Is Theater Essential? Virtually Opening the Open Rehearsal
Theaters are dark and empty from the beautiful Broadway stages, to the tiny improv basements across the country. But as Theater-makers we are bursting with creativity, even if our actors cannot grace the stage. As humans, we long to sit alongside one another, to laugh and cry and experience stories together. As VR technologists, we long to immerse audiences inside our worlds. As workshop leaders, we long to travel to film festivals and conferences to share our knowledge. While industries (especially the film and theater industries) have come to a halt, our creativity pulses deeply. Theatre, music, art, laughter, community, discovery, and knowledge-sharing — these all feel “essential” to me for living.
My studio team and I (a mix of creatives and technologists) have been making interactive XR experiences (AR, VR, UGC, Film). In the past few years we have been mixing VR and Theatre together. Most recently we premiered an original production, Loveseat written by NYC playwright Mac Rogers, at the Venice International Film Festival. It was a tremendous challenge, because we built the entire production in roughly 6 weeks.
I’m not even sure where to begin regarding the metaphors I feel about the production of Loveseat and the state of our world today, but we performed our VR play on the Lazzaretto Vecchio, an island that was a “quarantine station” where they built the first Venetian hospital to treat lepers and victims of the plague. Inside those storied walls we built a theater on the barren dusty floors, we gathered an audience of 50+ festival attendees, and we strived to push the XR industry. We connected our production in Venice to an even wider audience through Social VR. From this tiny island we sent up a beacon of a future reality where theater was accessible to many more outside of those medieval walls. And etched onto the walls were images, names and writings — of the people who lived their last days from the plague. Surrounded by their stories we took our place on this imaginary stage, and told a new story.
It all feels like a dream now.
The mere fact that we performed a show in Venice to an audience of human beings hardly seems real. Between the epically high tide flooding historic Venice this past autumn and the horrific death toll from the Virus in northern Italy, the spaces we performed in surely sit empty. And Loveseat itself is a story about emptiness. Two characters competing for the love of a Perfect Partner, which to the audience appears always as an empty chair.
Loveseat is a show about loneliness and about connection. These themes feel strikingly apropos these days
Our team gathers in these virtual spaces full of emptiness, until we fill them with our creativity and a potential audience. What’s wonderful is that there is potential in the realm of VR.
VR and Theatre have long felt like my two deepest passions, and mixing them has come naturally. This is the vision I have, to create this format — VR Theatre — where two live audiences experience the same story, but through different media.
I anticipated that I would be testing and experimenting new ideas in VR Theatre for years to come while we waited for our future audience to buy headsets. I expected that this upcoming “glimpse” into our process as part of CultureHub and LaMama’s “Experiments in Digital Storytelling” would be a tiny springboard; with years of hard work ahead of us until an audience would be mentally ready. I assumed that audiences would not consider watching from home or gathering virtually for years and years to come, due to the lack of headset adoption and uncanny valley issues in the VR medium.
And then the world changed.
Our reality and life as we have known living, changed. Overnight. This special Downstairs Theater at LaMama that I’ve long dreamed of designing a production in had to close, along with all of the other theaters in NY. But New Yorkers are strong people. And the ingenious creatives and technologists at CultureHub, these wonderful warriors that have helped give me the space to dream my Loveseat production into “being”, found ways to distribute their equipment so that the show can and must go on.
My studio team has scattered around NYC and across the country; and while we cannot rehearse in person, through the power of our VR headsets we are persevering. We’ve built a new immersive stage, learned a new Social VR platform, and begun to write a new story.
The time to gather virtually is not in the future, as I had imagined.
The time to gather virtually is now.
I’ve been playing with this concept of the 2 audiences, the Live and the Virtual. Seizing the change in reality as an opportunity, I’ve reimagined the role of the “Live” audience. Since our Live Theater audience in NY cannot gather in LaMama’s Downstairs Theater, we will gather that community online as a “Digital” audience. Simultaneously we will still work with the parallel “Virtual” world.
We are going to open the doors to our process. Instead of waiting for months to come, we are going to run open rehearsals this weekend. I’m going to take another giant risk, just as I have with Cardboard City and Loveseat, and forget about perfection and polish. And I welcome all of the critique from my industry that we are early, too soon, too naïve, too imperfect, and too unusual. I strongly believe that XR is a wild west where the rules should not be defined for many years. The XR industry is a place for the unusual, the misfits, the experimenters, the rule-breakers, and the risk-takers.
It is a place where we should not be told by some predetermination who we are allowed to be; but a place where we can imagine all we want to be.
In our VR Theatre experiments we’ll begin to test ideas for what is impossible in the real world. Our actor’s through their avatars can be gigantic, tiny, they can fly, move superhumanly fast, and be invisible. And due to all kinds of technology limitations it will look imperfect. On top of this, we will Livestream this multicam setup with many video feeds from across the country (the original vision was a triptych screen setup in the theater). Finally, we’ll try out a collective audience interaction to test my idea and dream for this XR bridge.
It will be messy. There are many points at which this grand experiment, full of many smaller experiments (Social VR Theater, audience interaction, multicam livestreaming) could fail.
Thank goodness for my team (Alyssa Landry, Mark Sternberg, Lara Bucarey, Christopher Toppino, Michael Woods, and Chris Dawes) that has stood by me through this risky process time and time again. Bless the brave actors Jonathan David Martin and Jenn Harris, who are trusting me as they hurdle their minds through these technical voids to learn new ways to “virtually block” a scene. Applaud the writers Mac Rogers and Alyssa Landry who are working alongside my team to create these storyworlds. I am fortunately surrounded by a brilliant team on this journey of discovery.
But if we don’t attempt these ideas and carry out these experiments, how can we expect to near a discovery? How can our team grow and how can the industry grow, if we don’t take risks, fail, and continue to risk? That was a motto I learned while training as an actor at the National Theater Institute: Risk. Fail. Risk Again. That motto is in my blood now and that fuels my imagination.
We will take a small step towards all of these ideas this weekend, opening up our process in two open rehearsals on Saturday April 18th at 12PM ET and 8PM ET as part of CultureHub and LaMama’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling. Please join us on CultureHub’s Facebook Livestream where you can interact in this great experiment with us. I hope we will see and feel you there.
Love & Hope,
Kiira
