Is there such a thing as true interactive live theater, by which we mean that the audience has real agency to impact the story? Our discovery project was borne of a discussion that generated a lot of interest at the recent foldA (Festival of live digital Art) festival which Brenda, one of our instructors, attended. Our team will be trying to explore this definition of interactive theater and the possible use of technology to help realize it this semester.
We’re all excited to get started, so we began first thing this week with meeting with our instructors to establish some scope and areas of interest for our project. Some points emphasized are:
- Live theater
- Our focus is on live theater, where the audience is present for the performance.
- Use of technology
- We are curious how technology can be used to make live theater a meaningful interactive experience. We don’t want a “gimmick”; we want the technology to be an organic part of the experience.
- Interactive theater with agency
- The term “interactive” is often used to indicate audience participation of different degrees, but we want to specifically explore the possibility of audiences having the agency to make significant changes to the story.
- Interactive vs Immersive
- One thing we will find is that interactive theater is often actually immersive theater, that is, the audience is surrounded by the world of the story, but their action does not necessarily impacted the story itself. It will be important for us to define these terms clearly for ourselves and build a common taxonomy.
- Live performance <———–> Video games
- Immersive theater like Sleep No More are known to be inspired by video games. We want to find more inspiration on the spectrum from live performance to video games, where there are a range of degrees of audience involvement and different use of technology.
We recognize that these topics are tall orders! Along the way, we may discover new questions (Do the audience even want agency? Is technology the best way to achieve interaction with agency?), and our goal is not to make a production, but to make prototypes that answer our research questions.
We will spend our first three weeks researching, looking at existing work both in and outside the ETC, developing our own understanding of interactive theater and getting on the same page with each other before we start working with project partners.
To start our research, we have compiled a list of works (Note. Permission required to view some links in this blog) that we have read about and started a mural to visualize our research. We’ve also attended one relevant work-in-progress project personally as a team.
The start of our mural; orange notes are for categories, yellow is for examples, and blue is for comments.
-Team
Production
Production is the busiest early in the semester! Tasks we completed:
- Decided on our team name: theatre.exe
- Set up our paper calendars
- Set up team Google Drive and team Slack.
- Put our core hours & personal hours where we would be working on the project on Google Calender
- Set up regular meetings with our instructors who also function as our clients
- Had our first team retrospective; the conclusion seemed to be that that shared Google docs are helpful for collaborating and having a sense of progress when researching but we should have more group discussions to help us get on the same page
Excellent paper calendars courtesy of Healthy’s sure hand and artistic eye
-Healthy & Tina