What is Our Digital Stories?
The idea for Digital Stories came from a place of need. A group of artists were in the beginnings of the COVID19 pandemic and eager to find a way to contribute to the community and to find a creative outlet while sheltering in place. What came of it was a fundraiser event surrounding a series of pieces that were set within the digital world - video chats, phone calls, texts - and performed on the digital medium of the story. We saw these as a hybrid of a ten minute play and a short film and called them “Digital Stories.”
When we created these Digital Stories, we realized something interesting and quite special. The health concerns of the world required us to stay apart from each other and we wanted to see what would happen if we leaned into this need to stay apart and see what it did for our storytelling. Although this new format of storytelling was not going to replace what we loved about live theatre or film and television, this format of play provided us an opportunity to create stories that felt surprisingly intimate in a way that feels entirely real and entirely of the moment. With OUR DIGITAL STORIES we are looking to continue this work through regular episodes where we will present a number of individual Digital Stories while partnering with different community service and arts organizations to help support them. In addition to this, we hope that by using the internet as our venue, OUR DIGITAL STORIES can be a point of access to storytelling and representation for all communities.