Pre-Production

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Tech Behind the Scenes > Pre-Production

Clemence Debaig has a background in both engineering and dance performance, and one method she has translated from technology design into her performance work is journey mapping. The user journey map as a methodology comes from the Agile software development framework and ‘is focused on learning about relevant user processes in order to identify areas with need for user research’; the method aims ‘to learn in a short time about relevant user processes and identify and plan necessary UX activities, even before entering the user research phase’. Essentially, the process of creating a journey map helps the software design team determine what users most need out of the user interface (UX or UI); Debaig compared the process to dramaturgy and has integrated journey mapping tools into her dramaturgical process to design the ‘map’ of the performance. She told me:

I feel like giant journey maps have all those layers of: ‘this is the story we're trying to tell at this point. What does that mean for the music? What are the emotions we need to go through the music? What about the interactions? What's the code, what’s the role of the audience in this story, at this point? What does the virtual environment look like? What does the avatar look like?’ And I have like all those moments, and that was not at all what I was using before at all, and that helps a lot as well, just purely from a technical point of view, because it is from this document that I start building cues and I start understanding what system needs to talk to the other.

Debaig’s description provides a list of important dramaturgical questions for digital theatre makers regarding the structure of their work and how to consider best approaches and methods. The journey map method works alongside production design processes, as well as script development or even devised theatre performances that might integrate digital tools into their workflow and performances.