Accessible Technology in Telematic Theatre

Lead Research Organisation: Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
Department Name: Faculty

Abstract

The five-year project for which this application represents a first step involves exploring and making telematic performance. 'Telematic' here means the use of the Internet to transmit images and sound between two or more sites, with performers in each location interacting with each other. Spectators in each location see the performers who are in the same space as them, and also the performers elsewhere on one or more screens.

A number of performing arts practitioners and computer specialists are exploring telematic performance, although to date there has been a tendency towards dance-based or physical performance. I have been awarded the AHRC Creative Fellowship to explore the dramatic potential of this new medium, and to look at ways in which the basic principle of telematics - the separation of spaces and people, and the creation of a shared space and event that is both concrete and virtual - can be harnessed as part of a new sort of theatre.

In order to do this, I want firstly to establish a rock-solid, trustworthy telecasting system. More, I want it to be based on equipment that is, broadly speaking, readily available. I have started to make initial inroads here as the director of Station House Opera, a theatre company that makes performance pieces working with different media, using Apple's Quick Time software. I want to develop this work so that we can arrive at a kit of parts (cameras, laptops, projectors, software that is freely available) that you might be able to gain access to even if you are not working in an academic institution or for a commercial company. The first year of the project will involve experimentation with this technology in several locations within one building, and then exploring ways of creating a mobile system - one that doesn't have to be in a theatre or a studio, but can be taken to many different locations. This will involve using mobile phone technology and wireless connectivity.

Following this year of groundwork, I will be ready in the second year of the fellowship to publish details of the kit of parts online so a wide range of practitioners can benefit. After that I will move the next phase, which is to consider action, characterisation and other elements of dramaturgy in telematic performance and to begin to explore what global performance space could be - starting from visualisations of occupied space and spatial communication, then considering dramaturgies of (dis)connection and (mis)communication.

Planned Impact

The programme is organised, broadly, into an initial technical phase lasting two years, and a second phase examining dramatic opportunities, issues and applications - although technological and aesthetic considerations will intersect throughout.

The main focus of the first year's work is focus on technological development towards the establishment of a robust platform for telematic performance. The first priority will be flexible use of spaces at Central to test means of connection and exchange. This phase also entails discussion with prospective partners, and the identification of specific project opportunities.

The project partners in Year One are the University of Chichester and Station House Opera. (Omar Rajeh and the Maqamat Dance Theatre, Beirut have pledged support from Year Two.) Through workshops, we will develop models of performative extended spaces, according to the year's overall concerns (for example, construction of action that apparently runs seamlessly across virtual spaces; imposition of different physical conditions on each space). Where more than one institution is involved, the participants will focus on the same issues, allowing for the development of a comparative framework and shared technique.

My work with Station House Opera furnishes international contacts and interest from potential participants in collaboration in future years. I will approach the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, which has worked with CSSD for two years on a temporary sustainable theatre project. Other possible partners include Rescen, University of Middlesex; BodyDataSpace; Central St Martin's; and BAC. I will also contact educational institutions such as Paris 8 and University of Montreal, as well as independent producers/directors such as Trevor Davies (KIT, Copenhagen), Hannah Hurtzig (Mobile Academy, Berlin), Divya Bhatia, Mumbai/Bangalore, Lieve Baert, Das Arts Amsterdam, Eduardo Bonito/Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro.

During the year the main technological discoveries and experiments will be documented through a blog on the CSSD website with links to Station House Opera's work. Some portions of the 'laboratory' and workshops will also be open to academic and industry colleagues. A public showing of 'scratch' experimental work will take place during the Festival of Emergent Arts in September 2010 and the Accidental Festival (Roundhouse) followed by post-performance discussion. Being telematic these performances may involve links to BAC and Chichester; it is expected that they will be shown live on the Internet for online spectators, thus engaging a wider audience.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Title At Home in Gaza and London 
Description Six public showings in London, Liverpool and Gaza (Palestine) of a major theatre production. Twelve artists (six in either place) along with supporting artistic/technical/production team of ten participated in a production taking place simultaneously in the two locations linked by live video streaming. 
Type Of Art Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) 
Year Produced 2018 
Impact The piece contributed greatly to the artistic and cultural development of the participants and to the aim to increase cultural connections between the two countries. It attracted great attention of both the general public, special interest groups and the media in its contribution to increasing awareness of current artistic social and political conditions in the two locations. The process strengthened the international team greatly by developing understanding, working processes and artistic reach, and set the project up for further development in due course. 
URL http://www.athomeinlondonandgaza.com
 
Title Nowhere: a work in progress, in Collisions: The Festival of New Performance and Theory, Oct 2010 
Description A telematic performance linking the Central School of Speech and Drama with the University of Chichester, in which the motion of video cameras and projectors was synchronised and mutally controlled from either end. An audience at each location observed the live performance and two video streams of local and remote locations on projections rotating around the walls. Performed by students and others at CSSD and from the Department of Performing Arts at Chichester, this was produced with Dr Jem Kelly at Chichester, my AHRC collaborative partner. 
Type Of Art Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) 
Year Produced 2010 
Impact This led to further technical and artistic development of the idea, along with increased interest from students and others for workshops and performance. 
 
