🔔Tips & Tricks

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Televisual Theatre > Tips & Tricks

Camera as Performer: as discussed in the Cinematic Theatre section, Televisual Theatre offers a creative opportunity for the filming team to become a co-performer with the onstage performers – as long as this does not disrupt the in-person audience experience, per Matthew Jameson.

I think you get more creative input as a streaming team when you are able to make most of the calls and have good responsive actors you can play with. Or, if you look like a monologue-y show where they specifically want to eyeball the camera and incorporate that as much as they play to their physical audience. … you're there basically just to make sure you capture a decent angle. But the ones where you can play with it or have fun – like dance shows are really fantastic to shoot because you have a beat, you have music, you have stuff that you can respond to in terms of the beats that you're hitting, and the mix that you're making. It feels slightly more like DJ-ing than being a cameraman.

The camera can also, as mentioned in Cinematic Theatre, serve as an avatar for the audience. The fastest shows to pivot online in 2020 were typically play readings, like The Space’s ScriptSpace program: ‘the first one we did was literally a one-woman show where she was reading the script off her screen and directing everything at camera in a direct address fashion, because that was very much the nature of the show. And it really worked’. Like television’s live broadcast hosts and livestreaming content creators, online theatre’s direct address made visual sense within the mise-en-scene.

As another example, to get inside the action, RSC’s 2023 All’s Well that Ends Well considering the at-home or in-cinema audience, while allowing themselves to be seen by the onstage audience some nights, ‘to get “inside” the drama’. They also ‘fitted lightweight bodycam GoPros to the chests of several of the cast’ to get first-person perspectives, much like webcams in the mid-2000s, or candid mobile phone shots in Kuo’s In Love and Warcraft: that online livestreamed production integrated webcams and smartphones into the show to capture the performers as though the characters were being spied on through their laptops, gaming devices, and phones: ‘And I thought: the camera is now essentially the audience. That's the audience’s lens into the show. How do we acknowledge the camera as a real thing or not?’. In a show with a narrative centred around technology, like In Love and Warcraft, using the panopticon created by ubiquitous computing feels seamless.

Offer Livestreamed and Pre-Recorded Stream Options: I have defined Televisual Theatre as live broadcast or livestreaming, but a significant reason theatre makers continue offering online streaming video is so their audiences can access shows from home. In this case, consider recording livestreams as they happen, and then edit together a filmed version for later release, like The Space does: ‘we stream everything live which tends to have a major audience pickup, and then we offer the same recordings on-demand afterwards for a period of two weeks’. Holly Champion noted that livestreaming was a personal dream of hers: ‘I strongly believe in giving access to people who can't normally access quality live theatre. I grew up in the Coffs Harbour area, and it was hard, as a young person wanting to access quality theatre, you had to basically go to Sydney or Brisbane’. Access options not only mean livestreaming but offering a recorded version, like a rerun. YouTube automatically records livestreamed performances which simplifies the archival process.

Document Your Workflow: this seems obvious, but post-pandemic digital theatre forms like Televisual Theatre are still evolving, so documenting steps in the process can help streamline your next production. This documentation is especially beneficial for digital theatre makers working in a live setting, with less opportunity to edit out errors. Carmel Clavin worked with colleagues in Adelaide, Australia and at other fringe festivals around the world in 2020 to determine what was possible for performers to quickly do – use the webcams or smartphones they have, ‘pull all the cushions off of your sofa and pack them around you just out of frame’, determine the best source of light. Out of that, Clavin and her Richmond Fringe Festival team ‘created these one-sheets that we sent out to our participants with very basic instructions about how to optimize the things that they already had at hand or could maybe sadly go to Amazon to get something as fast as possible’. Streamed Shakespeare also created extensive notes in scripts for technical run-throughs and future documentation, allowing them to improve their virtual production workflow while minimising rehearsal time.

Consider Rehearsal Schedules: theatre makers who performed over a videoconferencing or livestreaming platform from their homes found that they were able to keep their scripts open on their screen, which reduced the amount of line memorisation needed and thus, for some groups like Streamed Shakespeare, effectively compressed rehearsal time: ‘we understood that if you look straight down into the lens of the camera, you can actually read the script without people being too aware that you're reading. That's like an auto-cue’. On the other hand, learning new tools, teaching actors to do some of their own tech (like setting up Zoom backgrounds), or setting up greenscreens properly can increase rehearsal time as Peter J. Kuo notes: ‘I started playing with [OBS] and realized: this is like doing a theatrical show with projections. Now you just need extra time. You need the extra tech time’. With Televisual Theatre, the production timeline for your show will have time distributed differently. Specifically, you may need to spend more time in technical rehearsals compared to traditional in-person theatre, as many designers or performers may need to learn new tools.

Digital Scenography vs. Online Interpretation: While digital scenography is a prominent legacy of first wave digital theatre, it does not always translate into second wave. of in-person projections that do not translate directly into the livestreamed audience experience:

Projections in meatspace can be an excellent way of creating theatricality, but it is less effective when used online. Why the difference? There is no shift in audience experience. In meatspace, the audience’s visual understanding shifts from three dimensions to two. It is this shift that creates the audience’s experience of the event as “theatrical” because it is an intentional disruption of the storytelling mode and therefore supplies a moment of theatricality that serves the narrative. In the digital world, excluding virtual and augmented realities, projections don’t shift our visual frame – projections remain in two dimensions. But what if you sent the audience a text message at the same moment? Now you have introduced a shift in their experience of the play and found a way to heighten that moment. Turning a theatrical moment into a transmedia experience is just one potential way to solve this challenge of presenting theatricality on screens.