Getting Over the Threshold
Wayfinding: Spotlights > Audience Onboarding > Getting Over the Threshold
Dramaturgically understanding threshold objects improves your ability, as a theatre maker, to design shows for your audience. Practically, however, you will also need to instruct the audience how to enter the performance space or get them in the door. In-person theatre typically performs this process starting with a ticket purchase, which is checked at the door by front of house staff. In contrast, digital theatre typically sends a link that the audience member will follow to enter the space. This might require a passcode: for example, when you rent Cinematic Theatre from League of Livestreaming or Digital Theatre+, you receive an email with a password that allows you access to the work for 24 to 48 hours; if you are attending a Zoom production, the producers may use a special passcode to prevent unwanted attendees from hacking or otherwise disrupting the performance that is included in the email.
Andrew Hungerford found, with Know Theatre performances, they had to offer a higher level of support for some of their regular patrons just to help them use their tickets:
We also learned is just how not digitally native a lot of theatre patrons are. … for a while, [we were] making infographics that show how you use the controllers on a video player on the Internet, like: This is how you adjust the resolution. … And then we offered guides for how to get it from your computer to your TV, with the caveat of like, We don't know what your TV is, here are a number of possible ways [to stream to it], we cannot guarantee this.
Know Theatre kept to their accessibility-focused mission statement by creating guides to use the platforms they chose for their shows, and this is still a potential stumbling block you should consider as you start to make digital work. Audiences will not automatically know how to use your platform. Clemence Debaig agreed: ‘Remember, at the beginning of the pandemic, getting people on to Zoom was already a challenge? It's a bit easier now’ because more people have experience with Zoom; but there are still plenty of people who may not understand getting into Zoom for a performance, compared to joining a Zoom meeting for work.
Clemence Debaig first translated her dance production, Strings, to a livestream with an associated web app that audiences could interact with; the app was linked to haptic devices on Debaig’s body, which would vibrate when the audience told her what part they wanted her to move. It was common in early 2020, Debaig told me, for performers or a house manager to start Zoom performances by explaining aloud anything the audience needed to do: ‘things like, “Don’t go in gallery view, go full screen view,” and like, “Turn your camera off,” like all those features were not integrated into Zoom’ until later in 2020. These instructions were, for several weeks, parleyed through an opening statement or monologue, loosely similar to in-person theatrical interventions like land acknowledgements and pre-show recordings to silence phones and avoid rustling lozenges:
The persuasive and informative purposes are also evident in prologues/introductions in the Covid online theatre, though more than on the dramatic level. Not necessarily giving away the plot like the prologue in Elizabethan drama, the introduction of an online production usually provides practical information about how to watch and participate in it, as audiences are required to operate digital technology on their own such as streaming services, video conferencing software, mobile phone applications. Compared to earlier experimental practices, online theatre has entered the mainstream since the coronavirus outbreak, it thus is reaching much wider audience, whose digital skills and prior knowledge of online platforms can vary greatly.
Debaig wanted to set the mood, and the audience’s focus, on her physicality, so did not want verbal interactions starting the show: ‘I was doing this thing with a double screen where people also needed to have their phones at the same time’ but she could not explain just over Zoom stream how to get to the web app, because she aesthetically chose to remain silent so the audience would focus on her physicality. Her dramaturgical solution was to post an intro slide with a link at the opening of the Zoom, so the audience could follow that on their phones, helping them understand the interaction with a companion screen. This note on entry serves a practical purpose, as well as functioning like a curtain that blocks the stage from the audience’s view, creating a sense of anticipation.
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