🎪Theatre As Sound Stage

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Televisual Theatre > Theatre as Sound Stage

Hybrid theatre as a second wave trend began in 2021 and has continued as of this writing in 2024; during the early months of hybrid livestreamed theatre, some places were reopening performance venues with social distancing, masking, and vaccination requirements in place, but found that audiences were often cautious about returning in-person. Companies like the Wilma Theater in the US and The Space in the UK found it worthwhile, financially and artistically, to maintain their livestreaming (and later, recorded streaming) options for Covid-cautious audiences to access shows they wanted; these streams, in some cases, provided backup footage when a performance had to close due to performer and crew illness.

Hybrid differed from fully online livestreaming in a creative sense, as well. Matthew Jameson from The Space said of the shifting performer-audience-camera crew relationship: ‘you became a sort of secondary character rather than a primary way of engaging with the audience’. Hybrid online/in-person theatre also for audiences to commune with each other: ‘The live audience gives the effect of interactivity to the broadcast audience’. Hearing the in-person audience reminds the solitary at-home viewer that they are part of a larger arts-loving community.

In both the US and UK, there were times when partial reopening allowed theatre makers to return to their physical stages, even if the audience was not able to be physically there, too. Jameson said:

It was really interesting shooting things [in closed theatre spaces] – it effectively felt like a closed studio when you were doing it without an audience. So, you were left to imagine the audience reaction, you were allowed a bit of freedom in terms of the camera angles you were getting, in terms of the relationship between the camera as the audience and the theatre-makers, the performers . . .

Jameson and his team at The Space used the opportunity to expand their cinematic dramaturgy, integrating the camera as another performer with choreography, much like Morgan Green suggested in her approach to Cinematic Theatre. At Know Theatre in Cincinnati, this resulted in a livestream process intentionally akin to a closed television broadcast studio:

And then we did a livestream show from the theatre, as a broadcast studio. It was this play called Zach by Christian St. Croix, which is a riff on ‘Saved By The Bell’ … because of the sitcom nature of it, we did a multicam to give it sitcom vibes. And then we also did some live Chromakey stuff where we could do scenery, treat the back wall as a greenscreen, and Chromakey in hand-drawn scenery that had a ’90’s flare.

The livestreamed theatre space intentionally becomes a television-like broadcast studio, which Andrew Hungerford and his creative team treated as a type of site-specific theatre; the dramaturgy of the broadcast studio enhanced the experience for the livestream’s mise-en-scene.