6. Creating an experience: What design and dramaturgy teach us about worldbuilding
‘Theatre is a rehearsal for revolution.’
One of the first things I learned when I began writing plays is that it doesn’t matter how beautiful your script is on the page — what matters is whether it works in front of an audience.
Everything in theatre is directed towards the live experience with an audience. If it doesn’t work with a live audience: it doesn’t work.
If your acting is powerful and authentic but the audience can’t hear what you’re saying, it doesn’t work. If your lighting design is moody but the audience can’t see things they need to see, it doesn’t work. If your script is full of beautiful poetry but it doesn’t sound good spoken out loud, it doesn’t work.
Very quickly, you learn that the only way to know whether something works is to test it in front of an audience. The quicker you test, the quicker you learn.
So I learned to mistrust too much sitting and talking, sitting and writing, sitting and thinking. Making theatre is all about experimenting — lots of quick experiments, over and over, doing ‘scratch’ performances in front of test audiences as soon as possible.
Working in the theatre trains you to look at things from the audience’s point of view. I think this is a useful perspective to take into the world of modelling.
Dramaturgy
In the theatre, we use the term ‘dramaturgy’. Originally a German word, it’s come to acquire different meanings in virtually every context I’ve encountered it. I understand it to mean something like ‘the study of the story’.
In classic text-based theatre, a dramaturge works with the playscript. In a production of a classic play, the dramaturge might help actors to analyse the text and understand their character arc. In productions of new work, dramaturges often function as editors, helping the playwright refine and develop the script.
But in the world I come from, the world of interactive, devised and immersive theatre, dramaturgy has a much broader focus.
Often the shows I was involved with had multiple endings, no fixed script, or else the audience could create their own experience by choosing to follow different characters.
In these shows, where the script is not the focus, dramaturgy means thinking about the story of the audience’s experience.
What is the audience’s journey from the start to the end of the event, from their arrival at the venue to their departure? Where are the high points, the low points, the moments of most intensity? Is there space for them to rest and process what they’re seeing? What is the range of feelings they’ll experience, and how will those feelings fit together?
This is a little similar to the concept of ‘design thinking’ and ‘user experience’ in the world of business and product innovation.
The dramaturge is often responsible for making sure the ideas in the work are accessible to the audience. I’ve seen (and made) many plays that were full of great ideas, but which utterly failed to bridge them to the audience.
This is not unique to the theatre. In the science world, I’ve seen many great systems models and future scenarios that are completely inaccessible — where the audience has never really been considered. (If your engagement strategy ends with putting a downloadable pdf report on your website, you haven’t got an engagement strategy.)
We apply this dramaturgical lens naturally when we organise an event, even something as simple as a house party. ‘The guests will arrive at 7pm, and we’ll start by sitting in the garden. Then when it gets cold we’ll go inside, and then we’ll play this record on the stereo…’
Theatre trains you to be obsessive about considering the audience’s experience. If you don’t take care of your audience, they won’t come back — and a theatre show doesn’t exist without an audience. It doesn’t matter how good your playscript is, if you haven’t made sure that there’s somewhere for people to park their cars, or seats for them to sit on, they won’t return.
Coney’s Tassos Stevens has a well-known remark about dramaturgy: ‘The experience begins when someone first hears about it, and doesn’t end until they stop thinking about it.’
In a systems mapping workshop Coney ran for Science Gallery London, we asked participants to map the experience of different users of the gallery, from their first encounter to their final moment.
We were effectively asking them to consider the dramaturgy of their audience’s relationship with the gallery.
So when I’m making a model to engage a group of people, my starting point is to consider the dramaturgy of the experience.
How do participants meet the model?
When presenting a model of a complex system, the first question is: Where will this happen? What setting will they meet the model in?
Ideally, a model should be placed in a context that supports the ideas that the model is exploring.
In 2013, Boho created a work in collaboration with CSIRO and the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (the first lab in the world to culture the SARS-COV-2 cell, and currently working on two separate vaccines). We met with epidemiologists who told us how scientists prepared to fight an epidemic, using remote videoconferencing technology.
From this basis, Mick Bailey and Jack Lloyd created Word Play, an interactive work simulating a hypothetical pandemic. The audience were placed in the position of making decisions to navigate the aftermath of the pandemic.
