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These days all I can think about is story. For me, any discussion of "transmedia" art practice is based in an appreciation of story-telling that serves the vestiges of some ritual purpose. In other words, I come at it from theatre. When I discovered what "art" could do, it was as a wee lad being blown away watching theatre. Or being blown-to-theatre, which has infected my imagination, so that whenever I imagine anything happening, I see it on a stage.

Too often other media are incorporated with live performance to enable artists to further obfuscate an already-muddled idea or narrative. But technology must be used to illuminate, to feed the story-telling fires that Lepage and Anderson talk about. We may soon be crying for a Luddite repair, not because we don't find technology seductive and inherently powerful, but because as audiences, we've lost sight of why we gather at night in the first place. As a fledgling screenwriter, the simple truth I've learned is that unless one has a good screenplay, and unless those pages tell the most gripping and worthy story, the resulting film cannot not be of consequence to most people.

I use the word "worthy." To me, story is the way of addressing this crucial question of worth. As a writer, I am continually humbled by the fact that what I write mobilizes dozens of other artists who devote their considerable skills in the labour, usually underpaid, of translating my script into its final form.

That said, I don't think that story-telling is about pandering easy or conventional. The artist's obligation is to find new too ways to tell a story and here, technology becomes a tool rather than a prop. In my new play Grace, I'm inspired by the technologies of film and photography (the same thing really) to construct a kind of "view master" style of narrative that releases the audience and requires their active participation between the frames.

I think of the sound element of Judy Radul's installation in the VAG's Topographies: aspects of recent bc art. A series of recorded conversations with her friends and family, we find it initially titillating from a voyeuristic (auristic?) point of view, but we stay listening because the piece succeeds in cobbling together, in an almost epistolary way, a story of one woman's life.

Maybe it's all the film pitching I've been doing in Toronto these days, where all you hear is story story story. But when I'm in a good pitch, when I've got a producer intrigued, the look on their face is that of a child being told a story: open, curious, and feeling. Which I believe we all want to experience.