Pervasive theatre

Abstract

This article explores the opportunities and implications for new digital writing in transmedia performance environments. This article centres on the experimental Pervasive Theatre project (Assault Events 2014, commissioned by futuredream funded through Arts Council England), which explored the potential of online social tools to create a multimedia, collaborative and participatory work situated across multiple platforms. This project brought together researchers, artists, writers, technologists and practitioners from the interdisciplinary fields of digital writing, transmedia and performance to explore ways to develop narratives that weave together physical and online worlds, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy, audience and performers in a way that would be exciting, immersive and participative. The project looked at different performative spaces including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vines, exploring how these platforms could support the delivery of original narrative performance. This transmedia approach informed and shaped the digital writing practice, instigating new modes of working. Four aspects were of particular interest and will be explored in this article – how new writing can emerge from within online spaces rather than being translated onto them; how characteristics of different online social platforms inform style and content; how social media platforms can be used to develop narrative and character through creative collaboration with performers; and finally, how online social spaces enable the digital writer to develop a narrative framework through which audiences frame their own meaning.

Keywords

Collaboration digital art narrative performance pervasive practice social media theatre transmedia

Introduction

Over the last decade, transmedia practice has created new environments for narrative performance. Traditionally, writers for performance have developed scripts to be interpreted by a performance company, or worked alongside companies to create collaborative-devised work to be presented to an audience at a particular time and place. However, online social tools have enabled the creation of multimedia, collaborative and participatory work situated across multiple platforms and this transmedia approach has informed and shaped the digital writing practice, instigating new modes of working.

Henry Jenkins (2011) offers a definition of transmedia as ‘a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers’. In digital practice, these ‘particular resources’ relate to a range of digital platforms including film, television, gaming, e-books, websites and blogs and social media tools including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Telling stories across different mediums is not new, Bryan Alexander reflecting in The New Digital Storytelling how people tell stories with nearly every new piece of communication technology invented: ‘No sooner do we invent a medium than do we try to tell stories with it’ (2011: 5). Creative and cultural producers have been playing with multimodal approaches for decades, but what is new is how these production practices (now playing out on digital media) and the new reception practices arising from participatory and social media combine with new aesthetic understandings of how popular texts work. And these shifts have led to transmedia practice.

One of the most well-known forms of transmedia practice is transmedia storytelling, a way of thinking about the flow of content across media. In transmedia storytelling, engagement with each of the media strands enhances the audience understanding and enjoyment of the story, and as Robert Pratten, CEO of transmedia storytelling tool Conducttr, reflects enjoyment from all the media should be greater than the sum of its parts (2011: 1). Such a multimedia approach is necessary to reflect the changing patterns of consumption and co-production that is available today:

We are surrounded by an unprecedented ocean of content, products and leisure opportunities. The people to whom we want to tell our stories have the technology to navigate the ocean and can choose to sail on by or stop and listen. Technology and free markets have allowed unprecedented levels of customization, personalization and responsiveness such that a policy of “one size fits all” is no longer expected or acceptable (3).

Jenkins (2011) suggests that transmedia storytelling can be broken down into different types, including transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism and transmedia spectacle. So then, what is transmedia performance in this context? Jenkins regards the television series Glee as an example of transmedia performance, with the songs moving through YouTube, iTunes and live performances, making sense of the larger Glee phenomenon when read against each other. While Glee may be an example of transmedia performance, it doesn’t utilize transmedia approaches to engage with and interrogate the nature of performance itself – Glee is essentially a TV phenomenon enhanced with content across media, some of which is performative. For me, a more exciting example of transmedia performance would be a performance piece that could be structured, created and disseminated through a transmedia framework.

This fuller vision of transmedia performance involves creating content that engages audiences using various techniques to permeate their daily lives, developing stories across multiple forms of media to deliver separate piece of content in each channel, not only linked together but also in narrative synchronization. Through using online social spaces including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, text and email, transmedia performance events can weave together physical and online worlds, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy, audience and performers, potentially making audience members part of the story itself. In this way, transmedia performance engages with what Carver and Beardon (2004: 2) regard as common concerns of 21st-century performance that uses digital technologies:

…the virtuality and fluidity of space and time, and the potential for alternative realities, spaces and narratives; interactivity and the active audience/participant; the role of the body (and its double) in technologically enhanced or mediated performance…the ability of performance to extend itself beyond the circumscribed moment and place of its enunciation; and the ‘problem’ of liveness in multimedia work.

Over the last couple of decades, a number of different types of performance work have explored these new transmedia environments, including Twitter Theatre (such as Jeremy Gable’s The 15th Line (2010), Broadway’s Next to Normal (2009) and the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark’s Such Tweet Sorrow (2010)), Netprov (such as Rob Wittig’s Grace, Wit and Charm (2011)) and Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) (such as Microsoft’s The Beast (2001) and 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees (2004) and Year Zero (2007)).

