Play Nice

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Audience Onboarding > Play Nice

Engaging the audience’s sense of theatre etiquette may help onboard audiences, too. Michael Deacon noted that he and his company were still experimenting to find this combination of theatre and digital space etiquette: ‘What is the etiquette on Zoom? I think that is still an unknown thing compared to the hundreds of years of what theatre etiquette it is, and how to use it in the theatre’. Brendan Bradley felt theatre etiquette was very important, considering many interactions in virtual spaces suffered from standards set by videogame violence:

The majority of people I talked to, their first experience in VR is going into one of these socialized spaces, and basically being assaulted by a 13-year-old. That's what we're telling the world, ‘This is the use case’. And I think that that's incredibly damaging – not just for the industry, but for humans. It's not a great experience to put people through, and because it's such a visceral, embodied experience, I think we don't yet have the data to know how damaging that might be to somebody.

Bradley also credited ‘the ritual and the etiquette of theatre’ with the gentleness of OBXR’s audience onboarding, because the theatre space is ‘a known etiquette and social contract that really elegantly fits inside of a virtual space’. As theatre, both digital and in-person, becomes more immersive, gamified, and interactive, the contract between audience members to respect each other is crucial. Clemence Debaig experienced this contract play out with Strings when she placed it in VR and audience avatars provided an embodied experience: ‘we realized that it's harder because you don't see 360 [full circle view], so you might have a lot of people behind you, and you don't know. So, people started talking to each other’. The audience co-creates the show when they teach each other how to navigate the space. ‘The audience interaction is what makes the work. And then the tech is here to enable that’.

However, it is worth noting that traditional theatre has enforced a damaging hierarchical experience of audience onboarding which developed alongside : ‘The anesthetisation of audience behaviour is often blamed on a shift in power relations, with managers and other cultural gatekeepers – formerly at the service of their patrons – beginning to see spectators as the grateful recipients of artistic merit’. Enforcement of etiquette, which included bringing police officers into theatre spaces, means that theatre makers now must work to invite audiences in; this is particularly crucial with digital theatre, where the communal experience is not immediately obvious. Nathan Leigh agreed with Sedgman’s analysis, noting that enforced rules are ‘a bad idea in-person and in terms of online work, where you can't even hear them [the audience] laugh, they're deadly’. There is also a delicate balance with audience engagement; : ‘Theatre practitioners need to acknowledge that participation can be profoundly disturbing; that it may involve making ourselves vulnerable as we open ourselves to unexpected experiences and outcomes’.

When Bradley discussed theatre etiquette, I began fretting about Kirsty Sedgman’s analysis against policing politeness in these spaces; however, Bradley is not advocating the reinstitution of strict behavioural rules, but instead notes that audiences respond differently to socialisation within a theatre space compared to socialising within a videogame or metaverse space.

To date, our show [OnBoardXR] is the first place that I've heard people say, ‘Excuse me’ when their avatars bump into each other … because they still have this notion of, ‘You are another person, I'm in your way, and we're all here to experience this thing together’. … I think that that level of imbued experience for the audience to truly invest in and participate in the ritual of in-person gathering through a virtual medium, I have not seen or felt in any other technology.

In Virtual Reality Theatre, the audience’s avatars trigger a sense of shared physical space which in turn triggers reactions to avoid obstructing views or bumping into others. It is possible, though, that other platforms may require more content moderation, particularly with livestreaming performances.