Title Telematic Theatre Workshops 
Description A series of workshops were run at Central School of Speech and Drama in February 2010. These were attended by participants from within and outside the college, and averaged six to twelve per session. Two different locations in the college were connected by video/audio and performative tactics for co-operation, separation and co-existence tested, with particular attention to making engagement with the physical reality of the distant location inextricable from the direct experience the audience has of its own. 
Type Of Art Artistic/Creative Exhibition 
Year Produced 2010 
Impact Led directly to the concept of the site-specific telematic performance 'Nowhere', stimulating the artistic and technical development of the piece, which to date has received three different iterations, two within an academic context and one public. 
 
Description THE INITIAL AIMS

This award funded the development in year one of the fellowship of a functioning telematic system for video-streaming and afforded the opportunity for testing in performance conditions. The context concerned the technology required for two-way video streaming in a performance environment, that is flexible, reliable, affordable and low-latency, and the emergent aesthetics and dramaturgies for a telematic theatre.

The questions asked were:
What arrangement of technologies provides a robust, accessible and portable platform for telematic performance?
o In what ways can telematics serve as a conduit for dramatic performance and exploit the nature of this new medium?
o What new understandings of space (global, virtual, cultural, personal) arise from performances made through telematic production? As the project develops, it will address the following questions:
o How may one make a coherent, global space that is recognisably 'tele- present', yet absolute to its participants and spectators? How may one occupy this space? What manipulations of it are possible?
o How may temporal and architectural innovations such as changes of scale, delay, continuity and connection challenge the nature of Euclidian space while retaining its relation to the physical bodies of the occupants/performers and audience/viewers?
o What is the nature of 'identification' (with character or persona) in telematic performance, and what are its limits?
o What could be the implications for drama when performers in different locations are seen to be equivalent and isomorphic - as if they are the same character?
o How does telematic space enable (or inhibit) representation of the absent other as a projection of personal fear or desire?
o Performatively, how might telematic theatre dramatise mis- representation and mis-understanding




THE RESEARCH

These primary aims led to the following areas of research in the technology and dramaturgy:

A) Technical: 1. An assessment of the current situation.
2. An exploration of the constraints of video-streaming, what the trade-offs are, and how they interact. How to achieve optimal real-time interaction and reciprocity, using domestic consumer connections, as well as academic institutional ones



B) Aesthetics and Dramaturgy:
1. What is meant by 'presence'. 'telepresence'?
2. The video-conferencing model: the abolition of distance, the illusion of spatial coherence.
3. The absence model: to use the characteristics of the medium and the technology to find new representations of space and time, including appearance and disappearance, remote action/control, latency, spatial manipulation - visual and aural, distance, absence.
4. Practical issues of long-distance collaboration.





A1. The current situation is that high quality video streaming remains difficult to attain when required to operate in real-time with very low latency, as is necessary where performers need to respond to each other across a two-way connection. Single-direction streaming (eg by the National Theatre, or productions such as Katie Mitchell's 'The Forbidden Zone' recently at the Barbican) employs significant latency in order to ensure good quality images.

Video conferencing systems provide the low-latency, but at the cost of limited image quality (restricted to talking heads against plain backgrounds) and constrained institutional and physical set-ups.

So what in this situation suggests itself as a useable idea for performance-making that is equally distributed across space in terms of both audience and actor, one that acknowledges (and valorises) the technological environment in which the event takes place? Furthermore, given the evident fact that virtual presence is not and perhaps artistically should not be confused with physical presence, what are the characteristics and potentials of virtuality and absence in performance and where do they lead?

Much of the most successful networked performance forgoes full video in favour of less data-heavy media to provide instant feedback and interactivity. With ever increasing bandwidth and compression techniques, how should video streaming position itself in the future of networked performance?


A2. Over the first year of the fellowship I developed with my technical director Kevin Jacobs a streaming system that is portable, flexible, focussed on the spatial and site-specific, scalable, and affordable.

The system developed was tested over extended periods in performance conditions - at RCSSD and Chichester University.




B1. This question is encountered by all who work with mediatised representations of human beings.
My practice with telematics has concentrated on finding effective structures for video-streaming distant performers, without pre-defining what those effects might be. The work focussed on the spatial, sculptural and architectural character of mediated representations, rather than their graphic, iconographic or linguistic potential. I was interested in the relation between the perceptions of the viewer or spectator as a physical person in a space and the absent performer also understood as a presence with actual location and form in the space. Each of the three primary outcomes of the research found a different solution to the problem, but all contributed to the overall aim of establishing a shared space for performance that could be understood physically and spatially, rather than purely as images on a projection screen.