Netprov (networked improvised narrative) is ‘a genre of electronic literature predicated on establishing contexts for online synchronous and asynchronous writing’ (Mark Marino and Rob Wittig, 2012), using ‘existing digital media in combinations to create fake characters who pretend to do things in the real world’ (Rob Wittig, 2015: 3). Wittig, a Netprov practitioner, describes the genre as having a ‘transmedia approach’, employing multiple media simultaneously ‘to create a complex system of varied communication technologies that real people use in real life’ (2015: 4). At the core of Netprov is a transdisciplinary artistic team comprising of director/writer, player/writer, the graphic designer and programmer (11) who work together to write and perform interactive narratives told across online and physical spaces. Netprov has a fluid conceptual framework, Wittig himself questioning whether it is closest to a novel, a play or a television show (4).

Jane McGonigal (2008) describes ARG as

an interactive drama played out online and in real world spaces…in which dozens, hundreds, thousands of players come together online, form collaborative social networks, and work together to solve a mystery or problem that would be absolutely impossible to solve alone.

Sean Stewart, an ARG story writer, offers four characteristics of ARGs: a distributed story to be reassembled by the audience; a story unbounded by platform type; transmedial in its delivery; a collective audience working together to problem-solve, with a key role in developing the narrative (Stewart, 2008). While ARGs are not in themselves solely theatrical performances, they do contain performative elements, players becoming performers through their direct interaction with the narrative. Use the real world as a storytelling platform, ARGs develop plot using everyday situations and technologies (Patrick Jagoda et al., 2015: 78), where players shape their own interactive collective experience (Jeffrey Kim et al., 2009: 3).

Twitter Theatre has developed in two different forms – short-form single tweet plays and longer form plays ‘performed as a series of messages’ (John Muse, 2012: 43). Twitter Theatre practitioners such as Jeremy Gable regard their work as plays, as the series of posts are performed ‘in front of an audience in real time’ (cited in Muse: 55), though in virtual space rather than the traditional theatre context (43). Muse reflects that by rejecting the traditional stage in favour ‘Twitter’s wide and universal theatre’, Twitter Theatre highlights ‘the newly fragile distinction in a digital age between theatrical spectatorship and the experience of real-life events’ (44).

Within this context, performance company Assault Events developed their idea of Pervasive Theatre – an online narrative delivered in real time through text, image and non-live performance distributed across social media platforms. Text is shared through Facebook posts and comments and Twitter feeds, image is shared through Facebook photo and non-live performance takes the form of filmed theatre, dance and music performances shared through Facebook video, Vines and YouTube. Audiences are able to interact with the storyworld and the characters within it, constructing their own experience and understanding of the story through combining segments of narrative situated across multiple platforms. While Pervasive Theatre shares a number of characteristics with ARGs, for example, in the way in which it tells a story distributed across media to be reassembled by the audience, the game experience is not foregrounded. Rather, like Netprov, Pervasive Theatre has at its heart the creation of a narrative world (Marino and Wittig, 2012).

Social media lies at the heart of all of these different types of transmedia performance, Muse reflecting how social media is reshaping writing for theatre (43), as theatre-makers continually develop their practice ‘to reflect the contours of altered realities’ (60). Indeed, Muse regards Twitter (and I would argue all social media platforms) as theatrical in nature, always having been a ‘platform for performance’ (48):

Whether used for explicit play-making or not, Twitter already constitutes an enormous, continual distributed theatre of the everyday in which a cast numbering more than 200 million strut and fret upon virtual stages for the benefit of audiences who follow their every move or thought (55).

The Pervasive Theatre project

Assault Events are a live performance company combining contemporary dance and theatre, new writing, music and design to create accessible, innovative performance events. They have been interested in how the Internet (primarily online social media) can be used to support innovative creative practice for a number of years and in 2010 undertook a practice-based research project Feedback, which explored how Facebook could be used creatively, as a collaborative artistic environment, developing new methodologies for collaborative creation supported by online social media.

In 2014, the company developed this research into the creative potential of social media tools, undertaking the Pervasive Theatre research project, which explored the potential of online social tools to create a multimedia cross-platform environment for non-live performance. The project was a collaboration between theatre writer (Shannon Yee), Assault’s Artistic Directors (Sophy Smith and Sandie Fisher) and performance practitioners from theatre, dance and music, exploring ways in which to develop narratives that wove together physical and online worlds, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy, audience and performers, potentially making audience members part of the story itself. Sandie Fisher, co-director, saw the potential audience engagement and participation offered by transmedia as a key driver for the project:

Key to our work is enabling new audiences to access high quality professional performance work, as well as allowing people who are already going to see performances to access this work in a new way. We’ve been experimenting with how we could use transmedia approaches with our performances as it is an incredibly exciting opportunity to open up our work (Sandie Fisher, 2015).

