Off-Boarding

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Audience Onboarding > Off-Boarding

Exiting is just as important as entering. While it is intuitive to click the ‘leave meeting’ button or close the browser tab, is there more you can offer to support the audience’s emotional integration of the work (if they want it)? For example, during 2020 and 2021, when lockdowns were in force in much of the world, offering Zoom rooms or virtual hangouts after the show worked well for many companies. Matthew Jameson at The Space told me that they began to routinely offer Zoom hangouts for audiences and performers after shows, because it offered ‘the hecticness of a bar post-show with the limitations of only one person outside can speak on Zoom. But it still felt like something more. It felt nicer than just “okay, that's the end of the show we'll see you all later!” … It was about that sense of releasing connection that you only really get after a show. That was one of the things that was really good to capture’.

The ritual of gathering post-show may enhance positive associations with the experience, but for Virtual Reality Theatre, a ritual for off-boarding could be important to reduce negative side effects. that some HTC Vive headset users reported feeling disruption of connections to their body and to their perception of reality, but more important for theatre makers, they reported hesitation when moving back into physical reality. This sense of dislocation with the actual world around them is antithetical to many theatre productions which aim to create a stronger emotional connection between audience and performers. To combat this vaguely reported disconnection, Brendan Bradley has created a ritual for NPC: The Musical, in which he helps off-board the audience participants who enter VR with him.

The very first thing I wrote is a guided meditation to offboard them to take them out of headset and return them to the audience and let them reconnect again with those seated spectators, and to realize – ‘For an hour I was just up here, and I was the star of the show, and I had no idea I was the start of the show’. And I take a curtain call, bow with them as my co-stars of this experience.

By encouraging the sense of togetherness and measuring their return to physical, mostly-unmediated reality, Bradley keeps group cohesion and empathy.

These unique approaches to curtain calls and post-show gatherings are just a beginning for audience engagement with digital theatre.