Experience of these projects suggests to me that there are many kinds and graduations of 'telepresence'. The sense of someone leaving the room when you terminate a connection. The degree to which you agree to mutual dependency/co-operation - that is, the degree you share your fate with the distant person - is the effect they have on you direct or indirect, sensory or imaginative, physically causal or detached, moral or dispassionate? The degree you are aware of the physical position or action of the distant person in real time, in relation to some spatial orientation of your own body. How the distant space and the local one are related perceptually.
To what degree can 'telepresence' operate in the same way (have the same affect) as the actual physical presence?
And what about absence? Awareness of the physical absence of a person in some way is a measure of their virtual presence, in whatever way that is conceived or felt.

Primarily, there is a sense in which presence is revealed or even learnt: exposure to a telematic practice opens new perceptions to what presence feels like and can be. A door opening or closing by itself is a curiosity, until you learn that it signals the arrival or departure of an active, causal agent, or a videographic one. Or, the location of a distant object's image consistently at, or superimposed upon, the location of a local object creates a persistent, functioning relationship where none existed before. Change the objects into people and the effect is amplified.

B2. The industry aim for video-streaming has been for a low-latency, high resolution functionality, allied to efficient data-manipulation tools. The notion of the desirability of creating an audio-visual illusion that is next-best to the real thing seems unexceptionable, and has been taken on by many in the artistic community. This is a next step in the accelerated flattening of the world that is the prime feature of globalisation. However it may be maintained that as an artist it is part of one's job to re-configure available technologies away from their nominal functions when they suggest ways to achieve a purpose that is not necessarily for what they are designed for. Research into affordable video-conferencing technologies revealed systems highly focussed on small-scale, rigidly controlled environments - typically a speaker's head-and-shoulders against a plain background. Under these restrictions, it is possible to attain a seemingly good quality result - the illusion of an illusion. Such systems do not deal well with the transmission and representation of large or complex spaces, or site-specific spaces. They are also proprietary systems that are difficult to customise.


B3 The research aimed to uncover alternatives to a model of telematic space that effectively denied the existence of distance in its construction and that inevitably raised questions about the point of attempting to create an illusion of normal spatial and dramatic coherence. It aimed at ensuring that distant performers retain the integrity of their own performance, and distant spaces the integrity of their own physical location, thereby insisting on a physical presence providing the root for whatever telematics could offer. In this way, by unavoidable comparison with the local, the physical presence of the distant, in its own place, could be experienced empathetically from afar, in a form appropriate to its status as distant, via a close communication with the physically present.

In the first year of my fellowship one project was developed to address these themes. This project created a telematic spaces that is inherently different from coherent representations of material space, and attempts to seek out characteristics that bring the two locations cognitively or perceptually into accord and/or collision with each other, thereby creating understandings of presence and absence, agency and virtuality, that are cognisant of the physical facts of distance and the technical means of illusion and representation. The research used workshops and studio-based experimentation to provoke and analyse the relations of streamed video imagery to physical space in terms of appearance and disappearance, remote action/control, latency, spatial manipulation - visual and aural, distance, absence.

B4. Through practical experiments and workshops in academic and semi-public contexts, estimates were made of the relative success and failure of the working practices adopted. The nature of creation and collaboration over internet links was explored at RCSSD, linking two rehearsal rooms in the same building. This allowed participants to experience and gain comprehension of the technical set-up and artistic process, which encouraged an informed input and discussion to off-set the naturally fragmentary experience of the whole event that comes from working with other performers (and often the workshop leader) who are not in the same room.
This was extended to include workshop using an internet links between Chichester University and RCSSD . This built on a perceived problem with the practice of telematic theatre experienced by Station House Opera in the company's work 2004-2008 linking theatres in England, Brazil, Singapore, Germany and Holland, relating to the encouraging and ensuring of common artistic, cultural and economic goals between the participating groups, who through the working process were not able to directly share space or communicate face-to-face. Emphasis was laid on clearly identifying potential partners as being able to share common goals and stating what these were before commencement, developing personal and professional relationships, extending development period, and allowing regular social time using the video links as well as work time.


THE OUTPUTS

Two main outputs were achieved during the fellowship, along with subsidiaries (workshops and a symposium): a technical platform and one performance/theatre piece.

1) A technical platform for researching and producing telematic theatre.
A basic system was developed that suited the independent practitioner without access to institutional resources. It was tested as to the aim of being robust, stable, flexible, and mobile. It was based on using commercially available Axis hardware encoders coding Standard Definition video (720x560) as rtsp streams, decoded by VLC. A technical guide was been compiled.


