theatre

Theatre is a sometimes forgotten casualty of the current pandemic. Social distancing precludes the assembly necessary for participatory theatre. Theatre and theatrical improvisation rely on participants--performers and audiences alike--gathering in the same space, exploiting their physical proximity to tell stories. Because of the limited modalities of communication, virtual gatherings using video-conferencing platforms are, at best, an ersatz solution for audiences longing for connection in an ever more disconnected world. While some performance groups have embraced tele-conferencing and streaming for workshops, practice and performance, many theatre makers and performers are preferring to temporarily pause while waiting for the conditions of performance to resume [1]. We took the opposite view, believing that live theatre cannot wait for the pandemic to wane. 

We therefore built a computer tool for online performance. Our system, called the Virtual Director, enables actors to recreate a feeling of presence with stage partners while performing and storytelling remotely [2]. 

Our research combines cinematic and video communication technologies with the theatrical practice of improvisational and scripted theatre, and aims at recreating presence, virtually.Virtual Director relies on commodity software (TouchDesigner, web browsers), widely adopted video conferencing tools (Zoom, Microsoft Teams) and streaming platforms (YouTube, Twitch)--digital platforms for streaming and video conferencing that we subverted for participatory online performances.

We deployed Virtual Director during community-based performances at the Online Paris Fringe festival. We noticed that the audience was curious about new interaction formats and performance modalities. We believe that our streamed performances redefined the nature of live performance, as we identified four levels of participation: performer, privileged audience member, general audience member, and onlooker who watches the recording of the show. First, our tool enabled visual collocation and presence among performers. Second, Virtual Director enabled visual collocation and audio interaction between selected audience members and the performers, or recreated visual presence if we placed them in a virtual “amphitheatre”. Third, audiences could interact indirectly via chat. Finally, onlookers followed the show via streaming. As a complement to previous analyses of the performers’ experience of presence in a tele-immersive virtual space [2], this paper examines the perception of the performance by audiences and their participation in collective storytelling; we situate our work in literature on improvisation and interactive performance. 

As we performed remotely with multilingual actors from different countries, we exploited live translation and speech recognition technology to enable actors to improvise in multiple languages while being understood by cast members and audiences. Building up on an existing multilingual improv stage show [3], we combined tele-immersion with translation to create a multilingual performance that transcends typical physical limitations of the stage. Our paper concludes with our ongoing work: once we assemble again in a post-pandemic world, we will keep the tele-immersion and translation tools to create mixed-presence connected international shows. 

[1] Berger, "The Forgotten Art of Assembly”, April 2020, retrieved January 2021, https://medium.com/@nicholasberger/the-forgotten-art-of-assembly-a94e16…] Branch et al, “Tele-Immersive Improv”, SIG CHI 2021.[3] Mirowski et al, “Rosetta Code: Improv in Any Language”, Computational Creativity 2020.

Virtual Reality presents great promise as a storytelling medium, but rarely delivers on that promise because it is often approached as an offshoot of cinema. Virtual Reality as a narrative medium has much more in common with theater, using multi-modal narrative in a three dimensional space to tell the story. The possibility of multiple users sharing a virtual space simultaneously creates the opportunity for live performance, with one or more performers moving among and around the audience -- immersive theater within a computer-generated setting. This paper examines the aesthetics of this new space for digital performance. We introduce a new type of performance activity, “Immersive Mixed Reality Theatre” (IMRT), which promises exciting possibilities for participatory immersive digital narratives. To explore the potential aesthetics of IMRT we created Holojam In Wonderland (2017), a short play inspired by the work of Lewis Carroll. It was built on the Holojam platform developed by the NYU Future Reality Lab, which enables both performers and audience to walk around with untethered VR headsets within the same room. Sharing the same physical space is part of the enchantment of live theatre, where the audience feels they could touch the actors; this proximity with the bodies and voices of the performers creates a visceral connection with the audience. This is the sense of presence that is often elusive in Virtual Reality. We wanted to transpose the excitement of live theatre to a visually expansive experience mediated by computer graphics, allowing a live co-located audience to experience a performed narrative via a shared immersive digital world.Our work differs from other mediated experiences, including other types of Virtual Reality, in which the viewer is physically isolated. Rather, IMRT is a new type of theatrical experience that invites shared immersion by audience and performers within a digital mediated space, while retaining physical proximity. IMRT presents specific design challenges. Because all participants are represented as computer-generated avatars, the aesthetics of IMRT inherit features from animated film and puppetry. As IMRT occurs in a physical space, the performance and movements must still be connected to its physical components, to allow all participants to remain aware of each other and of the space. In addition, an experience must consider how the audience transitions between the physical and digital worlds.We have also explored the additional affordances of virtual reality by experimenting with features that are not possible in traditional theater. Individual head-mounted displays allow for personalized teleprompters, visible only to individual performers reading their cues. Computer generated imagery affords many effects, such as changing the scale of objects and characters. Having a live performer become a giant or lilliputian allowed us to create a powerful sense of wonder, which informed our decision to use Alice in Wonderland as the first text to appropriate and adapt. As an exploration, Holojam in Wonderland uses Alice as a guide into a new and exciting dream world, in this case the land of immersive mixed reality theater.

Video and computer games as performance spaces continue literary traditions of drama and theater, and particularly Brechtian “defamiliarization” and subsequent practices of street / guerrilla theater. Such performance work is one end of electronic literature: delivery to a vast audience, potentially the largest any work of e-lit could have; at the same time, epic failure in the complete disregard for the performance by the game players – the literary performance as nothing more than spam.

In fact, exactly this makes such work literary. This presentation discusses two game “interventions” staged over several years by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University: 1) Coal Dust, a series of agitprop theater performances about resource exploitation staged in MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online; and 2) Beckett spams Counter-Strike, carefully staged performances of Endgame in the tactical shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

Such interventions are critical displacements and performances enacted on the game space and community of CS:GO and LOTRO, but also on the literary works themselves – on the agitprop theater text and its claims, and on Beckett’s Endgame. As “existential spamming” (one name for the overall project), the interventions both insist on a political and contextual “reading” of the game space, but also consume the space through absurd and ineffectual performance – a problematic situation that perhaps defines the literariness involved.

This presentation at ELO 2015 situates these works in terms of literary and dramatic tradition, as described above, but also as a corrective supplement to the existing discussion of computer/video games in e-lit scholarship. “Literary games” are an established area of scholarship. Astrid Enslin’s excellent book sets a precedent for analyzing both artistic works making use of game-like aesthetics and affordances (think Jason Nelson’s games), on the one hand, and games that can claim literary merit, on the other (think Journey or Left Behind). The interventionist projects described here offer a very different engagement with games, and in doing so call attention to a need for greater understanding of performance and improvisation in e-lit.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)