Space Dramaturgies

Wayfinding: Spotlights > User Interface > Space Dramaturgies

Zoom, YouTube, and Vimeo were arguably the dominant platforms used from 2020 to 2022: an overview of my digital theatre case studies found that during that time, seven of the shows were fully on Vimeo; 19 were on YouTube either as uploads, as livestreaming, or both; and six were on Zoom only (several others were on bespoke platforms which could have been integrations with Vimeo, YouTube, or Zoom; some of the livestreamed shows on YouTube incorporated Zoom; and several other shows were on virtual platforms but had the option of ‘passive’ viewing through YouTube).

After the first several months in 2020, some companies incorporated their platforms in self-referential ways that used the UX ‘stage’ as part of the mise-en-scene. For example, Michael Deacon told me that one of his first productions in 2021 with Creation Theatre was a livestreamed show over Zoom – Friar Lawrence’s Confessional – which unusually for the group at the time did not use virtual production tools like OBS, and instead used ‘Zoom as Zoom’ including direct address to the audience. Similarly, Peter J. Kuo’s production of In Love and Warcraft used webcam streaming views on smartphones and laptops to capture the actors in a ‘natural’ way for their young, digitally native lives:

because of the nature of the show, it's a twenty-first century show. A lot of these characters have smartphones. They have laptops with cameras in them. I think there was only one scene in which the camera was utilized much more of like a security camera. And then, I was like, Okay, great. How do we look at these environments that these characters are in and embrace that there is a camera at different times?

In Love and Warcraft was broadcast over YouTube Live, which meant there was an active chat section to the right side of the screen – similar to Zoom in appearance. The integration of this chat feature into the work draws on Kuo’s history as a YouTube content creator, meaning he intended to reference not only vlogs, but livestreaming audience engagement as part of the show’s mise-en-scene, which reflects the youth of the characters and the digital world they exist in. The dramaturgy of the show translated it into a vlog format.