Mon Mar 7 04:10:49 2022
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*** Telematic Dramaturgy in the Time of Covid-19 — Digital Culture & Education (ISSN: 1836-8301)
*** Written and edited by: Glenn D’Cruz and Rea Dennis (Deakin University) … “While most of the usual audio cues drifted in and out of our classes, depending on who was muting their microphones, we found that the camera provided a good sense of whether people were engaged with the class. After a
*** Digital Culture & Education (ISSN: 1836-8301)
(*0da15217*):: psing of the workspace into the home computer system’ has significant impact on our bodies (110). Students were required to reconfigure their relationship to their devices, usually for rest, play, and social interaction.
Ironically, just as quickly as students were identifying how remote devising disrupted the building of intimacy, and those long-lasting relationships that college theatre productions promise, they identified the many ways in which ‘being in this together’ and overcoming the challenges forged close ties. There was a kind of explorer spirit that inflected their troubleshooting and we were inspired by their ingenuity when devising in very small spaces. One student stated: “every person involved in the performance is performing on their own stage [and] … as performers we are inviting the audience to view our private homes as our stage and for each individual it is different in terms of lighting, space, and even internet capability.”
From our ends as directors, We could only work within the space of the screen, and the timing of camera. Each individual student engaged with designing their own stages. In Lost in Place, this most often meant ‘declutter’ it; but for some sequences they opted to showcase their bedroom and the way in which they were holed-up in there.
Collaboration and Physicality
Working with large groups of students, the challenges of working with others and with co-negotiating meaning while interacting remotely resulted in a mix of pre-recorded and live material in the final show. In Lost in Place live performance tended to be either solo, duet or up to four performers. Individual student initiative dictated this. Those few students who persevered, worked ideas up into scores and scenes, and rehearsed in a consistent way ended up performing live. Some students found watching themselves very difficult and this interfered with their capacity to trust telematic live performance. Rather, they applied similar strategies to performing for the camera, in repeated takes, then keeping control of what would be streamed by selecting specific video, editing and shaping it into ‘a performance’.
An exception was the formation of a large group-choreographed work entitled Shadow Dance. Shadow Dance underscored Rea’s pedagogy in the final weeks. A student-led score, carefully constructed by two talented and hard-working students; engaging with ideas of performing from home, ensemble movement, and DIY theatre design. Though far more time consuming than choreographing and rehearsing on the floor, through Shadow Dance students became empowered. They engaged in trouble shooting zoom, thinking about transitions and their performance dramaturgy: before entering, camera on, entering frame, leaving frame, camera off. This six little minutes of performance represented an opportunity for students to engage in shaping and layering work, experimenting with light, space, sound, and body texts. The online forum made it slow work, and demanded that students listen to one another, be patient and work together. The result was a triumph of self and pride. While the making of Shadow Dance was a counterpoint to fast strategies that students perceived gave them more power such as their frequent requests for break out rooms, or their preference to be working offline in small groups, it became the heart of the show. The physical nature of the score, the DIY design that required them to rig up simple lighting to produce the shadow effect, and the need to re-stage their familiar home space into a space of performance offered students insights into the value of this altered learning experience. Perhaps most affecting in this process was the inclusive process. Most of the work that was made outside the big group required significant skill and time to obtain group buy-in. As such, many students were featured far less in pre-recorded work due to power dynamics, lack of social influence, and scarcity of time. These issues are managed in the
(*0da15217*):: Introduction
We teach devised performance as part of the Deakin University undergraduate drama degree. In normal circumstances Deakin University drama students work under the direction of a lecturer to develop and present a major original performance work to a paying audience in a black box theatre space. We introduce students to methods for devising theatre in group contexts based on the work of influential contemporary performance practitioners and the needs of the specific project. The COVID-19 lockdown meant that the unit had to quickly transition to online delivery, which required the rapid development of intermedial dramaturgical techniques that enabled students to create a devised play to a ‘live’ audience through Zoom webinar (a platform that was not designed for theatrical performance). We developed two productions: Us and Them, and Lost in Place. Us and Them investigated political polarisation and, for the most part, used verbatim theatre strategies to create scenes. Lost in Place investigated affective attachment to and alienation from, places of significance through an array of postdramatic strategies. Both productions loosely followed the conventions of telematic theatre. That is, a form of live performance that, in the words of Elena Perez, is ‘an art form that emerged in the 1980s that applies telecommunication technology to performance’ (2014). This essay reflects on the strengths and limitations of Zoom for generating affective qualities (such as intimacy, immediacy, kinaesthetic energy) associated with live theatrical performance and the pedagogical challenges of directing student actors through video conferencing technologies with particular reference to three key themes: liveness, intimacy and dramaturgy.
