Guest Blog: Forristal & Clarke Chat PUBLIC DOMAIN at Southwark Playhouse Online

Written and performed by Francesca Forristal & Jordan Paul Clarke, Public Domain takes words spoken and typed on the internet in the past year to build a unique portrait of the digital world that is every bit as mesmerising as it is terrifying.

This high-adrenaline, electronic thrill ride is made entirely from the words of YouTube vloggers, Instagram influencers, Facebook's
tech giants and everyday internet users.

A dark, funny, verbatim musical about the internet: those who own it; those who live in it; and you. It's like Black Mirror but real, and set to music.

The first song from the show was written for Newsfeed, a 2019 Southwark Playhouse event that asked writers to create songs based on that week's news. Exactly one year later, this first iteration of the show returns to the same room where it began. Forristal and Paul Clarke discuss the show.

Hey, y'all. We're Chesca [Forristal] and Jordan [Paul Clarke], and we've spent the last 12 months making Public Domain. Think of it like this: a musical Black Mirror about The Social Dilemma. But at an electronica rave, in a teenager's bedroom. That's Public Domain.

It's about our relationship to being online, and searching for authentic forms of communication in a medium which so often stops that being possible. Who owns our voices once they're on the public domain? How authentic can those voices be? And what is it about total 'authenticity' that is so alluring?

This show is entirely verbatim. That means every word in the show (every song lyric, every line) is taken from YouTube videos, real tweets, or Instagram posts.

We're using the words of people who make financial profit from the internet like Zuckerberg, or social media influencers, as well as the 'products' - normal people like you or me - who put so much of our lives onto the public domain. We're talking content monitoring, data privacy ethics, loneliness, mental health, exclusively using voices we've found online.

Take everything you love about modern musical theatre cast recordings, put them in the washing machine with the brooding Spotify playlists of a 16-year-old YouTuber (electropop, EDM, trap), condition with a dash of silicon-valley electronica, and out comes this show. The music in the show should feel like diving headfirst into the internet, with digital loops and fragmented bops coming at you with every scroll.

We're serving up all the most addictive elements of the internet with a side of sick beats. It's a pop-concert youtube hole, with the two of us playing everyone you might find online: Facebook administrators, teenagers on Twitter, insta-vloggers, members of congress, that happy guy on the Tik-Tok ads, and corporate tech leaders.

The show follows two teenage influencers; Millie (sporty spice, health guru, buddha bowls - millennial) and Z (GCSEs, existential dread, swag - generation Z), as well as giving you exclusive "footage" of inside Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan's family home. You're gonna get their honest, true, authentic selves, but online, with some serious bass, obvs. Authentic, right?

Verbatim was totally new to us, and a lot of this process has been us working out what our relationship to the form is. Initially, we just intended to write one song for ALP's Newsfeed - a night of songs created in response to that week's news - at the Southwark Playhouse.

We'd literally just been raving about a video that had popped up on our Twitter feed: Congresswoman Katie Porter totally rinsing Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's atrocious treatment of their workers and data privacy ethics.

We wanted to make a song that really emphasized the 'bad-ass takedown' vibe that we got from watching the original video. So we spent a rather frantic 48 hours creating this dark, bassy, synthy little number - it became this Hamilton-esque "Cabinet Battle" using Katie Porter and Mark Zuckerberg's actual words, and creating music that kind of, magnified their tonal and speech qualities.

It went down a storm - we'd theatricalised the equivalent of meme-autotuning, which felt really appropriate for a show about the internet. We were buzzed, and pretty soon, we'd fallen down a 12-month YouTube hole that brought us new characters and perspectives. Musical themes began to resonate across the content we were finding. The content we found told us what we needed to write next.

When COVID-19 hit, and the whole world started to change, we had to rethink our plans a little. There we were, writing a piece about searching for authentic forms of connection online.

Next thing we knew, the internet was the only option we had. It's not in the show anymore, but right at the beginning of lockdown, we had a whole song about Zoom meetings made entirely out of tweets from the first week of lockdown.

We started this show just before COVID-19 and lockdowns were even a thing; we were booked to perform it at the Edinburgh Fringe and everything. Madness.

Six months on, we have an incredibly different show. There are lyrics and lines in the show taken from events as recent as two weeks ago. It's been exhilarating writing something that is - through its form, rather than COVID-specific content itself - responding to this moment in time.

Working at a distance and entirely online has been nigh on impossible at times? But we love a challenge. And, bizarrely, it's been a real gift for helping us engage with the themes of the show.

This is the show's first outing, and what better way to watch a show about the internet... than on the internet? We'll be performing it live, from The Southwark Playhouse in London, on the 11th and 12th of Dec. 7:45 pm, with a 2:45 pm matinee on Sat 12th.

This show can only be watched on your devices at home, which makes the show accessible to anyone in the world; 100% live, beamed in from the theatre which is being set up like a pop-up TV studio. We're excited!

Public Domain at Southwark Playhouse available online from 15 January 2021

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