🪩Even More Combos!
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on online and digital post-pandemic theatre audiences in 2022 found: ‘Other types of technology digital theatre attendees experienced include QR codes (22%), hologram technology (21%), virtual reality (20%), audiobooks or headphones (18%), and voting via a remote control or smartphone (13%)’. This list demonstrates the myriad options for digital devices and software to integrate. For instance, augmented reality is, : ‘the real-time integration of digital information into a user’s environment. AR technology overlays content onto the real world, enriching a user’s perception of reality rather than replacing it’. Manufacturers like Meta are trying to incorporate AR experiences into their headset devices, with the goal for many manufacturers being something similar to Google Glass.
For now, though, . ‘All Kinds of Limbo’ from the was a performance piece for smartphone AR: ‘an eerily realistic holographic avatar on a mobile phone screen; her performance had been recorded and was now being broadcast in augmented reality from the National Theatre in London’. Although pre-recorded, AR performances feel live, immediate, and theatrical by virtue of their visual immediacy to your environment.
Drive-thru cinemas made a comeback in 2020, and some theatre companies experimented with a similar idea. Know Theatre combined driving and digital tools with Fanny Lou Hamer, Speak On It! The show was ‘performed on the back of a pickup truck that we drove to different neighbourhoods around town’ – not digital, but the company ‘did do a multicam livestream of that from a parking lot. ... It was, fortunately, the place where we were had good wi-fi. And we did a 3-D cam, multicam stream of that show’, using the 3-D camera to transmit the experience of being near the vehicle in-person.
In addition to the increased sensory hybridisation in Journey to the Kingdom of Hypnos, Carmel Clavin is developing another show that combines in-person collective experience and digital tools. Adelaide Liminal was the premier of the concept at Adelaide Fringe 2024. The show involves audiences gathering to explore unique side streets, architectures, and artworks around their city – similar to Rider Spoke, mentioned in the Audio section – to gather clues and solve the puzzle of the Wandering Liminal Society’s next gathering. Clavin, as the Wandering Society host of the event, offers items to each audience group, as well as a link to a website that is unlocked once the group finds the right clue at their first destination. When I participated in the event in March 2024, my group was instructed to write a poem together after we unlocked the website, and then given an email address to send it to. When we completed our poem, we returned to the starting location and reunited with the other audience groups; as a larger collective, we then used our phones to gather final clues on the Wanderers’ Society’s Instagram page, Spotify playlist, and website.
The City Liminal game performance integrates many dramaturgies discussed in other sections, including Interaction & Gamification and Remix Theatres. However, it is vital to Clavin that the work occurs in-person, as there are physical sensations involved in walking around, seeing the city in new ways, and coming back together as a physically co-present group to struggle with each clue collectively. Clavin's post-pandemic work brings the liminal world of digital togetherness out into the open, merging meatspace and cyberspace existences.
There is evidence that other media are taking traditional meatspace theatre and incorporating those techniques, as well. that multimedia in-person experiences based on popular tv shows, videogames, films, and franchises - from the film of Taylor Swift's Eras tour to the multiple immersive Van Gogh experiences to the Stranger Things immersive shows - represent 'the theatricalization of media' indicating a remediation of all types of entertainment back into each other, using a combination of meatspace and cyberspace tools. Theatre is not under threat from medial incursions in modern times, but is now part of the swirling creative milieu redefining entertainment in a post-digital, post-pandemic existence.
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