🤲Co-Presence in Liminal Spaces

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Televisual Theatre > Co-Presence in Liminal Spaces

Any technology that allowed communal gathering and a sense of togetherness rocketed to popularity in 2020 after lockdowns came into force. Many of these works echo the early evolution of television, including temporal liveness, a liminal space for audience togetherness, and intimacy/engagement through direct address. Televisual Theatre’s liveness can create an online liminal space for communal experience in lieu of physical proximity, which : ‘Multi-site performances can create a liminal interstitial shared space between all of the performance sites involved’. This liminal (online) space is a gathering place just as much as the seats in a theatre auditorium. Peter J. Kuo described his experiences as a YouTube content creator in the mid-2000s: ‘we would all get on video and chat and just kind of hang out in a digital space. And so, for me, that's when I was like, “Oh, you can create community and space”. Which is what theatre does, but digitally’. The ontologies of theatre and the internet overlap, allowing performers to create for gathering and engaging

Audiences must be guided into this liminal communal space, and this can be accomplished through preshow set-up or through direct audience address (either as preshow or throughout the production). : ‘Television’s “interaction” with the viewer is a legacy from the hosts and announcers of radio’, with a presenter seeming to speak directly to the audience, though unable to see or hear any of their responses, arguably until the evolution of livestreaming videos. : ‘A great deal of work is done to make it appear as if communication were happening in two directions, with the intention of singling you out, as an active recipient. … Theatre and television, then, evidence a strong desire to deceive (that is, persuade) the viewer that the ideal viewing situation would be only or especially for them’. The diegetic communication in broadcast television, livestreaming content, and Televisual Theatre is largely unidirectional – emotions are transmitted from the larger-than-life close-up face of the performer to the at-home audience – but the shared temporal experience enhances the sense of community. However, online, there is the potential for the audience to talk back.

Audiences have finally been granted the ability to talk back to television presenters, thanks to livestreaming platforms with chat features, video and audio sharing, emoji reactions, and micropayments. the evolution of this content specifically on the platform, Twitch:

While sites like YouTube have long tapped into this desire with the ability to distribute game videos, live streaming upped the ante by offering broadcasters the opportunity to interact with their audiences in real time through a synchronous chat window. Audiences—and their interactions with broadcasters—were themselves becoming integrated into the show. Game live streaming has become a new form of networked broadcast.

The pandemic popularised this live performance method among theatre makers, but livestreamed combinations of theatre and television predated the pandemic. Andrew Hungerford, for example, oversaw livestreaming of Know’s sketch show, Serials! upon request from Know patrons who wanted to see new works but could not always make it in-person. Brendan Bradley, famous now for his virtual reality productions, told me about a Facebook Livestreaming series from 2017:

There was a bar in Van Nuys, California, and we would meet with a series of actors in the morning. And Mike Lee-style, we would workshop a dramatic improvisation around why these characters were at Last Call. And then we would rehearse it and stitch the scenes together, and then we go live on Facebook and pass the camera off to each other to do a single take episode. And we did that every single week for a summer: inventing the story that morning, going live around noon, and telling this very weird anthology story of these last-call regulars at a bar. And to me, that was that perfect sweet spot of having the technology to truly go live to do everything that we're doing with live theatre, but in a site-specific way, more like the ’60’s storefront movement. But now adding virtual technology.

Shared viewing time seemed important to many theatre makers throughout the pandemic as it was a proxy for onstage, in-person liveness, but it was not always evident that the performance was live rather than a scheduled recorded broadcast. Kuo, who coined the term live video theatre in a 2020 HowlRound article, considered shared time as an important component of digital theatre: ‘The theatre kind of theatricalizes digital experiences. Now, we're digitizing theatrical experience. That isn't just recording theatre and letting people see it’. Kuo’s production of In Love and Warcraft exemplified this type of shared time and online liveness, as his performers were in their individual homes, livestreaming video through Zoom that was then broadcast to a live, socially distanced audience on YouTube, who enthusiastically commented in the live chat section throughout the performance.

In-person theatre has always been appointment viewing, because the performers and audience agree to meet in the theatre at a dedicated time to experience the show; gathering at the same time from different locations creates the shared liminal performance space. , and online livestreamers similarly provide a live broadcast schedule: for example, the platform Twitch ‘may be understood as representing a return to linear-TV with its emphasis on live streaming’ which is an important part of broadcast scheduling. In fact, Twitch creators can list a broadcast schedule that resembles television schedules from decades past.

Figure 6: A screenshot of Critical Role’s Twitch broadcast schedule. Critical Role is a massively successful group of performers who livestream tabletop gameplay, mostly Dungeons and Dragons.

Echoing early television’s promoters, their pandemic-era livestreaming theatre productions: ‘By offering appointment viewing … we gave our audience a reliable anchor in a time of so much uncertainty. The safety of a regularly scheduled time and place for a community to gather meant audiences had something they could rely on’. These two theatre makers specifically livestreamed their online works as well, incorporating more a sense of theatre and less a sense of current television. , the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Lab stated regarding some of their shows like ‘All Kinds of Limbo’: ‘To summon some of theater’s shared intimacy, it’s being ticketed and broadcast as live, although the show is recorded’. The National Theatre is discussed more in the Cinematic Theatre section.

Sometimes, theatre makers used the communal aspect of appointment viewing to integrate pre-recorded video, so performers might not always have been temporally co-present with the audience. Hungerford told me of their livestreamed production of Feast: ‘we were able to hang some white drapes behind her [Grendel’s Mother], and then do a reveal at the end like it could be a drop where we revealed the whole space … And that was pre-recorded, but to have the illusion of liveness, it was broadcast at specific times’. Similarly, Creation Theatre’s 2024 adaptation of Antigone predominantly incorporated livestreamed video of performers over Zoom, but featured segments from the politician characters like Creon which appeared pre-recorded. In contrast, other companies chose to cling to theatre’s ephemerality for their televisual theatre works. Carmel Clavin described Wise Children’s work: ‘they just did brilliant livestream work, and they also kept it livestream. There's no archive to watch. This was when it was happening’. The audience had to show up or completely miss it; however, I will note that as of 2024, this ‘ephemerality’ is no longer part of their mystique, as Wise Children has released a recording of their show, The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, on Digital Theatre+.