The project sets out to look at different performative spaces including Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, text and email, exploring how these platforms could support the delivery of original non-live performance. Online social media tools have made it increasingly easy to communicate, cooperate and collaborate with others online and as such offer new frameworks for making and sharing creative work. Alexander (2011) reflects how networks are a vital part of digital storytelling, creators having to actively choose whether to actively embrace, accept or secede from networked environments (126). For a wide section of society, online social technologies have become a part of daily life. As Clay Shirky (2009) reflects, the important question is no longer whether the use of these tools will spread and reshape society, but how they will do so. In the introduction to New Narratives, Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas reflect how social media has provided a fertile environment for the development of storytelling communities, citing visual storytelling on Flickr, fan-videos and mash-ups on YouTube and microblogging on Facebook (2011: 2).

The Pervasive Theatre project aimed to explore how social media tools could be used to create a performance narrative. Until recently, social media has been used mostly by performance companies as a marketing tool or as a new environment to showcase their existing working practices. This project did not look at how existing performance idioms can be translated onto online platforms, but explored how online social environments offer exciting possibilities for new and innovative performance practices. Online social technologies enable artists to make and share artistic work differently and in doing so have the potential to change artistic practice.

In The New Digital Storytelling, Alexander outlines five themes of Digital Storytelling, each of which are reflected in the Pervasive Theatre project: Serial Structure (the narrative was released chronologically in real time); Personal Presence (the narrative depicted fictional characters, all presented in the first person); Social Framework (the narrative was played out across social media and encouraged audiences to engage actively through liking, commenting and sharing and was divided into parts including content created by others and hosted elsewhere); Multiple Proscenia (the narrative was constructed through segments communicated by the different characters so there is no single point of view); Platform Affordances (the narrative exploits the affordances of each digital platform to tell the story) (41–43). However, while Pervasive Theatre involved these five themes of digital storytelling, the performance narrative communicated the story across multiple platforms through a transmedia approach, integrating non-live performance with online digital participation to create multimedia cross-platform participative performance experience.

The project was structured around a Facebook site belonging to a fictitious nightclub, Hopscotch Highway. The narrative included four main characters – Neutrick Excess (the club impresario), Dirty Evangelica (the aging diva), Candy Wrap (the young up-and-coming diva) and the Trainer Crew (representatives of the clubbing community). The story was told across Facebook, YouTube, Soundcloud Twitter and Vines using Facebook posts, photos, film and audio tracks to tell the story. The main narrative tracked the characters over a 24 time-period released in real time, including their participation in a Saturday club night ‘Freaky and Fearless’, but the storyworld was developed across two months prior to the 24-hour event, the pre- and post-phases of an event playing an important part in creating the frame for and understanding of the performance (Carver and Beardon 2004: 180). The Facebook page (accessible at https://www.facebook.com/HopscotchHighway/?fref=ts) acted as a hub, through which story participants were directed to content on Vines, YouTube, Twitter and other Facebook pages. Original content key to the narrative was provided on each of these platforms and a full understanding of the story could only be achieved through accessing the content across the social media platforms. In addition, a number of characters had their own Facebook pages, enabling the audience to obtain a deeper understanding of the character. This transmedia approach informed and shaped the digital writing practice, instigating new modes of working.

Prior to starting the six-month practice-based Pervasive Theatre project, interviews took place with the Artistic Directors of Assault Events, the writer and the four performers involved in the devising process, to establish expectations around the project and prior experience with online practice both personally and artistically. Artistic Research and Development took place across the first 2 months, followed by the development of the narrative structure and the creation of content by the writer, director and the devising team throughout the following 3 months. The project, followed by 75 audience members/participants, culminated in the online release of the narrative across 24 h at the end of the fifth month. The project was followed by a second round of interviews, with the artistic directors, the writer and the four performers, establishing their experiences of the project including in relation to original expectations. Feedback was also provided by some of those who had experienced the project as audience/participants both formally through an online survey and informally through discussion. Following an analysis of the creative process and artistic product, supported by the data from these interviews, survey and discussions, four key areas of particular interest arose will be explored further below – how new writing can emerge from within online spaces rather than being translated onto them; how characteristics of different online social platforms inform style and content; how social media platforms can be used to develop narrative and character through creative collaboration with performers, and finally, how online social spaces enable the digital writer to develop a narrative framework through which audiences frame their own meaning.

