Audience invited to take part in NIDA Ghost Lights

NIDA’s Digital Theatre Festival kicks off with a call for audience participation in Ghost Lights. Audiences worldwide are invited to perform, record, and upload a monologue to social media and the best monologues will be showcased every week.

Opening 4 August, the Digital Theatre Festival comprises six world-premiere transmedia works in the modes of farce, horror, sci-fi adventure, love stories, classic characters and multi-media collage.

“At the beginning of this pandemic, every theatre in the world was closed. That never happened before," said Director, projection and new media artist Katy Alexander. "We were seeing all these amazing images of empty cities, like the Eiffel Tower and Sydney Opera House with no one around, and that got us thinking about empty theatres – where do all the characters go? That’s really where the concept came from.”

“As all performance venues across the world went dark, the old tradition of the ghost light was revived – leaving on a single naked bulb on a stand inside the theatre – to ensure that an empty theatre is kept ‘alive’ and never left in total darkness,” she said.

Australian and international audiences are now invited to take part and help keep ghost lights, characters and the magic of theatre alive by uploading a monologue on social media.

How to take part
Prepare and record a monologue from your favourite play and upload it to social media using the #ghostlightscommunity + #ghostlights2020 in the caption and tag the Ghost Lights page (@ghostlights2020) on both Instagram and Facebook.

Ghost Lights is keen to have as many kinds of monologues as possible, in as many voices as possible. If you are a writer, they welcome performances of your monologues or duologues: you may wish to perform them yourself or invite friends to perform them.

Each week the production will select the best monologues to be featured on their social media.

Ghost Lights participants are required to seek permission from the copyright holder of their chosen script prior to recording and uploading a monologue, unless a work is now in the public domain.