🤝Sharing is Caring

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Televisual Theatre > Sharing is Caring

Online content, unlike traditional television, : ‘Telematic collaboration can equally involve partnerships with audience members as well as with other artists or remote company members’. I define Televisual Theatre by its liveness and temporal co-presence, but some theatre makers needed proof of this togetherness. It becomes a significant dramaturgical choice whether to integrate an audience chat, how the performers (or an unseen chat or stage manager) might interact with the chat stream, and how much influence the audience will have over the narrative.

Livestream content creators talk directly to their audiences through a live chat feature, but these performers rarely respond to every single written sentence, and often chats are audience members talking to each other as much as to the performer. that ‘a fast-scrolling chat window, filled with text that wasn’t conversational but full of excited exclamations, repetitive emoticons, and memes, could be seen as akin to the cheering one would find in a sports stadium’. Brendan Bradley agrees, noting that his audiences for Non-Player Character: The Musical remediate the online gaming chat experience back into live, in-person experiences:

If we returned to the idea that this was all, early on, trying to embody a chat, they [the audience] basically become a Twitch chat in a room, all shouting out whatever they want to shout out and doing whatever they want to do, and being very excited and laughing at the participants and making fun of us, and it becomes its own version of the show.

that ‘online streams afford a mode of spectatorial engagement which, while distracted, may also be more responsive, response-able and responsible than the absence of physical and temporal co-presence in the context of online streaming might suggest’. When I asked Natasha Rickman of Creation Theatre what online theatre components she wanted to keep in her practice, she wrote: ‘Connection with an audience, by performers being able to speak to them direct to camera and to respond to their suggestions or in conversation depending on the show’. So, how have Televisual Theatre makers used platform tools for audience engagement?