Pictures from the performance taken on the camera we provided:
Video from the camera we encouraged the audience to use during the performance:
Tweets from the laptop given to audience member during the performance
Frankie’s reflection on the performance
A visually innovative and successful performance was produced and overall the group seemed happy with what was created. When talking to audience members who participated in our piece, they responded positively. However, some criticism and feedback involved the following:
- Lack of focus on the laptop and the camera within the space: this was due to our audience capacity as we managed to sell out and fill the space completely. Because of this, the items were not able to be clearly visible throughout the performance. If we were to do this again, we would have placed the items on tables and possibly included lighting on each item to clearly invite the audience members to use them and document the piece live.
- The beginning of the piece seemed to take too long: when speaking to several audience members, they felt that the focus on the grid lingered longer than expected and it became a little awkward as there were no progression. However there was meant to be music playing to accompany the grid sequence but this was never played. The reasoning for lingering on the grid was so the audience could relax and watch the cloud footage as well as people sleeping above them.
- Reality and dream were not as effective in marrying together successfully: it seemed apparent that the piece was not a whole piece but two running ideas happening consecutively, and the reality and dream did not match. We used the explosion and panic to break the dream-like state, but also we tried not to make it too seperate from the dream by not providing a completely naturalistic setting.
- Audience participation was very effective: audience members were pleased with the way this panned out, they were able to fully get to grips with the scenario and we were fortunate to have an active audience who were also fellow drama students. If this was performed publicly, we would have to rethink our idea of major audience participation as the public would not be as co-operative or confident enough to take charge. When speaking to members who came to our piece about this they felt that the participation was their favourite moment, and that they really liked that aspect of the performance. They enjoyed the game play of finding the envelopes and uncovering the truth of the investigation, with assistance from the mobile voice.
- Audio clarity and timing were successful: We felt that audio would aid in creating an atmospheric environment so it was not just visually captivating. However it was paramount to rehearse with the mobile phone and audio moments in order to make the piece fluid, as the mobile aided progression in moments where the audience had nothing more to say on their envelope. It was also essential to have audio so the audience could hear the voicemails of the convicted, to tie together the story and bring it to an end.
- Visually stunning: audience members were pleased with the setting of the performance and being able to watch sections of the piece together and watch actors on the grid above them sleeping with them. We received positive feedback on the inclusion of bean bags and pillows so the audience felt comfortable and relaxed before experiencing the dream.
Personally, this has been a very exciting and thrilling experience. Collectively, we managed to produce something we had not produced before and it was successful in our intentions. There is room for development, however if we were to do it again it would become even more exciting and even more challenging, which is definitely a positive.
By Francesca Brooks
Olivia’s Reflection of the performance
During the course of the rehearsal and workshops, I felt our idea was really exciting and we had some nice concepts. The end result was what we imagined it to be and we felt the piece ran smoothly. The audience members worked really well to the instructions. The majority of the audience were drama students, and this worked in our favour as the piece very much relied on audience participation. We were questioned in the post-show discussion about what we would have done if the audience did not respond to what we asked them to do. It was always a worry for us as a group that the audience would not understand what we were aiming for them to do or if they were just too shy to participate. Due to the concept of the piece it was very challenging to rehearse and it was pivotal that an outsider of the group was used so we could test it on someone who has never read it before. Unfortunately we were only able to do this in the tech run of the same day as our performance. Luckily we managed to put together a solid enough script which was easy to follow and instructions which were made easy for an audience member to understand. We made ourselves aware before the performance that we may come across obstacles during the piece, this could have been anything like an audience member not being able to understand the instructions and there could be a long silence, but in rehearsals we made sure if this was to happen that it could be covered. To answer the question from the post-show discussion I feel that if we were to do it again we would not make the piece so audience based and instead take more inspiration from practitioners like Gob Squad or Blast Theory and guide the audience instead of making them the main focus.
We wrote a script so we all knew that there was a beginning, middle and end, and if something was to go wrong with an audience member we could easily pick it up as actors and move on to a different part and the rest of the cast would be able to follow. The script helped us decipher where we were in the running order and when our queues were. Although the script was not followed word for word, it was important for us to have it so we understood what our aims were.
