Dramaturgical Approach to the Audience

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Audience Onboarding > Dramaturgical Approach to the Audience

Onboarding an audience is a combination of technical support, content moderation, and community-building support. Nathan Leigh suggested digital formats require new dramaturgical questions to avoid attempting to replicate the audience's in-person experience: ‘what are things that you could do as an audience member to interact, that you couldn't do in-person rather than thinking, “what are things that replicate the experience of sharing space with somebody?”’. Depending on the devices and platforms used, digital theatre makers have flexibility to offer audiences tools to engage in specific managed ways. However, certain platforms and devices have expectations associated with them based on how an audience member may have interacted with the tool in the past, and you can build or adjust those expectations related to your show.

Considering how threshold objects effect mental state can dramaturgically guide your approach. The devices used to access digital theatre have other associations like work or entertainment, so these – defined as ‘useful facilitators of the transition between the real world and digital fantasy’ – may hold multiple connotations, triggers, or desires. : ‘Screen-based electronic environments can also provide the structure of an immersive visit. Here the screen itself is a reassuring fourth wall, and the controller (mouse or joystick or data-glove) is the threshold object that takes you in and leads you out of the experience’. Watching a play on YouTube on your smart TV combines different threshold objects than immersing in a VR play through an Oculus headset, for instance.

In 2024, there are three devices most often used to access second wave digital theatre: computer screens, which is a fourth wall similar to a proscenium arch, ‘an enchanted threshold object’; a smartphone or tablet, which is a smaller flat computer screen; and a consumer VR headset, which is also technically a screen, but providing binocular vision for three-dimensional experiences and handheld controllers that motion-track the user’s hands and, often, provide some haptic feedback through vibrations. Like entering a theatre space, engaging this type of threshold object mentally primes you for the type of experience because the average audience member expects to directly interact with digital devices.

for two types of experiences, unlike a traditional theatre building:

A fundamental characteristic of computer games and other forms of interactive narrative is that by immersing the player in a fictional virtual world of some kind, they place them center stage, transforming them from being a viewer to being an active participant and ultimately to a performer. The emergence of multiplayer games, both those that involve remote online collaboration and also those that take place in local social settings, emphasize this notion of interaction as performance.

Since users are primed by these threshold objects to anticipate some interaction, whether for work or fun, it is worth considering how an audience will anticipate and then interpret their experience of a show based on how they enter the performance space.