New writing emerges from online spaces

One of the main outcomes of the Pervasive Theatre project was an understanding of how new writing can emerge from within online spaces rather than being translated onto them.

Assault Events had been creating cross- and interdisciplinary performance for 18 years prior to the Pervasive Theatre project and assumed that a transmedia approach would be similar:

As we saw it at the time, we had been working in a transmedia way for decades, blending moving image, static image and sound to tell a story – the only difference was that we were used to doing this in a live environment rather than online. Starting out, we didn’t realise how different that would be. That it wasn’t just a matter of moving our work from one medium to another, but that the medium itself and its characteristics would have a huge impact on the work we were making. (Sandie Fisher, 2015)

Janet Murray regards investigating such affordances is a key part of any medium’s development (1999: 66–67). Not only can the affordances of the social media environment offer new ways to construct and distribute a performative narrative but those same affordances have the potential to shape the nature of the narrative itself, practitioners exploring the new environment ‘on its own terms, “seizing on [its] unique physical properties”, “exploring its own expressive power”‘ (Alexander: 43).

For the writer Shannon Yee, the experience of creating a performance narrative for an online transmedia environment was very different compared to her usual creative process for writing for theatre. Although the initial process was the same, the lateral mapping of the storyline across characters/media platforms was new, as was using a storyboard timeline that incorporated aspects of time, media, character and text:

It was very challenging to be across all the different social media platforms at the same time while keeping that single narrative moving…how can we look at the way all these additional media platforms can feed into the central channel that we’re choosing as the narrative, the hashtags and so forth? (Yee, 2015)

The writer chose to focus on Facebook as the main platform from which the other characters’ pages and platforms used were connected to. This was a huge task, Yee reflecting how, while the collaborative team had initially imagined a wide and active range of online activity across platforms, they ultimately focused on one being active (Facebook) with Twitter and links to YouTube and Vines:

For me as a writer it was really exciting because there was that moment where I went ‘holy crap!’ and the whole thing exploded! So while the background work was all the same that I’d do for anything – thinking about character development, thinking about what the trajectory of the narrative was – when the platforms came into it, it all exploded in a really lateral way and that’s where the storyboarding really helped, trying to get that mapping of the platforms and realising that that real-time world was moving all at the same time. (Yee, 2015)

It was important for Yee to establish the parameters of the social media use of each character in the narrative, placing them on the ‘racing track’ before dealing with how key points of the narrative would get placed and mapped out. While the initial process of developing characters and dramatic narrative was the same, the mapping of this onto an online space was different from the usual way that the writer would develop new writing for theatre:

I had to think laterally to fully consider how the narrative would be portrayed in the online worlds run by each of characters. It was a mid-step of mapping, plotting and building an infrastructure to support the real time unfolding of the narrative that I normally would not do in this way. (Yee 2015)

The social media performance spaces were crucial to the narrative development, particularly in relation to the voices of the different characters and decisions about how, where and when to reveal the narrative. One key decision was to use different platforms for the different modes of performance – Facebook, Twitter were used for sequential events, Twitter was used for parallel and simultaneous events and Facebook was also used for non-linear events. This segmented approach found realizes Esposito’s idea of ‘interstitial writing’ (2008), which seems to have its natural home in socially networked transmedia environments where participants browse across platforms. As foreseen by Esposito, rather than a long narrative, the performance narrative is constructed in ‘small microbursts of time’, ‘…short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology…will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole’ (2008). For Esposito, central to this is the idea that rather than being a slimmed down version of a larger piece, the work is

built perfectly for the space and time it occupies…it is not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology (2008).

Through working with the affordances of social media tools, the Pervasive Theatre performance narrative was created from the ground up, emerging from within the online space rather than being translated onto it, Yee reflecting how it was ‘…really exciting, it was really valuable in terms of how the world of the performance space affected how we created the story and how we had to lay out the story’ (Yee, 2015).

Online social platforms inform narrative style and content

A second interesting outcome from the Pervasive Theatre project was an understanding of how the characteristics of the different online social platforms informed both style and content of the writing. Yee found that the conventions of being online and how they affect language and communication, coupled with the decisions made about which characters spoke on which platform affected their character. This authenticity of language in relation to online voices was vital in maintaining the believability and thus interest in the storyworld. As Alexander reflects, characters are regarded as ‘storyworthy’ when the audience connects emotionally with what they regard as a realistic human character (2011: 11):

I always see language and the way we speak and the way characters speak and because that’s my bag – text is my bag – that’s what I look at. But then to look at the other layer as well – not only how they speak, but the platforms on which they speak – that is their voice too, we all have an online voice and how that affects the way the characters speak, both in what they say online, what they don’t say, how they say it…. (Yee, 2015)