Liveness
As Philip Auslander argued, absolute distinctions between live and recorded performances are hard to sustain (2008). In summary, he reasoned that liveness only makes sense as a category of experience with the advent of media technologies (such as sound and film recording, television and radio transmissions, and the Internet and various digital technologies). In short, he espoused the provocative thesis that there is no ontological difference between live performance and its mediatised others.
The ubiquitous screens at rock concerts and the omnipresent video projectors in theatre productions are only the most obvious signs that digital technologies and software have taken command. As Barker (2013), amongst others, has observed, Live-cast and recorded theatre, telematic theatre and numerous other theatrical events are regularly mediated by mobile digital technologies and embraced by establishment theatre institutions such as the National Theatre of Great Britain who regularly beam their stage productions into cinemas all over the world.
Yet, in spite of the ‘liveness’ debate people continue to value live performance and celebrate being together in real space and time. For critical responses to Auslander see Dolan (2005) and Meyer-Dinkgräfe (2015). Indeed, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the degree to which many people value live events. The pandemic has also decimated those creative industries that depend on the co-presence of performers and spectators in a located space. This has not stopped artists making work for the Internet on telecommunications platforms like Zoom. In fact, Zoom theatre is now a thing. Of course, various theatre practitioners have been using the Internet as a performance space for some time. Indeed, various forms of Internet theatre, as we all know, predate the COVID crisis — see Myers, Watkins and Sobey, (2016) and Lavender (2017) for two exemplary accounts of Internet theatre. What is perhaps novel, though is the fact that the COVID Calamity has accelerated the growth of Internet theatre and Internet theatre pedagogy. This essay is about our experience of adapting to the online environment in order to teach devised theatre, a tricky proposition at the best of times.
(*0da15217*):: Despite our initial reservation and the multitudes of practical, technological, emotional and pedagogical problems generated by being forced to teach and make creative work online, most students enjoyed the experience of developing their media skills and learning how to work in the online space as live performers. We are all looking forward to returning to the sanctity of our beloved black box and working in front of a live audience that register its responses through laughter, applause and other, subtler energetic expressions of engagement or disengagement. Students appreciate what they were gaining in this new learning world, with many becoming excited by the prospects of family and friends in other states and even abroad being able to tune in to the livestream. “We are doing this [remote performance] because we have to! But look what it is allowing us to do – people from anywhere can engage with what we do; so seeing this as a way to engage rather than something we had to do”. That said, we are all in a better positioned to appreciate and apprehend the differences between live and recorded performances and, who knows, ZOOM aesthetics and ZOOM dramaturgy might persist beyond the current crisis.
References
Auslander, Philip (2008) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edition London: Routledge.
Barker, Martin (2013) Live at Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot.
Bolter, Jay and Gromala, Diane (2005) Windows and Mirrors: Interaction design, digital art and the myth of transparency. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.
D’Cruz, Glenn (2018) Teaching Postdramatic Theatre: Anxieties, Aporias, Disclosures. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Dolan, Jill (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1995) Space, Time and Perversion. New York: Routledge.
Jiang, M. 2020. The Reason Zoom calls drain your energy, BBC Remote Control retrieved from
Lavender (2017) ‘The Internet, Theatre, and Time: Transmediating the Theatron’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27:3, 340-352.
Marin, Carol (2013) Theatre of the Real, London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel (2015) ‘Liveness: Phelan, Auslander, and After’ in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Volume 29, Number 2: 69-79.
Myers, Misha, Watkins, Dane and Sobey, Richard (2016) ‘Conversive Theatres: Performances with/in Social Media’ Performance Paradigm 12.
Pérez, Elena (2014) ‘Meaningful connections: Exploring the uses of telematic technology in performance, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1.
Bios
Glenn D’Cruz is Associate Professor of Art and Performance and teaches drama and cultural studies at Deakin University, Australia. He has been a visiting scholar at the Australian National University (2005) and City University New York (2018). His creative work has been performed and/or exhibited at Federation Square, Melbourne, the RMIT Gallery, Walker Street Gallery, Federation Hall, VCA and the Gertrude Street Gallery in Melbourne and the Immigration Museum, Melbourne. His latest book, Hauntological Dramaturgy (Routledge) will appear in December 2020.
Rea Dennis, is a theatre maker and performance studies scholar from Melbourne Australia. A Senior Lecture in performance at Deakin University Australia, her research interests span embodied creative practices, inclusive theatre, actor training, and kinaesthetic and sensory dramaturgy. She writes critical papers addressing practice-led research, theatre making, and embodied performance. Her performance work has toured to UK, New York, Taiwan, Germany, Brazil and Japan.