To meet the content, Word Play took place in a lecture theatre, with the performers in a science laboratory across town, livestreamed via a series of cameras. The audience controlled and directed the action through an app on their phones.
The audience’s experience replicated the experience of the scientists working remotely via videoconferencing.
Boho’s collaboration with Miljöverkstan, Democratic Nature, took place in the Flatenbadet gellery on the shores of Flaten lake, 40 minutes south of Stockholm.
Designer Gillian Schwab’s stunningly realised model of the Flaten nature reserve was the centrepiece of the experience, but participants only arrived around the model after they had already travelled through the nature reserve itself. Gathering around the model and playing the Democratic Nature was impossible without first experiencing the subject of the game.
A personal highlight for me was Boho’s 2009 project Food for the Great Hungers. This was a series of provocations around Australian history and complexity science, in which participants made choices to create a counterfactual Australian history.
Hungers took place in the former home of Australian historian Manning Clark. Inviting people to reflect on historical choices in the study where one of Australia’s iconic histories was written had a satisfying resonance.
Shallow but Broad vs Narrow but Deep
When you’re making an experience that people engage with, one rule of thumb is that there’s a trade-off between shallow but broad experiences vs narrow but deep experiences.
Shallow and broad means that it engages a large number of people (‘broad’), but that their engagement is relatively shallow. For me, a lot of digital games fall into this category — they’re accessible to a large number of people, so they have a wide reach — but most people will only engage with them in the most minimal way. Plus, by virtue of being on a phone or a laptop, they compete for your attention with all the other apps and programs on your computer.
Narrow but deep experiences, by contrast, are only accessible to a small number of people, but the experience itself is much more involved and immersive. Into this category I put theatre shows and live games. These are naturally limited in terms of how many people can engage with them, but for those people in the room, the experience is richer and more involving.
Neither kind of experience is inherently better than the other. The trick is to make the trade-off consciously, and not to discover too late that you’ve made something shallow when you intended it to be deep, or vice versa.
My work tends towards the ‘narrow but deep’ end of the spectrum. Although I do make digital work and work for large groups (CrimeForce was designed for a conference audience of up to 800), much of my practice is designed for groups of 100 or less.
A group of, say, 30 people, together in a room around a table can engage much more deeply with a model — and with each other — than a group of 200. And live performance is one of the rare spaces where people are content to disconnect from their phones for 60 minutes or more. I’m not being anti-phone here — but I feel that that focus and connection is critical for grappling with some of the big challenges that we are facing.
Tactility
During the development of Boho’s Best Festival Ever, we made an accidental discovery about engaging people with complex systems. Best Festival Ever illustrates complex systems dynamics (feedback loops, tipping points, resilience) using wooden blocks, table tennis balls and toy trucks, designed by Gary Campbell.
One day, we were presenting a test show with a guest audience, reading the script off our Kindles and iPads. We realised the audience were paying great attention to the tablets in our hands, and that they assumed that all the systems in the show were being calculated in these machines. They therefore assumed that the science in the show was too complex for them to understand — that things like feedback loops were the province of computer technology.
When we got rid of the tablets and presented the show using paper and clipboards, the experience was very different. Suddenly people could see that feedback loops and tipping points can emerge from simple agents interacting through simple rules. Lo-fi — or in this case, no-fi — completely changed how people engaged with the work.
With that in mind, I’ve been drawn to representing complex systems through tactile objects wherever possible. Representing a system through a hands-on model is a powerful way to connect with people.
For Boho’s Get The Kids And Run, a collaboration with Earth Observatory Singapore and the Singapore Science Centre, we worked with designers Gillian Schwab and Julia Johnson. In a series of seven different games, we looked at the challenges facing communities in south-east Asia facing typhoon or volcano threats. The games focused on the lead-up to the disaster: from the first warnings through to evacuation and emergency response.
The subject matter of these games is serious, but the sheer pleasure of Gillian and Julia’s tactile game pieces immediately draws audiences to them. Participants were instantly willing to immerse themselves in the world of these games, and the stakes of the story — and the science behind them — followed easily from there.
