🔔Tips & Tricks

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Remix Theatre > Tips & Tricks

Draw Inspiration from Other Genres: You don’t have to attempt anything fancy to create Remix performance. Many theatre makers in this space use Zoom or pre-recorded performances using simple webcams, then use OBS or a similar video editing software; this can still generate exciting results. Michael Deacon of Creation Theatre, for example, told me that for Emperor of the Moon, a digital theatre work inspired by Spectacular Theatre, a Victorian form that used a similar method of technological and visual collage for special effects: ‘Scrolling panoramas were incorporated, images were projected from magic lanterns, translucent gauzes made for backlighting effects, coloured light on smoke and coloured flares were used, and all manner of machinery around, above and below the stage was incorporated, with the proscenium arch conveniently hiding all necessary men and machinery’. This show was recreated much more simply in a digital realm using Zoom and OBS. Similarly, the aforementioned Hot Cousin’s Murder Ballad pulls from short online video, and Jared Mezzocchi’s Section 230 draws inspiration from the internet’s visual overlapping.

Keep Track of Happy Accidents: Nathan Leigh’s show POV: you are an a.i. achieving consciousness was based on his pandemic-era exploration of music generation tools and audience interaction: ‘everything was built around this idea of trying to recreate for an audience this accidental, organic, but really magical experience that we had, just while screwing around’. Similarly, Clemence Debaig told me of a glitch she discovered while playing with mocap avatars: ‘I want to work more with Glitch, and I want to work more with separating a bit of the behaviour of the skin of an avatar from its skeletal movement, and how can I program behaviours around that?’. For traditional in-person theatre, the rehearsal process sets up the possibility of these discoveries, which can then be discussed and integrated; for digital performance, especially more mediatized forms like Remix Theatre, it is important to set up ‘rehearsals’ or testing to explore the affordances and limitations of your tools, and to keep a record of accidents that are interesting.

Consider Recent Events and Memes: major global events can have a psychological impact on the interpretation of certain images in your show. For example, Pascale Aebischer writes about her experience watching Creation Theatre’s MacBeth, which integrated audience video from Zoom to fill out random characters in the banquet scene: ‘Rather than joyful community, the scene illustrated the effect of oxymoronic “social distance”: the separation of individuals in which social activity is only possible while staying rigorously distant from one another’. Michael Deacon was excited by the potential of virtual production to make performers seem like they were in the same space; but for Aebischer, in October 2020 as the United Kingdom was re-entering strict lockdown regulations after an open summer, the visual togetherness was a painful reminder of being physically apart.