(*0da15217*):: rformance.
Dramaturgy: Lost in Place
Devising remotely via zoom presented a range of different dramaturgical opportunities and challenges. There was still the need to follow the student’s material, to see how they responded to prompts and how the material they generated looked, sounded and felt. Individually their work was thoughtful and at times compelling, yet when they tried to bring material together, their dramaturgical skills were really challenged. A couple of good editors were able to cut together some excellent montages early on; yet the students who created the material initially found it hard to contribute to the shaping and were quickly disenfranchised from the work. This phenomenon saw a lot of work generated and discarded in the first few weeks online. Alongside this video work was being made by ‘inviting’ contributions. A small group might have ideas, they write out instructions and then invite others to make their version to contribute. This approach raised two additional challenges: 1) a dilemma about when the job should close, if some of the group had not yet contributed; 2) exposed another skill deficit in shaping a large volume of repetitive material. Whilst I could see a number of ways of working with this material, I found that at no time did students apply my direction. Instead they needed to work through the storyboarding and editing, or for some dive straight into the editing and ‘see what happened’. Mostly this made for a noisy, montage style of editing, with too much material, too cut up to have a narrative, but without the visual or rhythmic finesse to communicate in a non-narrative way. These problems were exacerbated by the democratic nature of file share where students who were more productive or had more time to hand, were editing video and making works that the others had little time to engage with.
Some students became stuck in the frame when making pre-recorded material. All the footage they captured was head and shoulders, front on, direct address. This suited the video diary performances; however, video diaries-style sequences that were filmed with less attention to capturing the front-on face, and that leveraged the demeanor of the person were more successful, freeing the student to act less and perform more. On the other hand, when material embodied a meta commentary alongside the absurdity the student felt in performing to the screen, they explored a visual language through which to cohere it. This occurred with the ‘talking to self’ sequence.
Students found themselves watching each other, and watching themselves. The screen acted as a window to the other and a mirror for myself. The screen framed content and obscured what students placed just out frame. Bolter and Gromala (2005) write about the way the screen offered us a transparency – reflectivity continuum and suggest its value give in troubling the experience of the viewer and this worked in our favour with audiences who questioned what was live and what was pre-recorded. Students also became aware of the value of what was videoed and how it was not simply a film making exercise. Some video experimentation ended up in the final show as it was capturing naïve exploration and discovery rather than acting a role. While for others, they found they wanted to do ‘many takes’ of small moments to find the angle, rhythm, mood, eye gaze etc.
Conclusion
The shift to remote devising and telematic collaboration positioned students as author, performer, director. One admitted, “I like prerecording items and editing them together to create pieces”. Another said, “I like how editing can change the meaning of a piece”. For others, it brought new insight and discussion about what they perceived as peers changing from live performance self to camera performance self. As students became more familiar with directing themselves, their camera performing became more about the frame and their eye gaze, entries and exits, and ‘always performing’.
(*0da15217*):: Intimacy
There is no doubt that a form of intimacy emerges from interacting and sharing physical space with people. However, teaching in a university means that teachers and students are on neutral ground, at least in terms of occupying institutional as opposed to personal space. One of the first things we noticed about interacting with students on ZOOM was that, more often than not, we were getting a glimpse into their personal spaces: bedrooms, studies, gardens, lounge rooms. We could often make out the details of their furnishings, the titles of books on their shelves, posters, curtains, lightshades and many other details that convey a sense of identity and even the patterns of everyday life (parents and housemates often inadvertently appeared on my computer screen). Of course, students have the option of masking their personal space by using virtual backgrounds, yet few chose to do so. It soon became apparent that the group needed to treat virtual space as institutional space after one of the students started smoking and drinking alcohol during class. This incident required us to establish online etiquette protocols that provided students with clear guidelines about appropriate online interaction, participation. In effect, we agreed, as a group, to treat personal space as institutional space for the duration of our meetings, although this was not always possible.
Zoom also brings us into close proximity to other people’s faces, depending on the quality of their camera and their distance from the lens. Initially, we thought we would miss the feedback mechanisms we usually rely on to tell us whether students are engaged or bored with what we were saying or doing: laughter, eye-contact, fidgeting and the almost ineffable sense of energetic exchange between interlocutors sharing real space. While most of the usual audio cues drifted in and out of our classes, depending on who was muting their microphones, we found that the camera provided a good sense of whether people were engaged with the class. After a little while, most students became less self-conscious about being on camera: we found it wasn’t difficult to detect enthusiasm or boredom by scanning the ZOOM rectangles.