Shared experience
One thing that emerges from live performance is the power of gathering in a group. There is a temporary but real community that forms between a group of people in a space. The best live experiences make use of that intangible fellowship.
Gobyerno, created by the Sipat Lawin Ensemble and friends (including film-maker Brandon Relucio, designer Ralph Lumbres and myself) is on the surface a workshop exploring people’ feelings about the government (gobyerno means ‘government’ in tagalog). At a deeper level, it’s an experiment in community building, an attempt to create an ideal version of society live in the room — if only briefly.
Sipat Lawin are a group of Filipino artists and theatre-makers based in Manila. Originally graduates of the Philippines High School for the Arts, when they formed in the late 2000s, their focus shifted. As Sarah Salazar and Ness Roque put it:
‘Our interest in Drama and Theater shifted towards questions of performance and performativity, social and political functions of theater, new modes of production, and so on. Inspired by lack of funding, we reveled in being (quite literal) outsiders. We couldn’t afford to rent theaters so we took our performances elsewhere — in bars, living rooms, and anywhere people will have us. We began devising our own works, played by our own rules, and just figured things out along the way.’
One of the tags applied to Sipat is that they are ‘radical community artists’, which I think excellently states their approach. In 2013 Sipat started the Karnabal Festival, a program of work by independent and experimental Filipino artists in Manila. Salazar and Roque again:
‘One of the intentions was to celebrate what these ‘imperfect’ conditions have nurtured, and how artists have survived despite (or because of) these disruptions. It was important to create a shift in mindset: from thinking that their processes are not ideal and that they’re navigating through handicaps, to considering processes existing outside conventional creation spaces as valid, fruitful, and beautiful.’
Gobyerno was one of the works to emerge from Karnabal. The Gobyerno experience runs in two halves: in the first part, 50 participants are seated in small groups with facilitators, and prompted to imagine changes they’d like to make to their country. One version of the show focused on political changes, another focused in on urban design and asked participants to create a map of their ideal city.
In the second half, the participants are tasked with creating a documentary depicting the new society they’ve imagined. In less than an hour, sets are constructed, costumes designed, scripts written, and finally, the whole audience works together to film a one-take video depicting life in this new country.
The experience — which is chaotic, frantic and yet beautifully enervating — is the perfect example of what can happen when a designed experience gives a group of people a shared goal. Sipat’s approach here is disarmingly playful — as demonstrated by the fact that Gobyerno can engage with both middle class arts audiences in Darwin or Seoul, and with young people from exploited mining regions in Luzon, Philippines.
In these brief, transient gatherings, we practice building community. We practice consensus, collaboration, we build towards connectedness and courage. Until — and who’s to say it won’t happen — this becomes the norm, and we adjust our civilisation to work for the common good and to operate within the biosphere’s energy flows.
That’s what this is all about, really.
1. We live in systems: Becoming aware of what surrounds us
The disasters were designed by us — cuckoo clocks vs ants nests — the humility of systems thinking — seeing deep patterns — my practice as a writer, theatre artist and game designer, tools & techniques for thinking about the world
2. How to make a model: The art of systems modelling
What is a model? — maps on napkins vs satellite images — as simple as possible but no simpler — Best Festival Ever: modelling a disaster
3. A snapshot of everything: Tools for systems mapping
Mapping a Swedish forest — thousand year old oak trees — resilience assessments — a walk through the woods — Democratic Nature —
4. The future doesn’t exist: Scenarios and prediction
Why bother trying to predict the future? — the practice of creating scenarios — there are four possible futures — CrimeForce: LoveTeam
5. Narrative in systems: How to tell stories about complexity
Are theatre shows systems models? — underdog narratives & police procedurals — perspectives on an Indonesian rainforest in 95 Years or Less
6. Creating an experience: What design and dramaturgy teach us about worldbuilding
Theatre as rehearsal for revolution — dramaturgy & design thinking — tactility in Get The Kids and Run — collective experiences in Gobyerno
7. Don’t play games, make games: Interactivity in complex systems
Games are systems — game theory in Temperature Check — calculating risk in Busy Mayors — skilltesters vs decision-makers in Run A Bank
8. Lessons learned
Final thoughts — steering 9 billion people through a century of climate and global change — working with time instead of against it -
