🕺Choreographing Zoom
Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Televisual Theatre > Choreographing Zoom
Televisual Theatre makers most widely chose Zoom in early 2020, and when they transitioned to other platforms like YouTube, this often involved integrating a Zoom video feed into the streaming service. This broadcast videoconferencing medium presents creative challenges in its two modes: Spotlight View, in which one speaker is ‘spotlighted’ at a time, akin to a cinematic close-up; and Grid View, in which video feeds from several participants are highlighted and stacked alongside each other, like the Brady Bunch’s famous intro sequence.
In Speaker View, there is the option for a close-up or mid-shot of the performer, depending on how far away they can get from their webcam. This is part of what makes solo shows so potent, Michael Deacon told me, allowing the performer to look ‘down the barrel’ of their webcam and directly into the audience’s eyes, much like early television hosts. It also offers other cinematographic language: ‘In Emperor of the Moon, there were these interviews where the actors were looking off as if talking to an interviewer, as if talking to somebody who we can't see. That's a creative decision that says something very different’ about the location and experience of the characters in the narrative. In direct address, the audience is being brought intimately into the performer’s world; in the Emperor of the Moon example, the audience is a voyeur on a conversation between two parties. These are simple adjustments to the actors’ position relative to their webcam which can radically change the audience’s interpretation.
In an analysis of the television show 24, the filmic technique as such: ‘the split-screen vignette, a much more effective representational strategy which could express the simultaneity of the network era and satisfy the series’ real-time conceit’. The split-screen took on a new meaning during 2020 thanks to the rapid uptake of Zoom and other videoconferencing software, as : ‘The rapid take-up and subsequent ubiquity of the language of split screens for online performance has obscured just how radical a break this widespread usage is from the previously dominant screen language employed for almost all theatre, dance and classical music’. The Zoom split screen through Gallery View could represent temporal simultaneity, a split screen tradition, while also being manipulated to represent physical proximity, a shift away from cinematography.
that the split screen in Gallery View could, as Streamed Shakespeare in Sydney integrated it, expand the performers’ and audience’s proprioception: telepresence changed ‘our body’s self-perception and instincts in sensing our own and others’ movements and spatial positioning’. :
Grasping only at the air, the participants nonetheless shared a palpable intimacy and extraordinary energy in their telematic touching. Their proprioception was not only highly attuned when working within the virtual sets, it was actually heightened by the need to adjust their positions and actions in relation to these new and unfamiliar parameters, in the same way that proprioception is intensified during moments of physical uncertainty or danger.
The actors were reacting to what they saw happening with other actors on their grid-view screens, similarly to how they might interact in-person onstage.
For Holly Champion of Streamed Shakespeare, Grid View allowed the audience a view of all the actors, similar to the view they’d have of a stage: ‘it allowed us to show reactions. And we found that to be really engaging for the actors and engaging for the audience. … everyone who was onscreen was aware that they were being looked at the entire time. So, they had to keep performing’. Matthew Jameson added that audiences could ‘track everything’ in Grid View, seeing ‘things with one camera that you wouldn't be able to see with others, and just sort of play with it more as a kind of visual thing and a storytelling thing’. Champion added that Grid View could serve as ‘a proxy for coming on stage’ since performers could turn on their video and microphones at specific points allowing a choreographed architecture of their appearance. For example, this allowed performers in Streamed Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to look like they handed a prop to an actor in a box below them. Streamed Shakespeare expanded this choreography in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2:
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