🛤️Transmedia Theatre
Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Remix Theatre > Transmedia Theatre
Remix Theatre comes out of the recombination or remediation of theatre and internet hypermedia, so theatre makers in this realm not only combine symbols on top of each other but change the temporal experience of a performance with overlapping methods of communication. This can lead to transmedia storytelling, a process akin to franchising major intellectual property, like Disney’s ongoing expansion of the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes. For theatre makers, transmedia performances in the post-pandemic remix genre can include short videos, live in-person or Televisual Theatre works, emails and social media posts as characters, games, and other temporally expansive approaches to engaging the audience with a sense of immediacy .
The logic governing this approach is that of Henry Jenkins’ technologically facilitated convergence culture, in which transmedia storytelling involves content being distributed across multiple platforms that act as paratexts, intertexts and supplements to the live stage performance – or may, in the case of the broadcast, not just complement but replace the live performance altogether for its geographically remote audiences.
The media within a Transmedia Remix Theatre production comment on the performance overall, comment on other symbols within the show, and act as supplementary experiences outside of the show to create the sense that the narrative world continues to exist around the audience member – for example, an email sent two days prior with a link to the performance is a supplementary document to the performance and can be written ‘in-character’ to match the tone, themes, and performance within the show itself, and may include images from the show’s marketing materials that represent the show.
The Advent Calendar holiday release of Murder Ballad from Hot Cousin spans several forms of media both in its making and in its release schedule. The four producer-performer-creators who make up the troupe are spread across the globe in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia; although they have created in-person performances before the pandemic, personal and professional changes have impacted their lives now so that, even with the world fully reopened in 2023, they did not get together to make their drag cabaret flash meme performance loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Instead, the show not only faithlessly recounts Christie’s narrative, and delves into the onset of her dementia, but also self-referentially recounts the process of making Murder Ballad over exchanged videos, voice notes, and WhatsApp. Each performance segment, in fact, was not hosted on a traditional video streaming platform, but simply uploaded to Google Drive, then the link was both texted (in WhatsApp) and emailed to the audience on its release, making the show feel simultaneously unfinished – as Christie’s writing during the early stages of her dementia arguably is among critics, we learn while watching the videos – and makes it feel like top secret information being passed to an internet sleuth. The emails and texts themselves are collages of typefaces and colours – spread out over weeks during the Christmas season, each short video (between five and ten minutes each) was a meme-textured gift-wrapped snack.
Within each video, the performers often exchanged roles, using costumes and makeup as well as digital face and voice filters to create drag personas and clownish, though loving, characterisations.
While Murder Ballad incorporates visual collage and ‘glitches’ – shown in the images, for example, is an error of the Agatha Christie face filter as it clips into the background – the show predominantly uses its episodic (transmedial) release both to increase suspense, and to comment on the asynchronous making of the work across continents and timezones. Working in this manner gives each creator time to think about their part, but also increases the suspense of what fellow creators will make or think about your work, which could raise tensions to the point of a metaphorical murder. Much of the concern expressed in the narrative of Murder Ballad is about making good work, and what that means in their situation; yet the work they make comes from a Christie book that is not viewed as good. The transmedial stretching of time and communication becomes the performance as much as each video, and the imperfection of each episode reflects the imperfection of their working methods and of Christie’s original text.
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