☄️Other Second Wave Digital Theatre

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Other Second Wave Digital Theatre

The research in this GitBook has predominantly aimed to define approaches to second wave digital theatre; this section, however, will group together several digital theatre explorations that do not have a larger taxonomy, yet, to fit into. This assorted list is further evidence of the wide-ranging creativity in this new form, which is just beginning to gel into recognisable groups. to similar approaches to these emergent groups, too, which do not quite make up a single genre on their own:

While many individuals during the pandemic are switching to video conferencing platforms to connect with friends and loved ones, go to school, and experience live performance, there are also whole new genres emerging through both live and recorded audio, USPS mail, interactive websites, drive-in and drive-thru performance, and many more.

We will discuss a few of these here, along with other forms Bennett was unaware of.

The dramaturgy of many of these digital theatre creations , a term coined in 1991 by Xerox PARC Chief Scientist Mark Weiser in an article pondering ‘the ubiquity of information technology and computer power, which in principle pervade all everyday objects’ - i.e. devices that were constantly on, connected, and working. Arguably, this future has come to pass in the Western world, with many of us keeping smartphones nearby, and using digital tools for almost every part of our professional and personal lives. : ‘Where virtual reality invites the user to become part of a world beyond mediation, ubiquitous computing offers the user a world in which everything is a medium, because everything is or contains a computing device’. Complementing this definition, : ‘Ubiquity and immersion could thus be seen as two opposing forces that point to opposing ends of the virtuality continuum’. They associate immersion with virtual reality, an environment that surrounds as much of the user’s senses as possible, while ubiquity, as their proposed opposite, means the virtual is immersed in the user, with the user’s experience of a performance work potentially involving many digital technologies simultaneously overlapping in the ‘meatspace’ world.

In current practice, ubiquitous computing allows many of us to immerse ourselves in an existence separated from full ‘meatspace’ reality, often tailoring our sensory engagement with :

The individual, finally, is decentred in a sense from himself. He has instruments that place him in constant contact with the remotest parts of the outside world. Portable telephones are also cameras, able to capture still or moving images; they are also televisions and computers. The individual can thus live rather oddly in an intellectual, musical or visual environment that is wholly independent of his immediate physical surroundings.

The constancy of ubiquitous computing in our daily lives has changed how we pay attention to entertainment including theatre; traditionally, theatrical attention is considered deep attention while television viewing is considered hyper attention, according to Erini Nedelkopolou, and as I discuss in Spotlight-Companion Screens. about the integration of digital technology into our daily lives, and ways these tools have subsumed routine functions: they ‘make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (web-cams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world’. By changing our conception of our world and ourselves within that world, we can, as Augé and Howe state in the prior block quote, create a subjective experience of the world around us.

This has been damaging for traditional theatre regarding audience attention within the performance space, leading to many theatres requesting that phones be fully turned off, not simply ‘silenced’. : ‘For transformation to be possible, audiences’ heightened attention must be directed towards the performance rather than dispersed around it. … To cross that threshold together, a certain level of concentration is required from both performers and audiences. It is this shared focus, directed towards the work of art, that produces intensity’. In a world of distracting, shiny, and often noisy devices which allow anyone to curate their auditory and visual experience of the world, theatre makers must find ways to use these tools within their work; Sedgman’s main argument in The Reasonable Audience points out the folly of forcefully dictating audience behaviour. The liminal mental non-place created by ubiquitous computing in the form of portable digital devices is an experience artists can play with to refocus the audience, immerse them within the show’s world, and even encourage participation. As these devices draw our attention through a range of sensory engagements like vibrations, bright colours, and noises, so can these senses be incorporated in various ways through the device(s) to re-focus the audience’s attention.

While the prior sections considered how theatre makers pursue this in a largely cyberspace environment, many of the forms in this section rely more on meatspace with some digital interventions. ‘What lockdown has reminded most people is the value of physical community, collective action and communal sharing’, . Although digital devices are routinely accused of drawing attention away from the community around you, theatre makers can refocus the audience’s attention through the device(s) and back to the most important things in life.