I’m getting into edits right now for my next project, an interactive travelogue about a hitchhiker in space leaving messages for the girlfriend she thinks is following right behind her. It’s weird reading back on drafts from March where I wrote notes about how the interaction and choice mechanic might work. I speculated about apps, projections, a spooky voice over. All of those right now are being boiled down into a character played by a person onstage because that seems like the most sensible way to find out if the story and choices work with an audience (why pilot a whole tech system before piloting the story?) But they can be scaled up again—to the app, the projections, the spooky voiceover—basically anytime. The core thing of information being delivered and choices being made doesn’t actually change.
It’s weird realizing that I’ve learned to think about interactive theatre like this just over the last few months. I had some experience writing games for fun, which led to opportunities to edit and consult on scripts for choice-based games and audio dramas as my editing work picked up over lockdown. Going into the PhD, I knew the department here at University of York was strong on tech and interactive media, but I didn’t expect to get to jump into it immediately.
We’re looking at the final results now of what I’ve been mentally referring to as ‘Schrodinger’s videogame”, a project that exists in many forms but isn’t quite done. Over March, we essentially staged and filmed a ten-minute musical designed for VR, shot on green screen and recorded for spatialized audio. The project sent me hunting across campus for headsets to borrow so I could play/research and learn things like how long onboarding usually takes or how dizzy someone can get if they turn their head too fast in a game.
Just a few days after the final recording day for the musical game, I flew out to Poland as one of University of York’s team members for EU Creative Europe Play-On project’s Digital Campus. For this three-day event, theatre makers and programming/tech folks from all over Europe and beyond gathered at the Ludowy Theatre in Krakow. We were there to make interactive projects designed to both explore the tech capabilities of the theatre’s newest building and encourage local students to get involved in the space. After three days, all the groups gathered with the artistic directors and leaders of the theatres who have been working with Play On these past three years to share what we had made: robots who gave guided tours of hidden nooks and crannies in the building, projections and animations triggered by motion sensors, sculptures that reacted to sound.
In between all these projects, I’ve been cramming in as many workshops as I can: how to use Unity, getting to grips with AR, different approaches to spatialized audio. Despite being insanely busy, everyone I’ve gotten to work with has been so patient and generous about letting me pick their brains. It’s also led to some happy reunions: just when I realized I needed help getting back on track with the space hitchhiker play, the stars aligned and brought Leo Doulton into town, with a few spare hours to catch up and share some wisdom from his own projects (seriously, go check out Come Bargain with Uncanny Things.)
As I work on the space hitchhiker play—called If You Find This, and getting on its feet in front of an audience for the first time this July!—I’m also in the early stages of another project with Four Wheel Drive Theatre, exploring how we can create an interactive show in York’s Guildhall using their built-in button-voting system (might not have been the original intended purpose, but they’re way ahead of the game for staging interactive work!)
Things will go on pause slightly as I get myself sorted out for York Festival of Ideas next month. My presentation covers about 100 years of sci-fi theatre (loosely, since it’s only 40 minutes long!) but looking ahead at what’s happening now in the genre, interactive theatre—and all the different things that can mean at this point—is playing a big part.