Second Wave Digital Theatre: The Reason for this Project

Wayfinding: Introduction > Second Wave Digital Theatre

Like many theatre makers and fans, I didn't think much about digital technology integrated into theatre, or accessing theatre productions through online or digital means, until I watched my first livestreaming show over Zoom in 2020. . , in a post for ArtsHub in December 2021, wrote: ‘COVID not only prompted those in lockdown to ramp up their digital offerings, but even for those not in lockdown, going online was essential to maintaining engagement with interstate and international audiences’. The form integrates anything that allows theatre makers to create performance for an audience – as Brendan Bradley said to me during our interview, regarding his work in virtual reality, ‘You get to work with the biggest fly gallery in the entire world and the fastest costume change of all time’. Digital and online tools create magic as never seen before. Suddenly, watching a play on YouTube was normal, not an awkward substitute for 'the real thing'.

And yet, with less in-person focus, second wave digital theatre has (re-)ignited an ontological debate although several theatre makers found satisfaction in digital production. that theatre’s greatest strength is the community built by the experience of simultaneous physical and temporal co-presence: ‘By turning a fluid social situation into an enclosed event, stabilizing its ephemerality, the theatrical apparatus produces a distinct object of art by detaching it from the social factors that originally constituted it. … The real of performance rests upon the presence of humans that constitute its essential sociality …’. Otto theorises that the narrative world of the play crystalises an emotional or political experience – through narrative or otherwise – allowing for deeper pondering, greater examination, in the span of time allotted. It is this collective consideration and interpretation that makes an audience a community, in-person, for that instant.

However, not all audiences have the experience of shared interpretation and communing. In an interview on Big Telly’s digital work in Northern Ireland, :

… the sense of presence, I think, from a digital audience was just as visceral and affecting as that in the real world. And I’ve been to plays in theatres where I might as well not have been there. And I’ve been in the blackout and not acknowledged. And that doesn’t feel like I’m present. So for me, presence, it’s about acknowledgement, and lightness, rather than necessarily whether people are remote or in real space.

Similarly, : ‘if the co-located performance isn’t directly affected by the audience or need them in order to happen, does it really matter if it’s live or not?’. And :

Sure, sometimes one does have unexpected experiences of collective wonder. … Still, I notice a lot of fellow theatregoers wielding a possessive investment in their personal theatregoing experience, irrespective of (though immediately adjacent to) the experiences of others. … So, when I hear Horwitz and McNulty invoke the classical ideal of “the audience” as community, I’m reminded that my fellow theatregoers can sometimes be the most exhausting part of my theatregoing habit.

This atomisation and isolation of experience among an in-person crowd is a long-standing tradition in theatre. Even in current productions in which actors break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience, even in these instances where they get feedback directly from audience members, , ‘that semiporous membrane that stands between individual audience members during a shared experience’. Immersive, interactive, and site-specific theatre genres had all, before the pandemic, attempted to break this polite wall between viewers, but it arguably took the glass screen of a digital device for the audience to break their emotional walls down, when encouraged. Contrasting Otto’s championing of the in-person exclusive experience, : ‘theatre is about focusing time and space for the audience. The same is true for interactive digital performances. When solving for time and space, each production team will have to answer those questions’. Because Covid lockdowns were so isolating, second wave digital theatre often used digital tools to create a greater sense of togetherness, but this collective access to experience has taken myriad forms, which I discuss in this GitBook's taxonomy. One of my interviewees, Natasha Rickman, who worked with Creation Theatre in the United Kingdom on interactive Zoom shows, said of her production of The Time Machine: ‘to be able to work at all and connect with an audience felt very special and reassuring at that time’.

The audience for digital theatre, and the makers of this work, are stabilising post-pandemic. In our interview, Michael Deacon of Creation Theatre told me: ‘I think we're on the cusp of a new approach to digital theatre, and whether that's more of it or less of it, or a completely different approach to it. Who knows? The next couple of years will tell’. Morgan Green of The Wilma Theater echoed this sentiment in our interview: ‘The need to make digital work came out of this crisis, these circumstances, but then there was artistic fulfillment there as well. And to see all these theatre actors on a screen, they were amazing. So, it opened something up for us’. Although Wilma livestreams and then records their onstage shows, while Creation Theatre makes dedicated livestreamed Zoom-based works using virtual production techniques, their common foundation has inspired both groups to continue evolving work that started due to an emergency.

And so, if you, dear reader, have made it this far and are thinking about making digital, online, or hybrid theatre productions, please enjoy this GitBook.