In the opinion of the author, the greatest book ever written on the subject of theatre is Peter Brook’s The Empty Space. In this controversial work, first published over 50 years ago, he offers a wonderfully succinct definition of theatre:
“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
The emergence of immersive theatre did not disprove this statement, it simply underlined the possibility for its reinterpretation.
Audience or Actor?
In our contemporary theatrical landscape, the dichotomy between the man walking across the stage and his observer is not so sharply distinguished: the watcher of the empty space and its inhabitant can now be one and the same.
Artangel’s installation H.G. (discussed in a previous post) featured no actors. It comprised a series of abandoned sets that played with temporality, to suggest that the action had just taken place. The audience was left to their own devices, in the space, to piece together what they might have seen had they been there moments earlier.
Consequently, the true action of the piece took place in the minds of the audience, based on the impetus provided in each scene. Their presence was required to activate the work of theatre. Only when the artist creates a space, in which the audience can be present, does this activation occur.
The same rings true for XR: until an observer interacts with the equipment that conveys the experience, the experience is nothing more than stored data. What we find, in immersive theatre, is that we must consider our work incomplete until our co-collaborator, the audience, have fulfilled their role. This, then, begs the question, why are so many XR experiences judged by their data and not for the experience this data creates?
Total Perception
To clarify, I’m not suggesting that those currently producing work are doing so without consideration of the audience component. All stages of the XR development workflow involve interactive dress rehearsals to test the build, but far too often the build is the be-all-and-end-all of the process.
A mindset that has followed us from fixed frame media and proscenium arch theatre, demands that we set the boundaries of our practice at the edge of where we first encounter our audience. However, “the immersive experience arises where the medium and the message are fused, resulting in the ‘totalisation’ of the artwork. This lucidity subverts ascetics and critical distance, placing the perceiver of the art within the art.” These words, from Josephine Machon, echo the inherent implications we perceive in Artangel’s work. It is the entrance of observers into the theatrical space that creates action and completes the production.
If we apply the same rules to XR, we shift our perception from an experience that we gift to our participant to one that we create with our participant. The differences may be subtle but the alteration in our approach can result in spectacular changes. This does not necessitate additional, or unneeded, interactions and could be as simple as rethinking the camera position on a 360˚ shoot. The core of this process is to use the unpredictability of the audience as a tool for creation.
Authored by Roderick D. Morgan, Director and Producer Trajectory Theatre
Originally published on Our Trajectory Medium on 21 January 2019