Using social media as a performance space had a direct impact on the development of the writing and led to Yee making conscious decisions were made about who was seen, who was heard and in what ways:

It required me to think much more laterally and simultaneously after constructing the initial dramatic narrative. I also had to educate myself on the range of social media available (for example Vines and Snapchat) that I don’t use but our audiences and characters would, and locate content we could use in lieu of creating all of our own. (Yee, 2015)

The different social media platforms were carefully selected, with different platforms being used for different characters and at different times in the narrative. The Dirty Evangelica character did not have a direct presence on social media and was experienced only through posts by other characters. She could be seen (through still photos on Facebook) and heard (through song on YouTube). Neutrick Excess was present on Facebook through his management of the Hopscotch Highway Facebook page and YouTube channel. Candy Wrap and the Trainer Crew were present on Facebook and Twitter, with Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts. They could be seen (through still photos and video), read about (on Facebook and Twitter) and heard (through video on Facebook). Yee reflected how she began to consider the way we ‘speak’ online as its own language, for example, to ‘like’ a post on Facebook is a form of character dialogue. The ‘unique affordances’ of each platform were exploited, for example, different characters commenting on and liking each other’s Facebook posts, tagging images, using Twitter hashtags, harnessing ‘the unique nature of its digital housing to accentuate the story’s power’ (Alexander: 43):

The platforms we chose for the characters were based on the market and demographic for each platform, and how the different platforms affect the different ‘voices’ used. For example, Dirty Evangelica and Neutrick Excess are in their late 30s/40s so would use Facebook rather than Vines which has a younger demographic. Candy Wrap is a social butterfly and marketer of her own brand, and therefore adept at using Twitter & Twitterspeak as well as linking into Facebook. Trainer Crew is easily distracted and into instant gratification—videos and limited text fit their characters best. (Yee, 2015)

Content was carefully selected and distributed to maximize the ‘unique affordances’ of the different social media platforms which not only related to how the story was told but how the audience would be able to engage with it, necessitating the writer to form ‘an editorial/curation policy and practice’ (Alexander: 132).

Online social tools develop narrative and character

A third outcome of the Pervasive Theatre project was an understanding of how online social tools were used to develop narrative and character through creative collaboration with performers. As Alexander remarks in The New Digital Storytelling, ‘creating stories in a world of ubiquitous computing doesn’t rely on the Romantic model of a single creator’ (227). Collaborative writing is central to much social media activity (e.g. wikis, discussion boards, blogs and comments, Facebook posts and comments) and the collaborative team working on the Pervasive Theatre research project were keen that this spirit of online collaboration would extend into the creative process as well as the product. This was achieved in two ways. Firstly, each character in the narrative was portrayed by an individual performance practitioner. Each performance practitioner was responsible for the Facebook page linked to their character. Through populating the page, practitioners developed the public and private lives of the characters as they felt appropriate, selecting favourite books, movies and music, uploading photos and so on. This was shared with the writer to feed into the creation of the performance narrative. Yee reflected:

It was a great new way to collaborate because so often collaboration is dependent on people physically being together and that can be really limiting…the world that the pieces are being created [in is] remote, they’re accessible from anywhere. Our team is feeding in from all over, remotely. That was really exciting, the way the team structure mirrored in same ways the creation. (Yee, 2015)

In addition, different characters were developed and narrative content created through the creation of a treasure hunt, instigated by Yee. Instructions for the treasure hunt were emailed to the performance practitioners who were asked to find or create content both for general material and also character specific material (Figure 1). Once created by the performers, this material was sent to the writer to be fed back into the development of the narrative. In some way, this is similar to practices found in ARGs, where players complete tasks and solve problems set by the game’s makers. This was a new approach for the writer as previously devised collaborations had required everyone to be in the same room at the same time, content moulded concurrently with consistent input from all involved. The treasure hunt enabled the writer to collaborate remotely with the team of artists and performers, giving them a list of items:

We needed an effective way to generate a range of different content flexibly. It also began the democratic process of storytelling as the performers could interpret the items any way they wanted. For example, ‘fallen angel’ was captured both as someone asleep on a bed and a child’s doll on the street. It was an authentic way to quickly generate a wide range of different content with different tones, textures, and characters. (Yee, 2015)

Figure 1.

Treasure hunt instructions.

For the performance practitioners, this experience was also different to the usual creative/devising process:

The project had a very specific brief and was different to creating a whole show or sections for a performance piece, as the shots were so short. The intention was to create something that showed two personalities in a very specific amount of time so it was beneficial I was working with someone I knew very well to create the easy attitude between the two characters (Prickett, 2014).