After the performance I was interested in getting some feedback from the audience. Unfortunately in the performance the music in the dream sequence did not play, this left the room in silence. An audience member pointed that out to me and said it made them feel like they were meant to be doing something and there was a feeling of uncertainty for them. While researching the piece we came across a fact that the most effective amount of ‘nap time’ you can have is 27 minutes. We wanted to portray this with letting the audience lay down and relax. Obviously 27 minutes of that would have been ridiculous so we cut it to 8 minutes while videos were being projected. If there was music in the first half of this it definitely would have created a different atmosphere, the one which we had already planned. It was a technical fault though, and these things happen in theatre.
Within the set, we had placed a camera and a laptop. These were there as a different form of media and we wanted to encourage the audience to use this equipment. The laptop was on a twitter site and we hoped audience members would tweet about what they were seeing and doing. The camera was to take photos of the people around the set. Unfortunately this was not properly perceived and these medias got lost within the audience. I believe this happened due to having had such a small set and quite a few audience members, and the equipment got lost.
An audience member approached me after the performance and told me it was the best multimedia performance he had seen in the three years of being a student at the University. This was a great achievement for me and I felt very proud of our performance.
As beginners in experimenting with multimedia I felt the piece showed a lot of technical understanding and immersive theatre. We achieved our aims and this was shown in the audiences feedback. It is obvious that with more time and technology the piece would be able to advance in to something more spectacular. The use of an actual four sided box would have been able to achieve as well. I feel we worked at our best with what we were given and the performance, as a whole, went successfully.
By Olivia Clephane
Nina’s reflection of the performance
We performed our Multimedia, final degree piece on Monday the 13th of May at 8pm. We had spent the whole day in our performance site which was the LPAC Auditorium. We transformed the space into an immersive cube through the use of drapes and a cinema screen. We originally wanted to create a four sided cube, all made out of drapes. However we did not have the budget to afford the material to do so. Therefore it was suggested by the technical team to have a three sided cube with the cinema screen on stage acting as the fourth wall. We also narrowed it down from the use of five projectors to two after the advice that this would be too technically heavy and risked something going wrong. This picture can be seen below:
During the feedback discussion with Lee, Dan and ourselves the point was raised that this was a loss and would have added to the immersive cube we were trying to create. We agreed with this as it was a great shame we could not create our original intention. However in reflection to what we did achieve, I feel we still managed to create our original aim through the additional use of lighting. Sleep related media was going to be projected onto each of the four walls, this was still done but through the use of the cinema screen and the projection onto the grid. The footage which we showed in the work in progress session was not lost; instead we condensed them into one video. This can be seen in the post the final footage we used for the performance.
On the remaining fabric walls we focused our efforts on creating the same sleep induced atmosphere through lights. Specifically upon entering the cube, the audience was created with dim lighting except for the presence of an orange, sunrise sun on the drapes stage right. As the sky footage was then played on the grid, the space around it then changed to a mixture of blues to create a dream atmosphere. Whilst it was a shame not to have all of the sleep related media on the surrounding walls, creating a far more visually engaging space we still provided the sleep media on one of the screens and continued to create the atmosphere required through the use of mood lighting. If we were to do the performance again, we would most definitely have projections on all three sides but also keep the lighting as it did add to the environment.
Lee and Dan also questioned why we used a script. I responded by saying that we used it to regain a sense of control. We knew that our piece was hugely dependent on the audience, which is undoubtedly a big risk. This risk was appealing to us and for it to work in our favour we felt a script was logical to have control over the structure of the piece. It enabled us as Olivia pointed out to have a beginning middle and end. The main debate surrounding the script is that it resulted in naturalistic acting in what was said to be a ‘surrealist’ environment. This is what created the conflicting two performance ideas in which Olivia discussed. We wrote the script in the way we did to have what could be described as stock characters. The aim of doing this was for the audience to instantly identify with the characters and therefore automatically be immersed in the performance.
However taking the constructive criticism on board, if we were to continue to experiment with our piece it may be more beneficial to find case studies of accounts of people in emergency situations and use this as a basis for the characters. This would create a greater honesty rather than stock characters such as a child and a bad mannered youth. When considering the script also, the dialogue could be approached in a less naturalistic approach. Rather than having monologues and dialogues, speech could be more fragmented or even physicalised without being verbally spoken.
Finally if we were to continue experimenting we would need to find a better way to merge the concept of dreams and the immersed world we created. We felt that we had actually managed this quite well with the setting up of the sleep induced relaxation at the beginning which is then interrupted by the sleep related media. We felt we had successfully achieved this through the additional use of the sleep music playing throughout and the returning of the sky footage of the moon at the end, creating a cyclical motion. However we understand the criticism provided and if we were to do it again we would return to the notion of dreams. Perhaps one way of doing this would be through suggestion of the script or returning to the use of the grid, making more of it as a device. Physical theatre could have also been a greater influence.
