Audience Comprehension

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Preshow Set-Up > Audience Comprehension

One of the main uses for preshow in digital theatre is to help the audience understand how to engage with the show. :

The persuasive and informative purposes are also evident in prologues/introductions in the Covid online theatre, though more than on the dramatic level. … 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.

in 'Designing an Interactive Production': ‘you will need to find a moment outside of the published script to train the audience. This could be done through the use of a pre-show or other extra-performative device’. As Chen notes, even audience members familiar with operating digital technology on a daily basis would need some assistance learning the theatre maker’s specific approach to these tools; for example, should the audience turn their cameras on and microphones off? Can they use the chat section or is that too distracting? Can they make their VR avatars fly?

Figure 24: Screen grab of the entry to QuillsFest 2022, created by Oregon Shakespeare Festival; the graphics clearly demonstrate the 'cyber' nature of the virtual world created to host the festival, and the 'Enter' button is clear and bright. This helps the audience know what they are looking at and how to get in.

Figure 25: A screenshot of Creation Theatre's 2024 Antigone, in a modern adaptation with these two featured actors performing news readers; on the right, a chat moderator/house manager informs the audience how to use some of Zoom's tools, outside of the narrative, while below those comments, the chat audience becomes engaged with the narrative.

For example, La MaMa Theatre in Melbourne offers video streams online of many of their performances. During one show, My First Bike by Maude Davey and Jane Bayly, the La MaMa producers and editors elected to post a preshow notice that the in-person versions of the show had a different scene performance order every night, and that the recording was only one of the potential orders as captured on one night of the performance. Although the video was linear and pre-recorded, my mind engaged with the show in a more interactive way, imagining how scenes might be interpreted differently if they were next to each other or performed in a different order. This simple preshow panel, inserted into the film, informed my interpretation of the work and made the static recording feel interactive.

Clemence Debaig told me during our interview that, when she created her first livestreamed interactive show in 2020, she knew the audience would need help understanding how to interact with the work, but she did not want to vocally explain it over Zoom; instead, she created an image that informed the audience about how they would engage: ‘I had picked a very simple URL that people could type in –strings.dance – so I could display that on a pre-panel on Zoom, and then they could go to that’. Following the link opened the app that the audience used to trigger Debaig’s haptics that would cause her to dance.

While Debaig intentionally did not speak to the audience because she did not want to break the perception of her dance persona, talking to audience members to instruct them and welcome them is another common method for bringing them into digital works. When I watched Gumball Dreams and participated in Finding WiiLii, both from Ferryman Collective, there were avatar-actors in these shows who instructed the audience how to choose their show-provided avatars, offering us ‘costumes’ to become more integrated into the performance. They also explained headset and keyboard controls, depending on the device the audience members used to interact in the virtual worlds of either production (laptop commands are different from VR headset commands, for example).

OnBoardXR6 It’s Pronounced ‘Gybe’ engaged in a similar welcoming with their audiences: OBXR developed a ‘life vest’ system with their avatars, using colours to allow individuals to indicate to the performers whether they wanted to be interacted with or not. To choose the correct avatar, Brendan Bradley and/or Michael Morran, during OBXR6, would instruct the audience members how to choose the avatar they wanted for the show. They also spent several minutes chatting to audiences about how to use the controls, how to interact with the Hubs world, and how they found out about the festival.

Similarly, Varjack & Lowry’s iMelania preshow used verbal engagement over video conferencing in Gather.town to help the audience understand how to navigate the production. iMelania requires accessing two videos on Vimeo and playing them at the same time, one on a computer or tablet, and one on a smartphone. While these instructions play over another preshow video in Vimeo, getting into this video requires instructions from the show's house manager. Gather.town is an 8-bit style online social space that is used for several applications including conferences, workshops, and other gatherings that benefit from a social component that can be easily accessed from many types of devices. I made an 8-bit style avatar in Gather.town and interacted with other avatars in the space including the house manager, who welcomed me and instructed me how to get to the first video and when the video would be available. This preshow experience mimics the process of entering a physical theatre space for an in-person performance, and also ensures there is a live component of the production, which is otherwise pre-recorded.