The Flickerman: new forms of narrative for new forms of listening
Downloadable delivery of audio presents the radio drama writer and producer with the opportunity to experiment with new ways of assembling and presenting narrative. The audience is no longer tied to listening at a particular time, a particular location or in a particular fashion – they can control their listening experience, the can pause, rewind, draw in or draw out of the narrative. No longer tied to a schedule, to an audience demographic or even a particular station radio drama can be produced in a manner that will challenge and subvert accepted understanding of how the form functions.
The Flickerman is an ongoing interactive radio drama project that has run on radio stations internationally since Spring 2009; being described in the Guardian as “new and amazing” “fashionable compulsiveness” and “a strange and exhilarating project”. The narrative is unpacked through the combined use of audio, film, online interaction and a bricolaged of Internet artefacts. Dissemenated via iPhone app, online networks and broadcast radio – The Flickerman creates layered narrative of great depth that allows the audience to chose how they interact with and listen to the story. It is an attempt to create a working programme model for a new kind of radio/audio drama listener.
Lance Dann is the founder of Radio Art group Noiseless Blackboard Eraser
(1994 - 2007) and Associate Member of The Wooster Group (1998 to present). He studied Radio at Goldsmiths' College and produced a number of experimental radio programmes for Festival Radio Productions' Brighton based RSL radio stations during the early 1990s.
As a radio artist he has worked extensively with composer Rohan Kriwaczek on a series of works for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and independent stations internationally. Their collaborations included a long running series of live radio performances and a trilogy of experimental plays for radio ("If on a Summer Night a Listener...", "Ho! Ho! The Clown is Dead" and "Glowboys"). Between 1996 and 2002 he worked with The Wooster Group as producer of a sequence of plays for BBC Radio 3 ("The Emperor Jones", "Phaedra" and "The Peggy Carstairs Report"). He worked as sound designer for the company during the development of "To You the Birdie" and through performances of "House/ Lights". In 1999 he recorded two documentaries with Yoko Ono for BBC Radio 3, the first time she'd spoken at length to the British media for over 20 years. His work in radio and theatre has earned a number of awards including two Sony Awards and a Prix Marulic.
In recent years he has been writing for BBC Radio, carrying out doctoral research at Bath Spa University in the development of radio drama commissioning at the BBC on behalf of the Society of Authors, running a Sound Design programme at Ravensbourne College and developing ARG based audio projects with Panicboy Productions.