As Olivia and Frankie have said, we were overall pleased with our performance. Yet at the same time can understand the criticism. The response we got from the audience was very uplifting as many said they had never experienced a performance quite like it. The consensus was that the reliance on the audience to steer the performance was a positive as it directly placed them in the action. Not only making it a performance but also an experience. At that is pivotal as that was our intention and the aim of performance all along.
By Nina Woods
Kim’s reflection of the performance
During the early experimentation phase of our piece, our group began to sense real direction of where our piece was going and what it would involve. Very early on in the workshops, the idea to use dreams and reality was being very seriously considered as more and more ideas came to us. This is when the title and concept for our piece ‘dream reality’ became set in stone.
We began to gather photos, videos and stop motion to use for our final piece but realised quite late on that the piece lacked direction. We knew we wanted to use projections and videos of dreams and sleeping and we also wanted to involve the grid somehow, but aside from that it was very difficult to pinpoint what message the concept of our piece actually wanted to deliver. Danny and Nina began to speak about this. From there the idea to use terrorism and dreams to blur the lines of reality and to immerse the audience. It was decided that to completely involve the audience, we would use a piece of technology that was familiar to our audience; a mobile phone. (As mentioned in another post, an audience member would answer the mobile phone to hear instructions for the interrogation of the piece).
After the performance the piece turned out to be what we hoped it would, and worked better than what we thought it would. As a group we had doubts that our audience wouldn’t understand the piece nor that they would know to answer the phone when it rang. Without this, the piece would have become static as a member of our group would have had to answer the phone ourselves. Fortunately, this was not the case in the final performance. One reason I believe the piece worked so well is that a large percentage of our audience were drama students themselves, and they quite quickly figured out what they needed to do. The feedback we received from our audience was largely positive which informed our group, the expected outcome had been achieved.
There could have been different aspects of the performance had we been allowed a larger budget per group. One major difference, if we were to perform again with more expense allowed would be to make the piece more immersive. To achieve this we would have 4 walls of fabric to be projected on as opposed to just three. This would mean that the performance space would have been more of a cube, we could have 4 different projections on each wall, thus making our audience feel more involved in our piece and blurring the lines of reality even more so than it had been in our actual piece.
Danny’s reflection of the performance
During the early stages of this module, the influences we had took from a varied amount of sources allowed us to explore and develop a number of differing and exciting ways to produce pieces of work. The most fascinating was the stop motion and I’m glad we were able introduce this into our final piece. Focusing more directly on our performance, I feel we created a unique piece of work we all should be extremely delighted with.
What I’m most proud of was the environment we placed our audience members inside. At undergraduate level, I firmly believe this was the most exciting performance I’ve been lucky enough to help produce. Although we were unable to fully immerse our audience into a complete cube we initially wished to do, and we were unable to project images onto all the sides, we still managed to create an initial calm and relaxing feel to the piece through music that induced sleep. This allowed us to make our audience more focused and receptive to the world we wished to place them in that was distant to the space they were initially used to, or were expecting. As well as this, the fabric cube gave us a blank canvas to create a scenario for our audience to imagine the space.
Looking back at our performance, the most disappointing element of our performance was definitely not using the grid above more. The visual shot of both Olivia and Luke above the audience was in my eyes fantastic. Although they were technically occupying a separate space, they were still in the audience. If we were to further develop this production, I feel we would definitely explore the grid more to see what we could do with it.
Another thing that disappointed us was how our planted camera, Dictaphone and laptop logged into Twitter were hardly used by our audience. They seemed to have been lost inside our set, or due to the way we performed, the audience felt that they couldn’t interact with these. If we were to do it again, I feel we should place more camera’s and sound recording equipment around the space so all the audience were able to use these, and remove the laptop from the space.
In addition to these, during our feedback we were also questioned on our use of the script. While this was a way for us to control the performance, the naturalistic feel of the characters is something we should definitely steer away from. If we were to do it again, we would definitely explore how we would create a character in a greater depth.
