A few years ago, as part of the Velvet Loop theatre company, I helped create a piece called The Illumination. This work explored the daily lives of a group of religious zealots — or as they are more commonly termed, a cult.

The production consisted of: the members of this group; their home (which the audience was invited into); the mythology of their sect; their daily activities; their personal struggles; and on, and on, and on. During the creative process the group generated entire lives that supported how they had come to be in that place.

The narrative strands had been planned out, moving from one room to another, from one group of characters to another. They featured a journalist infiltrating the group, a visitor from an overseas chapter, a food shortage and an unwanted pregnancy amongst others. Though each of these strands were composed of linear events, we had no control over the action that the mobile audience witnessed.

In fact, there were many events that played to no one beyond the actors, who were instructed to secrete themselves in a quiet corner and play out their scene, moving on or otherwise covering up the conversation if they were interrupted by the audience. We populated the world with objects and asked the audience to make their own conclusions with regards to who the protagonists or antagonists might be; to judge the intentions of the characters based on the information they received, and decipher a plot that was consistent with the facts they possessed.

Nature vs Nurture

“Like our language instinct, a story drive — an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making — emerges untutored universally in healthy children.”
(Jag Bhalla, guest blog for Scientific American)

Stories are how we make sense of the world and they will manifest themselves regardless. However, this does not let us off the hook as creators of fiction. We cannot empty out a box of random elements on the floor and expect the audience to sift through the rubble and piece together a story: we still need to do the hard work of crafting a plot. What we learn from immersive theatre in this case is that an additional dimension to our craft exists; one that we cannot control.

The minimum requirement for XR is the ability to navigate a digital world, even if, for arguments sake, that world has no visual component. When you allow someone to navigate a path, this implicitly creates a variance, however small. Even a train on a track can move backwards as well as remain stationary, something us Brits are all too familiar with.

Plotlines Ad Infinitum

A viewer of a 360-degree video can see about a quarter of the image at any one time. Their experience is linear, and if the video is being displayed through a standard player they cannot affect the course of the experience beyond the playback controls. If we accept that the audience of 360-degree video might change their view on average every 4 seconds, then for each minute of content there would be 1,073,741,824 different possible versions of the viewing experience. This stands versus the 1 to 1 correlation of fixed frame video. So, how do we plan for these variances?

We don’t, or more accurately we can’t. Nevertheless, by moving our thinking away from a focus on a centralized narrative and instead (as we explore in the post, Observer and Object) letting the audience build a story out of a collection of narrative strands we can use these variances as a tool.

Curating Content

An example of this being put to good use within the limitations of 360-degree video is the documentary The Ark (2016), which tells the story of the battle to save the northern white rhino. In order to juxtapose the different efforts undertaken in this endeavor the filmmakers placed two 180-degree half-domes opposite each another. One displayed a patrol of soldiers guarding one of the last of the species out in the wild. Meanwhile, the other dome presented scientists working in a lab attempting to use stem cell technology in the repopulation effort.

In this circumstance we are presented with two different narratives and must use our own agency of vision to decide which to follow at any given time. The maker is responsible for curating the content, the viewer then decides how that content is consumed. Working in combination with their own experience of the world the viewer uses the information they received to create meaning.

As we add more elements, we exponentially increase the possibilities of the meaning that can be created. The maker is therefore only responsible for curation and not creation. We must craft our stories the way stories emerge out in the wild, through the nebulous clustering of circumstances, characters and events. Then we must allow our audiences to follow their innate desires for structure and order.

Authored by Roderick D. Morgan, Artistic Director Trajectory Theatre