Performers selected tasks from the Treasure Hunt list ‘that were playful and could have a sense on intimacy or knowledge of each other’, using the tasks to help develop character:

We had a pre-existing understanding of the characters so worked used the task to further the idea of two people who were together often and tried to create situations where they would be together in an informal setting. (Prickett, 2014)

The performance practitioners used their characters’ Facebook page to develop the character, adding music, liking groups and responding to real-life events to keep the page live and relevant. This process was different to the usual way that character would usually be developed, the performance practitioners reflecting that even though they had pre-existing understanding of the characters, the treasure hunt and task hugely informed where they placed the characters and their actions in that space. Content was carefully selected and distributed to maximize the ‘unique affordances’ of the different social media platforms which not only related to how the story was told but how the audience would be able to engage with it. This meant that the writer had to form ‘an editorial/curation policy and practice’ (Alexander: 132).

Online social spaces support narrative frameworks that leave space for the story

A fourth outcome of the Pervasive Theatre project was an understanding of how online social spaces enable the digital writer to develop a narrative framework through which audiences frame their own meaning, leaving space for the story. Documentary storyteller Sheila Curran Bernard (2007) regards engagement as central to storytelling remarking: ‘A story is the narrative, or telling, of an event or series of events, crafted in a way to interest the audiences whether they are readers, listeners, or viewers.’ (15) Carver and Beardon assert that for theatre ‘to continue to act as a mirror to society it must engage with the changing means of communication which new technologies have brought about…’ (152). The Internet has enabled theatre practitioners to ‘redefine their relationship with their audiences’ (153), commenting how the Internet ‘has transformed use of computer from a solitary to a public act’, radically altering the relationship between performers and audience, through enabling communication across time and space (168).

Finding new ways to engage audiences with narrative performance was at the heart of the Pervasive Theatre project. Social media provides an ideal space to develop an active relationship with audiences and indeed Muse (2012) regards social media as reshaping audience’s experience of theatre (43). Yee created a framework through which the audience could interact with the narrative by commenting and ‘liking’ posts by characters, posting their own comments. Yee reflected:

We chose specific moments in the narrative to solicit interactions but hoped they would also interact to any/all of the posts (including pre-event). We hoped they would be connecting into the story at times and places of their choosing, similar to how we all use social media, that this narrative would integrate into their daily online lives as something else they check in on while online. (Yee, 2015)

Contemporary media audiences are experienced in moving between and across platforms within a single experience and, reflecting this, Yee wove together the physical/online through the use of Twitter handles, YouTube links, photos and Vines, deliberately cross-referencing the platforms as much as possible. Distinctions were blurred between reality and the world of the story:

It was a bit unnerving and made me question the amount of time I/society spend online, living in online worlds, and how these social media platforms are multiplying quickly. We used videos and photos of real people, the artistic team and performers invited their personal friends who use Facebook, which blurred the distinctions further. (Yee, 2015)

The audience engaged with the piece in a number of different modes; passively, through reading the posts on Hopscotch Highway’s Facebook page newsfeed; actively, through clicking on and engaging with Vines, photos, music and posts; interactively, through favouriting on Facebook and retweeting on Twitter and collaboratively, through commenting on each other’s posts, sharing posts on their personal pages, inviting friends to like the Hopscotch Highway Facebook page and using Twitter handles in their posts (e.g. #fallenangels):

…the audience as a player to me as a character was fairly unified as to where they were on that map, they could be anywhere. But I had to figure out how many lanes there were and who were running across which before the thing started off and then people could feed in. So it was the infrastructure I was trying to figure out, that was new, challenging, that lateral spreading out where the narrative goes. (Yee, 2015)

An analysis of audience engagement with the project, drawn from metrics from the Hopscotch Highway Facebook page as well as audience feedback, showed that the most popular form of engagement was to passively follow the narrative through reading the online posts. Some audience members were more actively engaged, following hyperlinks and interacting with the project through favouriting and retweeting. A small number of audience members engaged with the project collaboratively, for example, uploading photos, commenting on posts and sharing post on their personal pages. Each level of engagement built upon the level before (Figure 2), which supported audience members who were happy with a more passive engagement, but offered greater depth to those who wanted a more active, interactive or even collaborative involvement.

Figure 2.

Audience engagement pyramid.

