Digital theatre


Strictly, digital theatre is a hybrid art form, gaining strength from theatre’s ability to facilitate the imagination and create human connections and digital technology’s ability to extend the reach of communication and visualization.

Description

Digital theatre is primarily identified by the coexistence of “live” performers and digital media in the same unbroken space with a co-present audience. In addition to the necessity that its performance must be simultaneously “live” and digital, the event’s secondary characteristics are that its content should retain some recognizable theatre roles and a narrative element of spoken language or text. The four conditions of digital theatre are:
  1. It is a “live” performance placing at least some performers in the same shared physical space with an audience.
  2. The performance must use digital technology as an essential part of the primary artistic event.
  3. The performance contains only limited levels of interactivity, in that its content is shaped primarily by the artist for an audience.
  4. The performance’s content should contain either spoken language or text which might constitute a narrative or story, differentiating it from other events which are distinctly dance, art, or music.

    ”Live,” digital media, interactivity, and narrative

A brief clarification of these terms in relation to digital theatre is in order. The significance of the terms “live” or “liveness” as they occur in theatre can not be over-emphasized, as it is set in opposition to digital in order to indicate the presence of both types of communication, human and computer-created. Rather than considering the real-time or temporality of events, digital theatre concerns the interactions of people sharing the same physical space. In the case of mass broadcast, it is essential that this sharing of public space occurs at the site of the primary artistic event. The next necessary condition for creating digital theatre is the presence of digital media in the performance. Digital media is not defined through the presence of one type of technology hardware or software configuration, but by its characteristics of being flexible, mutable, easily adapted, and able to be processed in real-time. It is the ability to change not only sound and light, but also images, video, animation, and other content into triggered, manipulated, and reconstituted data which is relayed or transmitted in relation to other impulses which defines the essential nature of the digital format. Digital information has the quality of pure computational potential, which can be seen as parallel to the potential of human imagination.
The remaining characteristics of limited interactivity and narrative or spoken word are secondary and less distinct parameters. While interactivity can apply to both the interaction between humans and machines and between humans, digital theatre is primarily concerned with the levels of interactivity occurring between audience and performers. It is in this type of interactivity, similar to other types of heightened audience participation, that the roles of message sender and receiver can dissolve to that of equal conversers, causing theatre to dissipate into conversation. The term “interactive” refers to any mutually or reciprocally active communication, whether it be a human-human or a human-machine communication.
The criteria of having narrative content through spoken language or text as part of the theatrical event is meant not to limit the range of what is already considered standard theatre, but to differentiate between that which is digital theatre and the currently more developed fields of digital dance9 and Art Technology. This is necessary because of the mutability between art forms utilizing technology. It is also meant to suggest a wide range of works including dance theatre involving technology and spoken words such as Troika Ranch’s The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, to the creation of original text-based works online by performers like the Plain Text Players or collaborations such as Art Grid’s Interplay: Hallucinations, to pre-scripted works such as the classics '' staged with technology at the University of Kansas and the University of Georgia.
The Participatory Virtual Theatre efforts at the Rochester Institute of Technology take a different approach by have live actors use motion capture to control avatars on a virtual stage. Audience responses are designed into the software that supports the performance. In the 2004 production, "What's the Buzz?", a single node motion capture device controlled the performance of a swarm of bees. Later performances use two motion capture systems located in different buildings controlling the performance on a single virtual stage.
These criteria or limiting parameters are flexible enough to allow for a wide range of theatrical activities while refining the scope of events to those which most resemble the hybrid “live”/mediated form of theatre described as digital theatre. digital theatre is separated from the larger category of digital performance.

History

In the early 1980s, video, satellites, fax machines, and other communications equipment began to be used as methods of creating art and performance. The groups Fluxus and John Cage were among the early leaders in expanding what was considered art, technology, and performance. With the adaptation of personal computers in the 1980s, new possibilities for creating performance communications was born. Artists like Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway began to transition from earlier, more costly experiments with satellite transmission to experiments with the developing internet. Online communities such as The Well and interactive writing offered new models for artistic creativity. With the ‘Dot Com’ boom of the 1990s, telematic artists including Roy Ascott began to develop greater significance as theatre groups like George Coates Performance Works and Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre established partnerships with software and hardware companies encouraged by the technology boom. In Australia in the early 1990s Julie Martin's Virtual Reality Theatre presented works at the Sydney Opera House, featuring the first hybrid human digital avatars, in 1996 "A Midsummer Nights Dream featured Augmented Reality Stage sets designed and produced by her company. Researchers such as Claudio Pinanhez at MIT, David Saltz of The Interactive Performance Laboratory at the University of Georgia, and Mark Reaney head of the Virtual Reality Theatre Lab at the University of Kansas, as well as significant dance technology partnerships led to an unprecedented expansion in the use of digital technology in creating media-rich performances.
Early use of mechanical and projection devices for theatrical entertainments have a long history tracing back to mechanicals of ancient Greece and medieval magic lanterns. But the most significant precursors of digital theatre can be seen in the works of the early 20th century. It is in the ideas of artists including Edward Gordon Craig, Erwin Piscator, Josef Svoboda, and the Bauhaus and Futurists movements that we can see the strongest connections between today’s use of digital media and live actors, and earlier, experimental theatrical use of non-human actors, broadcast technology, and filmic projections.
The presence of these theatrical progenitors using analog media, such as filmic projection, provides a bridge between Theatre and many of today’s vast array of computer-art-performance-communication experiments. These past examples of theatre artists integrating their modern technology with theatre strengthens the argument that theatrical entertainment does not have to be either purist involving only “live” actors on stage, or be consumed by the dominant televisual mass media, but can gain from the strengths of both types of communication.

Other terminology

Digital theatre does not exist in a vacuum but in relation to other terminology. It is a type of Digital Performance and may accommodate many types of “live”/mediated theatre including “VR Theatre” and “Computer Theatre,” both of which involve specific types of computer media, “live” performers, story/words, and limited levels of interactivity. However, terms such as “Desktop Theatre,” using animated computer avatars in online chat-rooms without co-present audiences falls outside digital theatre into the larger category of digital performance. Likewise, digital dance may fall outside the parameters of digital theatre, if it does not contain elements of story or spoken words.
"Cyberformance" can be included within this definition of Digital theatre, where it includes a proximal audience: "Cyberformance can be created and presented entirely online, for a distributed online audience who participate via internet-connected computers anywhere in the world, or it can be presented to a proximal audience with some or all of the performers appearing via the internet; or it can be a hybrid of the two approaches, with both remote and proximal audiences and/or performers."