First Wave Digital Theatre Makes a Splash
Wayfinding: Introduction > First Wave Digital Theatre
First wave digital theatre began almost as soon as digital technology became available to home consumers around 1980. The first wave incorporated digital technologies into theatrical tools, and even sometimes, into performers. In contrast, second wave digital theatre remediated the stage event itself into online content – which it was able to accomplish with ease thanks to the ongoing digital revolution’s remediation of many forms of old media into new online media. Bolter and Grusin define remediation in their eponymously named book as ‘the representation of one medium in another …’. This remediation of theatre’s stage-medium into websites, social media, online video, digital screens, video projections, videogame characters, and chatrooms meant that, alongside traditional media like television, film, and radio, new digital theatre was able to reach a wider audience, as Hans Thies-Lehmann points out in Postdramatic Theatre:
. . . reality from all parts of the world can be integrated into the performance, putting the spectators in contact with people far away from the actual site of performance. What would otherwise remain trivial as a mere demonstration of media communication, in the context of theatre manifests the latent conflict between the moment of life and the surface of virtual electronic time.
For many theatre makers, the first wave remediation of stage with multiple different types of screens – television, cinema, internet, mobile phone, gaming device – created theatrical chimeras both fascinating and frightening. : 'Two interrelated phenomena of technoculture, the evolving status of the televisual and the introduction of a new performative territory in the virtual site of cyberspace, challenge the most fundamental beliefs concerning performance, including its claims to liveness, immediacy and presence'. When a digital tool could be a performer, a set design, a lighting engineer, or a composer, what kind of story was the audience interpreting? Were they having a collective experience? Theatre makers experimented with these new medial forms to find out.
After two decades of experimentation, though, first wave digital theatre experienced a lull due to postdigital ennui, and during that time digital technology became more uniformly integrated into the theatrical stage space. Books were published analysing this flurry of early experiments, appearing on shelves from 2000 to about 2019. discussing the ennui around digital integration onstage:
everybody’s doing it. Moreover, the fact of doing it has become a marketing tool . . . In particular, it is believed that such work will appeal to the media-savvy younger audiences which theatres are so desperate to attract. . . . Perhaps predictably, a reaction has set in, seeing it all as just a postmodern fad, theatre succumbing to the rampant dominance of the visual in contemporary culture . . .
Rather than attempting creative, unique, boundary-pushing experiments with digital tools, theatres are here accused of using these tools largely for marketing, thus leaving a dramaturgical hole in productions – which, in turn, can make audiences less engaged.
However, when digital technology was integrated with live performance and theatricality for a dramaturgical, world-building purpose that enhanced the story, these experiments could be deeply exciting. As a personal example of this integration, I directed a production in Seattle, produced by Copious Love, titled Codename: KANSAS, Witch Hunter! The videogame-inspired, Matrix-like ‘post-post apocalypse’ performance was mainly, to my mind, traditional theatre; there were in-person performers and an in-person audience, and throughout the rehearsal and production process I worked to centre the meatspace performers rather than the digital special effects. However, the background character and scenic animations (developed with the Academy of Interactive Entertainment’s students) were crucial to set the tone for the show, informing the audience of the creative team’s worldbuilding intentions. To my eyes now, CNK is a prime example of first wave digital theatre, relying not only on tools like Unity, digital projectors, and LEDs sewn into costumes and wigs, but the tropes of digital and online culture, to tell the whole story. However, it was crucial, to me, that the production occur in-person with live actors and live audience sharing a time and space, in order to call something so mediatised ‘theatre’.
There are, of course, examples of first wave digital theatre that do not have full physical co-presence of performers and audience. in 2001 at the Transit III Women’s Theatre Festival, titled Water[war]s, ‘used The Palace – a graphical internet chat application – as the site for a live performance’. Jamieson, along with Desktop Theater’s Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis, used text2speech, animated avatars, and live video streaming to demonstrate the live, but highly online, work they were excited about: ‘Perhaps naively, I had not anticipated the reaction of a few audience members, who were outraged something like this could be presented at a theatre festival and declared that I could not call it theatre’. Around the same time, an artificial intelligence character named Jeremiah as a scene partner to a dancer-character named Elodie in a show titled Blue Bloodshot Flowers; although Jeremiah, a giant projected head, expressed different emotions through facial expressions at each performance, the audience could not tell the difference between his improvisation and a pre-recorded production without proof, so Broadhurst allowed him to react to the audience, too.
After several years of innovation, first wave digital theatre forms seemed to settle on a few specific integrations like digital scenography. Nearly all forms relied on an in-person audience to define the works as theatre. Second wave digital theatre, in contrast, changed the definition of the stage space when no one could gather in-person.
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