Member Article

The Legacy of Unfolding Theatre’s Multiverse To Be Unveiled

An award-winning theatre company is creating a legacy for its innovative Multiverse Lab by committing the project to Living Archive.

Unfolding Theatre opted to use Living Archive, an innovative cloud-based platform that enables organisations to showcase, collaborate and inspire, making it easy to upload, organise, curate and exhibit digital multi-media content so the team could host files and present the project in a way that is accessible, user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing. It was also felt that there would be ample support from the founder, Nick John Williams, whilst the site was populated with content, which was reassuring to the team.

Multiverse Lab is an interactive installation that was designed to help shape the future of health and social care research. It has involved gathering the opinions of 2,000 people to find out what matters to local people when it comes to health all of which are now on the Living Archive platform.

The interactive installation asked people living in the region to consider the following question, ‘What health or social care breakthrough do you hope to see in your lifetime?’.

The project resulted in a vast catalogue of audio and visual files recorded and collected from different regions around the North East. These archives needed to be shared with researchers and decision-makers, to support future health research in the region. Unfolding Theatre wanted to bring this data to life. Artistic Director Annie Rigby said:

“This project was all about making people’s voices heard and we delivered that in a playful and fun way so that it resonated with our audiences and drew out what they really felt about these very important topics. Having lots of recordings tucked away in files on the computer for researchers to sift through just didn’t seem to do the project justice. We wanted to bring it to life, convey a ‘feel’ for the project and elicit an emotive connection to the piece”.

Unfolding Theatre Creative Associate Garry Lydon was responsible for archiving the material on the Living Archive platform, supported by Artistic Director Annie Rigby. He said:

“Living Archive enabled us to take a huge abundance of material, attach the metadata to it and create an open, interactive and explorable online resource. With large data projects like this, a lot of great moments, thoughts and ideas get lost or are largely inaccessible; Living Archive offered a really nice way to demonstrate a body of work intuitively”.

“Another additional benefit to the infrastructure was the ability to use teams, giving access to other participants or organisers of a project with specific account rules. This feature really supports the documenting of projects where the end goal is to have a publicly available body of work”.

Nick Williams is now looking forward to celebratory event this Autumn when the outcomes will be reflected on and the Living Archive will be launched publicly. He said:

“Unfolding Theatre is very proud of Multiverse Lab and how the project has been presented on Living Archive. There is a legacy to the project that lives on; the audience-led research gathered will enable and help shape the future of health and social care in the region. It is exciting that this project has got Unfolding Theatre keen to explore how Living Archive could support the presentation of projects in the future too.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anna Toms .