🖐️Tactile Integration

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Other Second Wave Digital Theatre > Tactile Integration

Traditional and digital theatre both stimulate primarily visual and auditory senses. Some immersive and interactive shows, like dinner theatre or escape rooms, involve the other senses as well. due to the greater reliance on sight and sound in computer-based or screen-based media.

Given the dominance of sight and sound, as well as the very nature of digitized experience, we might conclude that the body’s other three senses play a minimal and even non-existent role in computer-enabled performance. And yet, it is worth emphasizing again how touch—be it actual or imagined—is the quality most ardently dreamed of by so many digital theatre-makers and their audiences. Perhaps this is because being able to touch someone implies being part of a shared world with them—of being immersed in something that is physically as well as cognitively involving, and that therefore seems more real.

Some theatre makers have begun integrating other senses into their shows, like tactile feedback through . ‘Haptics involves integrating information from two senses: touch and kinesthesia. The tactile cues arise from stimulation of sensors in the skin known as mechanoreceptors’. Haptic devices are computer-based tools that create touch-based feedback – one of the more familiar uses for these devices are rumble packs or force feedback in videogame controllers.

Clemence Debaig integrated haptics on the performer side for her digital show, Strings. ‘The idea of the piece is that dancers are wearing haptics that, as mechanic, allows the audience to control their movements. So, the audience have access to a web app where there's four equations – for right arm, left on right legs, left leg – and they can decide which body part to move, and that sends a signal to the wearable. This vibrates, and then that indicates to the dancer which body parts to move’. Although the audience cannot feel the rumble of the haptics themselves, they can see the results of their virtual touch on the performer. Further, because there were always multiple people in the online audiences, both in the livestreamed and VR versions, Debaig noted that audiences began taking collective action based on the tactile/kinaesthetic sensations they witnessed. ‘It ended up being a collaborative experience where you don't have a one-to-one relationship with a performer, it's a many-to-one. … So, I had to limit to one body part at the time, which meant that I had to create a system where the majority of the people interacting are the ones activating the body parts’. Visual feedback reinforced communal choices for haptic feedback.

Carmel Clavin described much of her work as ‘better in person’ and ‘analogue’ although she has been working with technology integrated into her in-person shows since before the pandemic. Post-pandemic, though, Clavin is trending not only toward different digital integrations, but a wider range of sensory experiences within her work. I have previously described one of her current touring projects, Journey to the Kingdom of Hypnos, which is predominantly an immersive audio production that has, as of Adelaide Fringe 2024, also integrated immersive video; for the in-person tour, Clavin has also integrated tactile and temperature sensations at specific moments, and offers small gifts including a yellow pansy flower and a small bundle of lavender to the audience at the end of the show.

Now I've started the last piece of it: somatically, what I've started doing is actually adding wind. … I just whip the fan through the air at certain points. … when they're in the ship, they actually can feel the wind on their face, or when they're in the storm, I actually do it low to the ground, so it's against their feet. It's just a small little input. And when they're listening, I tend to circle around them like a shark the whole time, around behind them. And there's something, I think it's infrasound, when someone is near you, your body is clocking an electrical field, even though your brain, even though your sight and your hearing, are not. When there's a tense moment between Mnemosyne and Lethe, I actually get really close to them and I circle really slowly, so that there's another energetic input like, I can sense that someone is next to me, but they're all next to each other as well. So, there's little pieces like that are effective [affective].

While Clavin’s tactile in-person work is likely in reaction against the digital distance during 2020 and 2021, these physically real sensations exist within the show to enhance the ‘reality’, immersion, and intensity of the digital audio work. She also added scents to the show, although she noted in our interview that she is cautious about essential oils, understanding that some audience members can be overwhelmed or allergic. Upon reading this, my advisor Dr. Sarah Peters suggested that haptic and tactile integrations might be served by a content warning, if these are audience-facing experiences – an important practical consideration on top of the dramaturgical one.