🎭The Performers' Experience

Wayfinding: Spotlights > The Performers' Experience

Second wave digital theatre has been deeply concerned with creating a sense of intimacy and togetherness - for the audience. Experiments like adding games, integrating a live chat section, or offering episodic releases all create a sense of anticipation and urgency in audience members. However, the performers’ experience can be quite different, and solitary. A University of Essex study conducted at the Essex Business School finds: ‘Not surprisingly, the primary challenge faced by those who had performed online was a sense of isolation and the loss of meaningful interaction with an audience’. There was a potential impact on theatre makers’ quality of production, too. Robert Bowen, UNCA professor of drama, : 'the limited direct connection between all people involved in the production modified the experience', limiting or even preventing the performers from experiencing audience reactions. Yet of their pandemic-era theatre experiments: ‘Performers spoke of the nerves and adrenaline they experienced before their live performances, just as they would waiting in the wings prior to their physical stage entrances’.

The perceived energy exchange between performer and audience is, for theatre makers, a defining characteristic of the form: theatre as ‘what takes place between the spectator and actor’. in her landmark audience study book that ‘theatre is an obviously social phenomenon. It is an event which relies on the physical presence of an audience to confirm its cultural status’. In Theatricality, that the presence (or ‘abstention’) of the audience at a play ‘has always been ultimately responsible for sustaining the performance’ – not just with their ticket purchases, but with their effect on the actors. When physical presence was restricted for health and safety reasons, audiences may have found digital theatre a worthwhile substitute, but theatre performers had a tougher time.

Nathan Leigh generally shared this outlook in our interview, noting that ‘the thing that makes a live performance, whether in-person, virtual, or whatever, unique is that it is an organic experience where the audience and the performer are in dialogue with each other’. When that dialogue is lost for some reason, the performer can struggle and thus the overall production can feel less engaging. In his production POV: you are an a.i. achieving consciousness, he and Nicole Orabona created an interactive experience in which the audience engages with a reactive digital tool in real-time to make music; Orabona was able to hear the music as the audience created it, and this energy exchange changed their emotional arc each night, though the monologue never changed.

While the relationship between the performers and audience was changed through digital tools, performers seem to also have some experiences in common with their in-person craft. Michael Deacon from Creation Theatre lauded many of that company’s digital theatre experiments which included using virtual production tools to give the appearance of performers sharing the same space. However, reducing the visual appearance of physical distance for the audience is different than doing it for the performer, who were essentially in a technological milieu of Zoom and other software, rather than immersed in the presence of their fellow performers. ‘I've had conversations with actors a lot about how weird it is for them, how different it is to when they're rehearsing a “normal” play’, Deacon said. ‘I can imagine that would be really hard, because you're not getting anything, any response from this. You're just looking into a tiny dot, and that's it. And you're not getting anything back’.

The struggle to reconnect the audience to the performer is not new in digital performance. about the scope of the problem in an early article, ‘Absent Friends: Internet Theatre, Posthuman Bodies and the Interactive Void’ (2003), which he quotes in his later book, Digital Theatre:

… [it] recounts how there was a strong view from the performers that they frequently overcompensated, since they were working in a theatrical vacuum unable to adequately gauge audience reaction. This is an important difference between traditional theatre and cybertheater from a performer’s perspective – the lack of presence (other than textual) from the audience, which they found adversely affected the sense of improvisational security. What was disturbing for the performers was that they did not have the same sense of control and performance judgment as in a theater; nothing was coming back except words (and sometimes unpleasant or insulting ones). Just as cyberspace is conceptualized as a limbo, a nonspace, so too was the experience of performing in an empty theater to a ‘disembodied’ audience.

The following considers digital theatre from the performers’ perspective, both the problems with creating this work even in a live environment, and potential solutions found to help performers re-engage in the dialogic energy exchange with the audience.