Up Close and Virtual
Virtual reality offers exciting theatrical opportunities for an audience to experience the nuances of a performance beyond the limitations of the real world.
This is the third post in an ongoing series about live VR theatre case studies undertaken in partnership with High Fidelity. For more posts from Alive in Plasticland click here.
I love great acting. On film, it’s amazing. At a live event, in the moment, it’s even better. But you have to be close enough to the performance to feel its full power.
London: Where Old and New Collide
Exactly ten years ago, I was fortunate to be starting a semester abroad. Studying Architecture at Syracuse University, my choices were Florence or London, and I chose London. Florence is beautiful, but somewhat frozen in time. London is vibrant, bustling, and architecturally entrenched in a struggle of new construction within the context of buildings older than the United States.
I’d always been fascinated by how new technology can improve, enhance, or otherwise affect older standards. In addition to architecture, theatre is a medium rife with these collisions. And, oh hey, did you know London knows a thing or two about pushing the boundaries of theatre?
The Power of Proximity
One class that I was thrilled to be part of was with Professor Michael Barclay, a passionate devotee of theatre. Not only did he take us to London shows every Monday of every week for a full semester, he ensured we were always seated within the first few rows. Why? I couldn’t quite remember, so I recently checked in with him and he was happy to remind me that we needed to “see the whites of the actor’s eyes.” He indulged me further:
“What has been happening in the last few years is that theatres have become smaller, not bigger. The idea is that you should be able to see the whites of the actor’s eyes to have a true theatrical experience. That is why small theatre such as the Donmar Wharehouse theatre is so popular and attracts such big star/high profile actors. Intimacy between actors and audience is key, otherwise you could watch them on TV. When the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford rebuilt their main theatre, they demolished everything behind the foyer doors and suspended a much smaller theatre inside the shell of the old theatre with a long thrust stage and two galleries no more than three rows deep, so that everyone is part of the action, including two ramps at the end of the thrust stage to allow the actors to enter and exit through the audience. The proscenium arch has been totally abolished in all new theatre designs.”
— Michael Barclay
I saw the most cathartic, world-shattering theatre of my young life that semester, and a large part of that impact was my proximity to world-class acting.
One such production was an adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel, The Idiot, retitled …some trace of her. Here’s the show page.
Core concept: you’re watching a film being made and cut together in real-time on stage. Actors that are not in the ‘scene’ are operating cameras, moving props, and even acting as hand models for other actors when a key shot calls for it.
I bring this production up because in addition to being a spectacular technical achievement, the show managed to bring some of the aspects of a well-directed film to the full audience in that theatre: notably, the power of the
close-up.
Whether you were in the front row or last, this show managed to provide every member of that audience with a rare treat: a live feed of a remarkable cast (including a young Ben Whishaw) performing with subtlety, nuance, and a vivid tightwire sense of liveness.
You see, even if you’re front row center to a theatre production, you’re never as close to an actor as a camera can get. You’re also limited by being in a fixed seat —at any given moment, there’s a chance you’re seeing some actors very well, and others less well. Visual obstruction, including distance, may alter your perception of a show if it prevents you from seeing characters’ silent reactions to key moments. That, and the actors themselves are regularly directed to perform to the back of the house, making their performance “larger” than what you would ever see (or hear) in film.
Short of always being in the first few rows of a production with brilliant actors under particular direction, maximizing intake of smaller performances that live in close-up is a bit of conundrum. I’ve only seen a handful of shows in the past decade that held the power of the twenty-odd shows I saw in September 2008. And I live in NYC!
Is there any hope?
Immersive theatre has the capability to help. In recent productions I’ve seen, such as The Great Gatsby and Secret Cinema’s Blade Runner in London and Sleep No More and Then She Fell in New York City, I found myself at times inches away from powerful performances. Performances I had agency to walk right up to. But there were also moments on the other side of the room that I wished I was closer to, but could not push through a crowd to witness without becoming a distraction. FOMO abounds!
Damn this corporeal form!
If you’ve read the others posts in this series (or the title of this article), you probably know where this is going.
If you’ve read the others posts in this series (or the title of this article), you probably know where this is going.
VR, Live!
That’s right: virtual reality live theatre. Back in June 2018, when we started putting real actors with full body tracking into High Fidelity VR, several things became clear right away:
- Watching the actors on a flat screen is far less engaging than being in virtual reality with them.
- When body tracking is working well, even a slight nod of the actor’s head can work wonders for a adding nuance to a digital performance.
- We used several VR headsets, and whenever I wanted to look closely at an actor, I became very aware of the pixels in VR headsets at lower resolutions. The best experience I had came from the Vive Pro which is very high-res with a larger FOV (field of view).
- Because I existed as an avatar, I avoided getting too close to the actors in VR because I didn’t want to distract them or disrupt the audience’s view of their performance. I was closer than ‘first row,’ but in the context of a VR proscenium stage show I did not feel comfortable getting as close to the actors as I would in an immersive theatre show.
- And yet, unlike all other theatre in natural reality, it’s great to be able to zip across a virtual room from one location to another in a moment to change your perspective of the performance. You can even fly or change your scale!
Ghost Powers
I was eager to engage with these performances as comprehensively as possible, so it wasn’t long before a wonderful experience booster came in the form of non-intrusive avatars. Ask and you shall receive, and Milad at High Fidelity delivered unto us both an invisible avatar as well as one where you are simply a camera. These, however, posed some unexpected new issues.
As an audience member, I loved being invisible — I could get right in the faces of the digital actors and they had no idea I was there. This might be great for something like a Sleep No More experience where you want to be as non-intrusive as possible. If all of the audience is invisible, however, you’re likely to lose the power of theatre as a shared live experience — you feel alone. This is particularly irksome if you’re an actor trying to feed off the energy/reactions/engagement of an audience since you’ll never see them.
The ideal here would almost be invisibility as a VIP tier for a live experience — most of the audience is stuck at least ten feet away from the actors and visible, while you get to be wherever you want with no one the wiser.
The camera avatar comes with its own pros and cons. Plus side: still less intrusive than a full avatar and gives visual feedback to actors and other audience members regarding where you are. Down side: It’s still going to look weird and distracting if there’s a bunch of cameras orbiting three inches around an actor’s head. Also, with a less expressive avatar, your reactions may be inscrutable, which, depending on the show, may hurt the actors’ ability to play off the audience’s energy.
The ideal use of camera avatars would be for a show that opportunes a more curated audience experience. Maybe, like in …some trace of her, there could be several trained performers (or cinematographers?), that guide the cameras throughout the performance and the audience can jump at will between a couple locations, and you see what they want you to see. VR… but with framing.
The tricky part still comes with giving the performer a sense of the audience. Perhaps they see a small array of faces organized below each camera? Or one face that’s a horrifying amalgamation of everyone’s reaction at once? Probably not that.
The Future
Is there an “ideal” level of engagement between actor and audience in VR? Audience members and other audience members? Who should see who, and as what representation? How close should they be able to get to each other? How interactive should their engagement be?
The answer is different for every production, and it’s almost never obvious at the start. This can be a tricky balance, but the wonderful thing about virtual reality is, with a few adjustments of code, the relationships can become just about anything you want. Actors, avatars, costumes, props, setting, show, locations — all changeable in seconds. So you can test and experiment and workshop and play and refine. Does it make me nostalgic for the days of 15-hour in-person tech rehearsals? Not at all.
Alex Coulombe is the Creative Director of Agile Lens: Immersive Design and speaks on all things XR in architecture and live events. In partnership with Fisher Dachs Associates he designs theaters around the world.
