Audiovisual Integration

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Televisual Theatre > Sharing is Caring > Audiovisual Integration

While chat sections are an easy way for audiences to know they are live and feel engaged, this is a legacy of livestreaming content and may not be appropriate for interactions in your show. Here are some other ways that audiences have been integrated into Televisual Theatre:

Using Audience Audio or Video Streams: while many Zoom shows told their online audiences to keep their cameras and microphones off during the performance (an admonishment reminiscent of turning one’s phone off in an auditorium), not every theatre maker was so strict. : ‘Zoom also enabled the audience to see itself in a way it couldn't in the theatre. At the end of the performance, the Zoom host promoted the audience to participants and invited them to open their cameras’. We could then smile and cheer as Crouch took a bow and even offer more extensive and specific praise. : ‘The copresence of performers and spectators on the Zoom screen is fundamentally different than simply addressing the audience in a theater … in the context of the pandemic, this moment of reversed “peeping” also constitutes a new shared public space’. While television brought live entertainment into the home, Televisual Theatre potentially makes the home part of the stage space.

Integrating the Audience Onstage with Virtual Production: Creation Theatre and Big Telly Theatre experimented with using audience volunteers’ video feeds during their Halloween 2020 production of MacBeth. Using OBS, home audience’s faces were spliced into the banquet scene when MacBeth is haunted by the ghost of his first murder victim, Banquo. The literal integration of the audience mimicked drawing volunteers onstage, : ‘Yet Macbeth’s solution to the problem of locating actors in the same space nonetheless troubles the line between film and theater: while carefully foregrounding liveness and audience participation, it nonetheless moves away from another, arguably less fetishized aspect of theater: the single-shot aspect, in which the audience sees everyone onstage, all of the time’. Virtual Production using Chromakey or Zoom's backdrop feature became more common later, with the 'single shot' being remediated by Holly Champion's Streamed Shakespeare simply through switching to Gallery View in Zoom, and by Robert Myles' The Show Must Go Online project, which integrated virtual production techniques like Creation did, but neither company integrated the live audience in the same way.

Pre-Show and Post-Show Hangouts: offering audiences space to decompress with each other and, potentially, with the performers is a great way to enhance community, regardless of how you have dramaturgically integrated the audience otherwise. Andrew Hungerford used Linden Lab’s Blocksworld created ‘a metaverse-y [space] early on in the pandemic. … we built it like a 2-D Zelda-looking level of our theatre, and people could walk their avatars around and have conversations’. For Hungerford, this recreated the hangout spaces in Know Theatre that audiences frequented. Know also hosted their Cincinnati Fringe Festival afterparties in Zoom Rooms, which was common practice in 2020: ‘having things like Zoom Rooms post-show and trying to figure out other ways that we could have the equivalent of community gathering spaces; having chat rooms available during the shows’ were all important audience integrations for Know Theatre.