Universities, theatre and performance studies and COVID-19: How Prospero can help.

Students in Harlem, New York City, use Prospero to document performance work.

Universities are suddenly facing the practical challenge of how to maintain the education of thousands of students at distance and scale. What has always been considered a possibility has, almost overnight, become a reality.   

On top of this, individual researchers and Post Grads are finding themselves isolated from their academic communities and are facing new challenges in sharing and documenting their artistic or pedagogic practices.

In the face of the current crisis, C&T, as a National Portfolio Organisation of Arts Council England and a not-for-profit organisation, wants to play its part in supporting researchers and teachers.  As a consequence, we are creating new, discounted “Producer’ licenses for Prospero, our online theatre and arts education platform.

What is Prospero ? Prospero was created by C&T as a platform to enable distance learning in the performing arts and for the documentation and sharing of practice. We recognised that in the performing arts, the challenges of Online Distance Learning are very particular and were largely uncatered for by many pre-existing online services.  How can software enable creative practices?  How can digital technology easily document complex performative tasks and activities?  How do students and teachers record often subtle and nuanced creative experiences from multiple perspectives?

We think Prospero could be really helpful in addressing these challenges. As we are experienced researchers ourselves, regularly teaching in universities, we think we understand the context. We use Prospero all the time to build creative collaborations around the world, with diverse participants.  We’ve extensively used and tested the platform through arts projects across the UK and internationally, including in Vienna, China, the USA and Kenya.     

The best way to understand Prospero, like theatre, is to see it an action. Visit the Library and see Phil Porter teaching playwrighting, or former students of Royal Central School of Speech and Drama teaching acting techniques for examples. Prospero allows you to make what we call Smartscripts. These are real-time sequences of web resources, media, tutorials, instruction and commentary that are integrated into seamless flows. These can be easily authored by anyone and use the language and techniques of theatre to ensure they resonate with performing arts professionals and teachers. These smartscripts can then be shared at distance and scale. Prospero works entirely through web browsers. That’s all you need.

We think Prospero can help researchers, teachers, practitioners and academics at this difficult time. As a consequence, we are substantially reducing the cost of our Prospero license to universities and introducing a new Individual license for only £4.95 a month. Just take a few minutes to look at the Prospero website and some of the explainer videos and case studies and see if it might help you. You can also now find out more about these new licenses and their different benefits here.

Prospero has a full set on online tutorials and video guides to help people get started remotely. Prospero’s interface echoes the vocabulary of theatre and theatre makers, finding digital equivalents of the drama techniques and structures we all use.

We hope this helps everyone get through these times. C&T, as a not-for-profit company and a Registered Charity. If we could give Prospero away for free, we would, but we have to cover the costs of providing Prospero’s services. We hope introducing these new types of accounts, we can help students and teachers maintain the quality education we all strive for.

You can find out more about becoming a  Prospero Producer here.  Please feel free to email Dr Paul Sutton, if you have any questions.