What's Up, Chat?

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Televisual Theatre > Sharing is Caring > What's Up, Chat?

It is common for livestreamers to refer to their chat sections as , but it is relatively new for theatre makers to consider their audience’s a ‘Chat’. Here are some case studies where theatre makers incorporated their Chat Audience:

Audience Chatting to Themselves: Fake Friends revived their Pulitzer Prize-nominated production Circle Jerk for a hybrid performance in April 2022. Originally, the company intended to stage the show in-person in NYC, but during lockdowns in 2020, they rapidly and brilliantly pivoted their show to livestream – and later, stream a recorded version – for distanced audiences. Like Kuo’s dramaturgical interpretation of In Love and Warcraft, Circle Jerk featured extensive use of digital technology and characters , thus direct camera address, memes, and content influencer references allowed the show to comfortably pivot into a new medium. In 2022, Fake Friends were able to stage the show in-person, but offered livestreams with, for the first time, a chat section. The performance I watched started with a prompt from a Fake Friends member, greeting us and asking us where we were tuning in from, but there was little chatter beyond initial hellos. We also had no impact on the show’s plot.

Performers Chatting to the Audience: some performers became more like livestreaming content creators and talked directly to the audience via the chat. regarding the August 2020 NIDA student showcase ‘incorporated Twitch fully into the show, announcing: “The chat channel is one of our stages.” The actors read the chat constantly and occasionally contributed to it, even as they reflected on the audience response and addressed it during the performance’. Similarly, one of Carmel Clavin’s lockdown performances was a Twitch stream called ‘The Glamour Hobo Bedtime Tales’, in which Clavin ‘read stories at night for people at 10 PM … I would put on a full face of makeup, and some glamorous loungewear, and I would settle into a little space somewhere in the house’. After welcoming the audience and having ‘my daily rant’, she began to read part of a book; later, this morphed into much greater audience interaction:

I started incorporating a deck system called the Lenormand. … I would say, ‘Alright, everybody! We need three numbers between one and 36’, and so I would pull numbers from the audience, and then I would make up a story on the spot based on the cards that corresponded to the symbols that they've chosen. So, we built a story together and say, ‘Is it funny, or is it a tragedy? Is it a historical piece, or is it a scifi thriller? What are we doing?’