In addition, I have led innovations the development of Motorised Camera and Projector mounts, remotely controlled and synchronised across the internet, with the technical design by Nic Sandiland.


Performance

2) Nowhere is a spatial structure for performance that in each manifestation is developed specifically for the sit and context. It was developed in collaboration with Dr. Jem Kelly of Chichester University.
It was performed in different versions at
CSSD - Chichester University (Collisions Festival 2010), and later at
Roundhouse, London - Private House (Accidental Festival 2011)
CSSD - Buckingham New University (Sept 2013)

Nowhere evolved from the interest in how to represent a distant space within a local one, both spaces being both performance and viewing spaces. Rather than presenting a distant space on a video screen which establishes no spatial relation with the physical space where it is located, and is only able to show more than a single aspect of the distant space through camera movement - transmitting the illusion of ocular movement to a static screen in the standard cinematic manner - 'Nowhere' uses a camera/projector combination which moves a projected image around 360 degrees, rather like a torch scanning a darkened room, illuminating parts of the distant environment at will. Thus an understanding of the distant space is built up incrementally and selectively, its virtual geography stable within the material geography of the local, physical space. Objects that exist in the distant location are always revealed projected upon the same part of the local space, effectively mapping them onto the local objects. In effect the distant is super-imposed upon the local , providing a one-to-one correspondence, while never negating (because always partial, directional) the materiality of the local space.

Providing correspondence (and isometry) is a second camera/projection pair relaying a video image of the local space onto the walls in the same manner. Thus in each space, distant and local, two projections (directed in opposite directions) scan the walls with live images of two locations, local and distant.

This set-up provides great flexibility for further exploration of an environmental relation between two locations, presenting continuous but moving views of two spaces which are bound together by movement, direction, isometry and spatial correspondence. The distance space is insistently described but continually left, as is the local space, the fixed relation between them asking question of control, offering opportunities for imagining and imaging a single performance space that nevertheless depicts two distinct realities that are geographically far removed.




DISSEMINATION OF FINDINGS


Progress and results of the research was disseminated via conference papers and a symposium. Workshops were held from spring onwards at RCSSD, open to the public as well as students. Numerous students and others expressed interest in the work both academically and practically.


TAKING THE FINDINGS FORWARD

The results of the research during the first year of the fellowship were taken forward into the final four years, and provided a secure base for continuing technical developments and extended workshop practice leading to further artistic outcomes.
Exploitation Route Artistically, the results of the research have been and will be experienced both through the workshops and through public productions and so will be able to influence ideas and practices in the professional and academic fields.
The development of a technical platform for video streaming and design will enable practitioners, both independent and academic, to produce their own work in the field, as well as being open to assessment by those with technical interest in the field.
Sectors Creative Economy,Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
 
Description Contribution to the wider appreciation and discussion of networked performance through public engagement with performances and workshops (as listed in Engagement Activities and Artistic & Creative Products)
First Year Of Impact 2010
Sector Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural
 
Description Grants for the Arts
Amount £15,000 (GBP)
Organisation Arts Council England 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 08/2016 
End 11/2016
 
Description Jem Kelly / University of Chichester 
Organisation University of Chichester
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution I led the development of the first telematic theatre production to be realised as part of my AHRC Fellowship. This was 'Nowhere', and was performed as a work in progress in Collisions festival at CSSD in Oct 2010. I instructed the technical team which was led by Nic Sandiland, and led the workshops developing the performance concepts. The piece was performed and by students at CSSD under my direction.
Collaborator Contribution Dr Jem Kelly attended workshops at CSSD and set up the performance and directed it in Chichester with students from the dept of Performing Arts
Impact 'Nowhere' work-in-progress, Collisions festival, Central School of Speech and Drama, Oct 2010. Disciplines involved: technical interactive design, dramaturgy, performance, music
Start Year 2009
 
Description Performance Workshop 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Twelve artist participants, six in London and six in Gaza (Palestine) worked together for four weeks with a team of ten artistic leaders/assistants/technicians, six in London and four in Gaza, to create material for a forthcoming production using live media streaming to link audiences and performers in the two locations. Two public showings were given to audiences in Gaza and London along with a live-streamed Q&A session.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2016
URL http://www.athomeingazaandlondon.com
 
Description telematic workshops 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Participants in your research and patient groups
Results and Impact I ran several series workshops at Central School of Speech and Drama between 2010 and 2014 in the development of techniques and artistic strategies for telematic performance. These were open to students at the School, alumni, established performers with my own company, and others. They fostered an interest in pursuing telematic work in different contexts outside of the school.

From the large number of participants many retained an interest as an informal group that developed and performed several pieces at the School and elsewhere. They also contributed to the making of the book 'Dissolved' in 2013. The interest generated has led to several applications to work with the company Station House Opera in its telematic productions.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2010,2011,2012,2013,2014