Yee acknowledged the potential for engaging the audience/participants in the narrative yet further, in a similar way to how Netprov involves the audience in the development of the story:

I also haven’t worked in a way that opened out the narrative to the audience as such an active player throughout the pre-, during and post-performance. And in the way that you were opening it up that in an ideal world, anybody from anywhere could say anything, and then if the performers were also online at the same time, or whoever it was being that then it would be branching off in to an totally non-scripted democratic sub-narrative…. (Yee, 2015)

The creation of a clear narrative was important to support the audience through their experience, and the story was constructed around a number of posts relating to key plot points. These were used as a framework on which the audience/participants could hang their own detail based on their knowledge and understanding of the characters and their relationships with each other. This idea of leaving space for the story recognizes the importance that the audience played as collaborators in the narrative, each individual bringing their own experiences, assumptions and expectations into play. Alexander recognizes the potential of such active involvement in the construction of a narrative describing how an audience ‘can turn a single item into a story through the process of reception, sometimes beyond the extent of the original’, making the audience co-creators of the experience (13).

This idea of the audience as active participants in the story mirrors the rise in participatory behaviour enabled by online engagement generally. Randall Walser (1990), writing about Virtual Reality, refers to maker of virtual environments as the ‘spacemaker’, providing a place for audiences to discover and experience. I would suggest this sense also applies to virtual transmedia worlds:

Whereas film is used to show a reality to an audience, cyberspace is used to give a virtual body, and a role, to everyone in the audience. Print and radio tell, stage and film show; cyberspace embodies…A spacemaker sets up a world for an audience to act directly within, and not just so the audience can imagine they are experiencing an interesting reality, but so they can experience it directly…The filmmaker says, “Look, I’ll show you.” The spacemaker says, “Here, I’ll help you discover.” (60–61)

Henry Jenkins (2008) describes how audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersections between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture (24). Participatory technologies have enabled ‘the people formally known as the audience’ (Clay Shirky, 2010) to actively participate online, often weaving their own narratives. Kate Roiphe (2010) described Facebook as ‘the novel we are all writing’, Alexander referring to the boundary between fiction and non-fiction on individuals’ Facebook pages as ‘blurry and contextual’ (71). Assault Events hoped to harness this interest in a more active participatory experience:

In their everyday lives, people are looking at snapshots of other people’s lives through updates, posts and photos, making their own connections and narratives that may or may not be reality. We wanted to reflect that in this project, offering participants a glimpse into a story that they could choose to either experience very surfacially, or dig down deeper to mine more information (Sandie Fisher, 2015).

This would suit the new kind of media consumer described by Murray (1999) as ‘the navigational viewer who takes pleasure in following the connections between different parts of the story and in discovering multiple arrangements of the same material’ (257). Jenkins (2008) stresses the part the audience must play in transmedia storytelling, asserting that to fully experience the storyworld, ‘consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels…’ (21), making connections between these ‘fragments’ individually (121). By creating work distributed across platforms that can be experienced and understood in intervening space, the Pervasive Theatre project enables audiences to actively engage with the performance narrative on their own schedules, realising Esposito’s (2008) idea of interstitial writing:

It is improbable that item A will lead to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end – and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another characters. All the pieces get assembled in our minds, five minutes at a time.

This ‘distributed aesthetic’ is familiar to contemporary audiences, characterized by ‘experiences that are sensed, lived and produced in more than one place and time’ (Lisa Gye et al., 2005) and reflected in the way that individuals follow the real-life narratives of friends and acquaintances online, using their imagination to connect related narratives distributed across their social media accounts. By using this approach, practitioners employ virtual realism, reproducing ‘real-life experiences, characters and relationships which are themselves increasingly virtual’ (Muse, 2012: 58). This approach embeds the narrative experience into the real lives of the audience, as the fictional story weaves itself into the newsfeeds and updates of friends on social media.

Conclusion

The Pervasive Theatre project created new environments for narrative performance, using a transmedia approach that informed and shaped the digital writing practice, instigating new modes of working. The process of working across social media directly affected the resulting practice and the project developed new ways of developing performance narratives, particularly around story structure, character development and online collaboration:

This was a groundbreaking and exciting project to be involved in that broadened my skills and experience as a writer. There already has been interdisciplinary learning and I think further development offers tremendous potential for how online gaming worlds and live performance can cross-pollinate and enhance each other’s practices. (Yee, 2015)

The project revealed many interesting discoveries about creating transmedia performance narratives, particularly in terms of the relationship between the artistic and technical infrastructures. Through transmedia performance, digital technologies are integrated into the conceptual, creative and performance processes, a triple approach which, as Carver and Beardon, reflect offer ‘new possibilities of performance and its relationship to time, space and the body’ (1).

