Deep Attention is Theatrical

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Companion Screens > Deep Attention is Theatrical

Second wave digital theatre makers are expanding their methods of integrating digital devices like smartphones into performances – not as an acceptance of distracted attention, but as a way to redirect the audience back to the production or become even more immersed in the work. Notable previous experiments listed prior include ‘Tweet Seats’ and offering downloadable, paperless playbills for the show. The post-pandemic, postdigital lifestyle has also caused the rise of QR code use, which Natasha Rickman of Creation Theatre notes worked well for her digital media integration, allowing her to share ‘links to external videos using audiences' phones’. This QR code integration used her theatre audience’s phones as companion screens, bringing the audience’s attention back into the world of the show and away from other potential digital distractions like social media or mobile games.

Clemence Debaig used a QR code in a similar fashion in early Zoom versions of her dance performance, Strings. Rather than a spoken introduction, Debaig posted a QR code as the introduction to the piece; the code took the audience to a web app they could use to trigger the haptics Debaig wore, causing her to move/dance. After some initial testing, Debaig designed the app with four quadrants: ‘the one on the right-hand side ended up being more interesting for this double view, where people could start not looking at their phones anymore and use this like a remote. … Those were very interesting design challenges to try to sort out here, because otherwise people felt – on the left-hand side – they had to stare their phone all the time to know what to click on’. Including an audience’s mobile phone for interaction both incorporates the audience’s compulsion to use their phones during the show and turns attention to what the performer is doing in response.

Andrew Hungerford’s pre-pandemic work with Know Theatre in Cincinnati found a unique approach to integrating the audience’s phones. While many theatres ask their audiences to turn off, or at least silence, their phones, not many people go to the length of fully turning off their devices anymore – and Hungerford found a method of integrating this.

In [Ada and] the Engine [by Lauren Gunderson], for example, the end of that show is a musical number that takes place in this dream of the Crystal Palace-slash-Babbage Engine. For that, we had the whole set automate at one point at the very end, as the song went on; and then our final sound queue … So, we were very sneaky about this, we had a dramaturgical app that people could install on their phones so they could read a bunch of history stuff, but also once they'd loaded the app, provided they silence their ringer, but not the other sound, the final sound queue of the show faded from the main speakers into the phones of the audience. ... Which was deeply cool on the nights that there were enough people in the audience to reach critical mass for it to work.

As Ada and the Engine is a play about the life of Ada Lovelace, inventor of computer code, the transition from the onstage world into the tiny computers that live alongside the audience served to remind them of this remarkable history.

In 2021, I watched Varjack & Lowry’s iMelania, produced by Omnibus Theatre for online streaming. Like many pandemic-era online shows, I received an email with a link – however, instead of a Zoom or YouTube link, it was to a set in Gather.town, where a house manager greeted me and explained the timing of the show. When the show was ‘live’, the audience would open a video on Vimeo that briefly explained how to synchronise two further videos that, when combined, created the show. Both were Vimeo videos, but one was to be played on the laptop, computer, or TV, and the other was to be played on the audience’s smartphone. The show’s blurb purports to examine the life of Melania Trump and her meaning within society, but the production does so through the lens of obsessive online research: the computer screen displayed news articles and short videos along with commentary, while the phone displayed a text conversation between a fictionalised Varjack and Lowry, along with further news searches, social media posts, and Instagram shots. There are also snippets of Zoom interviews with women from around the world displayed on both screens. The show wrapped up on the computer screen’s video, but the entire device takeover served to immerse the audience in the obsessive, somewhat dramaturgical, somewhat paparazzi-like, online research process.