Unfelt Audience

Wayfinding: Spotlights > The Performers' Experience > Unfelt Audience

In Televisual Theatre I discussed methods for engaging the audience with a live show using chat features available on many video streaming platforms. While chat sections are fun for me personally as an audience member, it may not be the most successful method of expressing presence to performers. one pandemic-era show in which the crew tried to let actors know about some of the chat engagement: ‘what the chat could not simulate was audience feedback to the actors in real time: while the staff tried to feed comments to the performers during the show, to convey the audience’s delight, the demands of projection and live capture set up “a digital fourth wall for the actors”’. , performers were focused on their screen, their script, and sometimes, the videos of their fellow performers: ‘Chat functions or message boards were considered a poor substitute for the immersive experience and atmosphere of a live venue’. Actors could not read or respond to the audience chat unless that was built into the show (as in Celine Song's Seagull in the Sims 4, for example).

Other types of live digital performance, such as videogaming livestreams on the platform Twitch, revolve around one gamer/performer who purposefully checks the audience chat for commentary and responds; this creates a feeling, , ‘as akin to the cheering one would find in a sports stadium’, but is purposefully built into the style of performance, while that dual attention is not currently part of theatre training.

Nathan Leigh agrees that chat sections might have been fun for the audience but were a struggle for performers: ‘The audience isn't behaving most of the time as that other performer,’ and instead often chats to entertain each other. Acting while also reading dissonant words can be problematic: ‘you can't monitor the chat while you're performing a monologue, like that would be chaos for your brain, and you would be totally shut down. … it is really alienating as a performer to be monitoring text while you're trying to speak text’. Holly Champion had a similar experience with Streamed Shakespeare: ‘With the YouTube streaming we did sometimes have audiences commenting on the YouTube stream. But because we're very much engaged and performing, we didn't really have time to answer them as well’.

The energy exchange in text-based media might simply take longer, : ‘If the exchange, the flow, the back-and-forth between audience and actors is what is important, then this is explicitly what recent performances like Fake Friends’ livestream production of Circle Jerk or their This American Wife (both produced during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 respectively) and its real-time Twitter audience created’. The sense of presence is different – performers have to imagine the audience they engage, and perhaps find written proof of their effectiveness later.