The Pervasive Theatre project was restricted in scope due to funding limits. In the future, the project will be developed to fully monitor and develop the characters’ online lives and facilitate active audience engagement to a greater degree, possibly building in some form of performative gamification similar to that found in ARGs:

the next steps would be for the artistic team and performers engage online in real time, like gamers do, with the audience. This would help strengthen the consistencies of the characters voices and create a richer environment for the story-world. (Yee, 2015)

Transmedia performance such as Pervasive Theatre, Twitter Theatre, Netprov and ARGs enables audiences to engage with stories as part of their day-to-day lives rather than something that is distanced from them, becoming a lived and intertwined experience. I would suggest that for this reason transmedia performance isn’t necessarily immersive as is often assumed, but is in fact integrative – rather than taking people out of their daily lives, it has the potential to bring arts directly into people’s everyday lives. Rather than an immersive storyworld being imposed on the participant, audience members can weave the performance into their everyday lives. They are able to engage with professional performance work wherever they are, whatever they are doing rather than being restricted to a specific time and place of a live physical performance. Sandie Fisher from Assault Events comments:

What really excites us is the idea that people waiting for buses, getting their car MOT’d, cueing for the cashpoint, waiting for friends or bored in a meeting could be actively engaged with performance. Why should performance be something segregated from people’s day-to-day existence? Using transmedia frameworks could really lower barriers to participation on a number of levels – geographically, culturally and economically for example. (Sandie Fisher, 2015)

As contemporary media technologies allow audience to access transmedia stories through small and transportable networked devices such as mobile phones and tablets, trans-platform performance environments can be experienced mostly anywhere at any time. The Pervasive Theatre project has begun to develop a mobile-based performance practice, echoing the digital storytelling foreseen by Esposito in 2008, accessed while

…waiting for a plane, a doctor or for a meeting to begin. That’s a huge number of minutes in any one day; a good portioned out lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive…How about the 10-minute crack? Five minutes? Think of your own day: How often are you simply waiting, doing nothing?

Through transmedia performance projects such as Pervasive Theatre, writers for performance have begun to answer Esposito’s challenge to ‘probe the nature of the interstitial medium…These writers will study readers, personal digital assistants or smart phones in hand, standing before the spinning dryer in the Laundromat, stopped at a red light, preparing to board a plane, waiting for the meeting to begin…’ (2008).

References

Alexander

(2011) The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media. Oxford: Praeger.

Bernard

(2007) Documentary Storytelling for Film and Videomakers. 2nd ed. Burlington: Focal Press.

Carver

Beardon

(2004) New Visions in Performance: The Impact of Digital Technologies. Lisse, Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger Publishers.

Esposito

(2008) Interstitial publishing: A new market from wasted time. Available at: http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/12/interstitial-publishing.html (accessed 4 January 2016).

Fisher

(2015) Interview with the author, June 5 2015.

Gye

Munster

Richardson

(2005) Distributed aesthetics editorial. The Fibreculture Journal (7). Available at: http://seven.fibreculturejournal.org (accessed 17 June 2016).

Jagoda

Gilliam

McDonald

. (2015) Worlding through play: Alternate reality games, large-scale learning and the source. American Journal of Play 8(1): 74–100.

Jenkins

(2008) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins

(2011) Transmedia 2.2: Further reflections. Available at: http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html#sthash.2QnieIau.dpuf (accessed 4 January 2016).

10.

Kim

Lee

Thomas

. (2009) Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games, 2001–2009. First Monday 14(6). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/2484/2199#p5 (accessed 17 June 2016).

11.

Marino

Wittig

(2012) Netprov: Elements of an emerging form. Dichtung Digital 42. Available at: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/en/journal/aktuelle-nummer/?postID=577 (accessed 17 June 2016).

12.

McGonigal

(2008) Saving the world through game design: Stories from the near future. 2008 New Yorker Conference. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/mcgonigal (accessed 25 February 2009.

13.

Murray

(1999) Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT Press.

14.

Muse

(2012) 140 characters in search of a theater. Theater 42(2): 43–63.

15.

Page

Thomas

(2011) New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

16.

Pratten

(2011) Getting Started with Transmedia Storytelling. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform Charleston.

17.

Prickett

(2014) Pervasive Theatre post-project evaluation questionnaire, returned to author 4th September 2014.

18.

Roiphe

(2010) The language of fakebook. New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/fashion/15Culture.html?ref=fashion.&_r=0 (accessed 4 January 2016).

19.

Shirky

(2009) Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together. New York: Penguin.

20.

Shirky

(2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin.

21.

Stewart

(2008) Alternate reality games. Available at: http://www.seanstewart.org/interactive/args/ (accessed 25 February 2009).

22.

Walser

(1990) Spacemakers and the Art of the Cyberspace Playhouse. Mondo 2000 2 (Summer 1990): 60–61.

23.

Wittig

(2015) Pasts and futures of netprov electronic book review. Available at: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/netprov (accessed 17 June 2016).

24.

Yee

(2015) Interview with the author, June 5 2015.