Joe is a producer, theatre maker, and creative technologist based in Nottingham and, now they'll be joining the DaDaFest team as our new Digital Producer! Get to know them through this quick Q&A, and stay tuned to experience DaDaFest International digitally this November.
What are you looking forward to about working with DaDaFest?
I’m really looking forward to meeting loads of new artists and supporting them as they explore the world of digital art and performance, for the festival and beyond.
What are some other projects you’ve been working on?
My theatre company, Chronic Insanity, is just finishing a project where we’re staging 12 shows in 12 months. After that’s done we’ll be taking a break for the rest of 2020 to develop more shows for 2021. I’m also finishing up a PhD in Future Experience Technologies and conducting research into powering digital theatre with audience behaviour data.
What drew you to working in disability arts?
Art exists to allow us to expand our horizons, to challenge ourselves, to understand more about the world, so any art made by people who are chronically misunderstood or misrepresented is incredibly important. Anyone can become disabled by society at any point in their life, so art that can help normalise this is worth championing and amplifying.
What are some interesting developments you've seen as the arts has increasingly gone digital?
That more and more people are calling for an offering of digital art to remain post-lockdown. There are so many benefits to creating digital versions of art, socio-economic, access, environmental, which many of us have known about for ages, but now even more people are aware of the many conveniences of digital art it would be a huge mistake to ever backtrack on this way of delivering work to audiences.
Any recommendations for current online events for people to check out?
Well, Chronic Insanity’s current performance is our most ambitious yet. 52 Souls is a pick-and-mix digital theatre production about death and mortality where the audience chooses which scene to watch using a shuffled pack of cards. It has an international cast of 52 performers and is a truly unique experience. There’s also an awful lot of full music festival sets from all sorts of bands available on YouTube at the moment.
Want to know who the rest of the team are? You can find out more about the people behind DaDaFest here: https://www.dadafest.co.uk/people/staff