Abstract
Today’s audiences are no longer content to passively consume entertainment but are seeking interactive experiences where they have agency to participate more actively. While there has been substantial innovation in entertainment genres that utilize digital media, providing interactive experiences for live audiences remains an ongoing challenge. This project presents an informal evaluation of a proof-of-concept which seeks to engage a seated audience in an embodied, interactive storytelling experience during a live circus performance where the audience can experience agency and communion. Building off Beach Ball Games for Orchestra (Delapierre 2017), where the audience used a large beach ball to play a Pac-Man-style game on a screen at the front of a concert hall, we prototyped an interactive clown show where the audience’s ability to collaborate affected the ambient media, the performer, and, by extension, the outcome of the story.
Highlights
We had been thinking about the experience from the perspective of the ambient media, audience gestures, and narrative structures
Our intention in creating such an experience is a response to the growing demand for participatory experiences in live performance and our attempt to innovate on the previous work in this field, most of which have focused more on game-play than on creating a comprehensive experience where the audience’s gestures are contributing to how the narrative of a live performance might unfold
This paper presented a proof-of-concept for an embodied, interactive experience where audience members collaborated in order to affect the outcome of the performance
Summary
In his essay on “Audience Participation and the Theatre’s Role in the Age of Post-Postmodernity”, Patsalidis (2013) references culture critic Alan Kirby to suggest that “if a person who grew up in the 60s and 70s still watches and listens, as before, a twenty-year old clicks, surfs, chooses, downloads and deletes; and by doing all this, s/he feels free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, empowered, independent (Patsalidis 2013, para. 2). Echoed in famed stage designer Es Devlin who sees “the auditorium as a mass congregation” (Mind-blowing sculptures that fuse music and technology 2019) or in the mission and vision of the premier psytrance festival, Boom, whose intention is to “enable a state of ultimate unity - Oneness” (Boom 2020, “Vision”, para.7), today’s audiences, more than ever, want to experience the sense of togetherness that has been, as McLuhan prophesied, simultaneously amplified and amputated in the social media age With these two trends poised at the helm, new audiences are seeking both a sense of togetherness and an ability to participate in the way that has become commonplace for them to do so. How can we create an embodied, interactive experience for a live audience that provides both the sense of communion and agency?
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