new friendships and relationships were forged, and new creative projects born. Bloggers started to realize that their thoughts, opinions, and ideas – however commonplace – mattered to others.

The definition of a blog changed too. In January 1999, Cam Barrett (he who had posted the very first blog roll) had initially defined it as ‘a small web site, usually maintained by one person that is updated on a regular basis and has a high concentration of repeat visitors’ (Barrett 1999), but after Blogger’s release, definitions of the form were all prioritizing reverse chronology.³ By 2003, Jill Walker Rettberg considered subject-specific blogs to be significant enough to address in her definition, considering the blogosphere as a ‘continuum from confessional, online diaries to logs tracking specific topics or activities’ (Walker Rettberg, 2003). The era of the political blog was born, predominantly in the United States, where bloggers would analyse, fact-check and comment upon news reports on the Clinton Presidency, the September 11 attacks, and military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was blogging as ‘citizen journalism’. Meanwhile, ‘MP3 blogs’ such as Said The Gramophone, Stereogum or Fluxblog, shared new music, often from unsigned bands. This was blogging as advocacy, with its roots in local scenes or pre-existing fandoms.

By 2005, the blogosphere was booming, its original 23-strong list having expanded into multiple communities and niches. At the same time, analysis of the blogosphere had become entangled with debates on ‘Web 2.0’, the supposed second phase of the internet’s development. Web 2.0 was almost synonymous with blogging to begin with; it was often used to describe the new technologies (like Blogger) which were enabling much larger numbers of people to contribute to the internet. More accurately though, it denoted a shift in the internet’s relationship to commerce.

The web as platform

After a period of high investment in the digital economy at the end of the 1990s, the ‘dotcom bubble’ had burst in 2001, wiping millions of dollars in value from the earliest web-based businesses. In the years immediately following that crash, many technologists became preoccupied with analysing what had gone wrong. Before long, some started to attribute the failure to a change in the way people participated in online space.

The first computer networks, bulletin board systems and email newsgroups which had emerged in the mid-1980s had been both accessible (provided you had the required kit) and participatory (provided you knew how to use it). These ‘virtual communities’, to use a phrase coined by Howard Rheingold,⁴ were largely built upon existing offline networks of media fans, amateur technologists and countercultural activists; it was their shared interests and exchange of knowledge which kept those networks buzzing. However, once Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘World Wide Web’ (one of several systems now facilitated by the internet) began to ex...