In his 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, screenwriter William Goldman famously proclaimed that “nobody knows anything”. At that point, the film industry was arguably 70 years old. Now, as we float somewhere around its centenary, the statement holds just as much truth.
In The Journey Starts Today we challenged the criticisms facing XR and looked towards the example of immersive theatre for potential solutions. There is further precedent in the history of performance for dramatic and mechanical innovation, but does it necessarily follow that we approach XR with an identical blueprint?
Is it all guesswork?
If we take the release of Google cardboard as the starting point of modern XR, it makes this industry four years old, so what hope do we have of knowing anything? Should we throw everything at the wall and see what sticks? Goldman’s position would suggest, yes, but we need not duplicate the work that’s already been done in the process.
“Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” (Goldman, 1983)
Breaking the fourth wall
I’ve often heard people in the XR ecology pay lip service to theatre. It is, after all, a medium that has been working in 360 degrees for 2,000 years. But, as pleasant as this is for a theatre maker to hear — without any further interrogation of what it actually means — it is just pleasantries. It’s also somewhat inaccurate. The goal of proscenium arch theatre is no different to that of film: to allow us to sit in the dark and give ourselves to the collective, to have our responses reinforced and reverberated.
Though theatre has made an innate feature of breaking this convention, it is only recently, with the trends of immersive and one-to-one performance that we see this medium demand something different from its audience. Both of these new forms often, but not always, “ask the spectator to speak or act in dialogue with the performers or the performance environment, or make choices that structure their experience.” (Gareth White, 2013) This narrows down theatre’s birth into the world of the 360˚ environment to somewhere between Allan Kaprow’s 1958 performance art ‘18 Happenings in Six Parts’, and the scenographic and architectural tableaus of Artangels' H.G., as recently as 1995. A much shorter lifespan for XR to truly examine.
Is there anything to learn?
So why look at all? If we accept that, despite our best efforts, it’s all just guesswork and only bull-headed determination will take XR from media to medium, is there any point? You don’t have to look very far in the XR ecology to see that we are already learning things for ourselves. When Chris Milk, in his 2015 TED Talk, called VR the “ultimate empathy machine” the term spread like wildfire, until it went from an adage, to a principle, to a rule, to a commandment. Now, we approach that selfsame idea with skepticism. A recent tweet from XR thought leader Verity McIntosh poked fun at this idea.
“It’s almost as though it’s the artistry and invention of the creators, and the relationship that is built between author, reader and subject that evokes empathy, rather than a magic trick that happens when you choose a particular medium.”
This is the rise and fall of the first commandment of XR, so let’s take a moment to extrapolate on why it took hold so firmly. Through the lens of film theory (let us keep in mind that Milk comes from an illustrious film background) we had already, in 2014, heard Roger Ebert call movies “a machine that generates empathy.” He went on to clarify that empathy “helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”
In film, as in traditional theatre, empathy is a tool which helps us exist on both sides of the fourth wall, simultaneously. That gives way to the logic that, when the wall comes down, empathy becomes explicit. We are in the shoes of the protagonist so, therefore, we must feel what they feel.
Relationship Problems
As McIntosh points out, there is more work to be done. Who could have known? Immersive theatre already has an established understanding of relationship building with its audience, and often uses this as a measurement of effectiveness, rather than a default output. To build this relationship, makers consider all parts of the audience journey: how they are welcomed into the space, how they transition through modes of the performance and how they are returned, changed but better off, into the real world. If, as happens more often than it should, a participant has their headset ripped off their face before being pushed out the door, there needs to be a reason for this beyond the pragmatics of capacity quotas.
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We cannot pretend that immersive theatre has all the answers. If it did, we would just do Punch Drunk with headsets and call it a day. However, if we pay attention to existing disciplines when we develop our hypotheses, we need not repeat their mistakes. That includes film, literature, and theatre of all kinds. But the final word I will put out in defense of immersive theatre is that as a form, it is built on the innate understanding that audiences do not demarcate what is, and isn’t, the experience: they are basing their understanding on what they feel, think, touch, see and hear. The same has never been true about fiction, based on the page, or on the screen.
Authored by Roderick D. Morgan, Director and Producer Trajectory Theatre
Originally published on Our Trajectory Medium on 14 January 2019