For the students however, they frequently found the experience tiring and disheartening. It is well documented that being on a video call is harder work than face to face interactions. And students missed verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of voices, and body language. They missed spontaneous discussions with multiple voices and felt drained. Far from any feelings they associated with making live performance, they were more like zo(o)mbies. Professor of sustainable learning Gianpiero Petriglieri (cited in Jiang 2020) attributes this state of not-aliveness to a perceptual dissonance that causes conflicting feelings and states that this is exhausting for participants. On top of zoom fatigue, students also had to manage emotions linked to unmet expectations. Students rightly acknowledge that this learning experience was supposed to be ‘physical’ ‘together’ ‘collaborative’. In other words, they did not elect to explore remote devising or telematic performance, but were thrust into this unfamiliar place. Whilst studio practices at Deakin frequently includes livestreaming – this is usually a dramaturgical device in which students perform to camera in front of an audience, whilst their performance is simultaneously projected large scale in Gob Squad fashion (See D’Cruz, 2018, 152). This meant that as teachers we needed to adapt both our devising methods and our pedagogic drivers on the hop. They expected a certain level of intimacy and instead they were confronted by what they perceived as their limited digital literacy within an aesthetic framework and of their self-conscious physical selves staring back. They felt themselves drawn into a vacuous virtual space. Grosz (1995) claims that the human-to-machine interface that comes from ‘colla
(*0da15217*):: studio when the teaching artist intercedes, models, sheds light, offers feedback, instructs and begins to draw more isolated students into other student work, layering and synthesising. Such is the necessity of college performance classes.
Dramaturgy: Us and Them
Transitioning to a wholly online mode of teaching forced Glenn to adapt his project in several ways. First and foremost, it was impossible to ignore the COVID 19 crisis: the students wanted to address the issue immediately — Glenn’s group had two classes in the theatre before lockdown, and the students spent as much time working through the impending consequences of the pandemic as addressing the topic of polarisation. As it turned out, the lockdown and the experience of working under the COVID cloud became part of the final production. As originally conceived, Us and Them, was a verbatim project that would have required students to generate text through interviewing a range of people (family, friends, random strangers, activists, politicians and so on). The transition to working online restricted the range of interview subjects, although students did generate some material by interviewing their immediate family and housemates. To compensate for this problem, the ensemble sourced most of its text from the Internet and social media (needless to say, there is a plethora of dogmatic rants, raves and polarising opinions online). Glenn devised a series of prompts, which the students responded to by gathering source material and, initially making short videos.
In effect, the group developed a telematic performance for over 20 different spaces, each with its own spatial and technological limitations. The visual and sound quality of the live performance would depend, then, on each participant having sufficient bandwidth for a stable Internet connection. Some students had high quality video cameras built into their computers, others had to use their mobile phones. Then, there were the dramaturgical problems: how do we use the ZOOM space as a theatrical space? Would it be possible to use eye-line match techniques from film to make it look as though students were interacting with each other? And then there was the problem of creating (or not creating) a consistent mise-en-scene: should we use virtual backgrounds and play with green-screen effects? Could we find ways to light each space consistently, or would such a strategy foreground the fact that the performance was taking place in multiple locations? As it turned out, the students spent a long time attempting to resolve these questions through practically experimenting with these variables.
ZOOM webinar provided the group with a platform for live performance since it made it possible to divide panellists (performers) from the audience. It also enabled a degree of audience participation since spectators could ask questions and respond to live polls. Auslander observed that mediatisation is often seen as a threat to live theatre and elicits two common responses. The first, as already noted, asserts the primacy of presence by rejecting other media while the second incorporates various media, so the distinction between the live and the recorded becomes difficult to discern. The group’s use of pre-recorded video compounded this problem since it had to find ways of overtly signally that large parts of the show were in fact live. From the spectator’s viewpoint, it is not always possible to distinguish between the two categories of performance. After all, the audience are seeing a parade of scenes on their computer screens, which makes it difficult for spectators to perceive what we might call, with a nod to Carol Martin (2013), the Real. We found the glitches and the high noise to signal ration in the ZOOM space fascinating, especially since it often foregrounded the status of the production as alive event. These moments constituted instances of risk and vulnerability that were akin to the kinds of uncertainty that marks live pe
*** The reason Zoom calls drain your energy
*** Video chat is helping us stay employed and connected. But what makes it so tiring – and how can we reduce ‘Zoom fatigue’?
*** bbc.com