Moving on, another pleasing element of the piece was the audiences’ willingness to participate with the piece. As I was at the other end of the phone, I previously worried about how the audience member on the other end of the phone would be like. I had concerns that they wouldn’t be willing to co-operate with the instructions we had issued them, or they would have struggled to understand what we asked of them. For this, I was ready for the worst case scenario. Although we were lucky enough for this to not happen, we also had an audience that was full of our drama peers. Reviewing our feedback, if we were to perform this to an audience that didn’t have a background in performing, we would definitely need to rethink how we would approach the audience participation element of the piece. As some people can be quite reluctant to publically speak, our performance could quickly change into an uncomfortable experience for audiences, rather than a thrilling performance we hope they’d enjoy. If were given an audience without a theatrical background, our flowing performance could have self-destructed and lost the ability to immerse our audience into a new world. If we were to redo this in the future, we would most definitely explore in greater detail the work of Gob Squad and Blast Theory, as Olivia has already stated, and look to guide the audience during the piece, rather than making them the main focus within the work.
Nonetheless, the audience who did experience the performance have only given us positive reviews. We began with the hope our performance would give our audience an exciting immersive experience and with the responses we’ve received from our audiences members that have already be discussed above, we feel we have created a piece that has succeeded in its intentions. I am extremely proud to say we created a performance that many of our audience, full of drama students, have previously never experienced before. Therefore, although after reviewing our work we know that there are parts of the piece if were to do again we do completely different, we still managed to produce a piece of work that fully explored multimedia’s and gave our audience an enjoyable experience.
By Danny Roberts
Luke’s reflection of the performance
As soon as we had formed our group, I was impressed at our efficiency at creating ideas and footage to use for our final performance. Our initial concept of dreams had already been founded before the group was initially formed, meaning we had ample time to experiment with different approaches to expand on our initial idea. I had found on a previous module that it was better to experiment with a single concept than it was to experiment with several. Although this sounds prohibitive it allows a focus, and when a group can concentrate on a single element rather than a broader one it means that all ideas and contributions are beneficial and allows progression rather than reverting back to initial stages all over again.
What I am proud of with our group was how all of our initial ideas came to fruition except for some concepts because they were just impractical, such as the cloud idea. I liked how we wanted to use the grid, and we didn’t allow the initial doubts of doing so from stopping us, and we became the first group ever to use the grid as an element in an actual performance. I admired the ambition of our group and i’m glad that it paid off eventually, despite the set backs on our first run through. I felt the use of technology and media was balanced with our live element, using it to aid our performance rather than just using it instead of.
We added a layer of the 3rd dimension for our audience, meaning that they had to look vertically as well as laterally, because of this I felt we really created a space that immersed the audience into a sense of a real dream, after all a dream is prohibited only by the bounds of imagination, and this was what we aimed to achieve. Whether or not we succeeded or not is individual to the spectator.
If I were to alter anything about the performance it would be the use of the grid. I felt that our usage and exploration of the grid was under developed and could have been used far more effectively than it was. The reason for this partially was for technical reasons, we were very privileged to have been allowed access to the grid, but our access was very limited meaning that we had to simplify our exploration of it. We weren’t allowed anything loose, so that meant that we couldn’t incorporate props into the sequence and our actual time on the grid was very limited meaning that we could only rehearse during official sessions that ended in March. Therefore, we couldn’t experiment with different ideas, because there simply wasn’t any way of knowing how it would look until we got access to the grid, and to get access to it required constant supervision by staff and the auditorium had to be empty, as people aren’t usually allowed under the grid, when it’s being used.
I would also have liked to have explored more the use of equipment by the audience mid performance. I felt it was thrown in as more of a gimmick, something for the audience to play with, rather than being a piece of equipment that benefited the performance. A possible reason for this was due to the bystander effect, this is the effect that when people are in a crowd, people are less likely to participate, I feel to overcome this problem we could have added more equipment to allow for nearly all audience members to participate instead of a few, but this still requires delicacy, because we didn’t want the equipment used for the sake of using it, we wanted it to develop our live element, not replace it. This definitely required further attention.
Overall I feel ironically that our multimedia performance was hindered by our access to media. Although Dan later stated that they would provide the media we wanted to the best of their ability if we were to ask for it. Our budget was largely consumed on material for the cube, therefore, all of our videDo and audio footage we gathered was purely down to the fact that we luckily had our own equipment to work with. However, I feel we certainly made the best of the situation that we had been placed. Every single piece of footage was created not ripped, the audio was mixed together by Danny and the script was collaboratively developed from scratch, all of our ideas and concepts became a reality. Of course, there were certain elements that could have been further developed, but when does a process end? I felt proud to be part of this group, and I was proud that this was our final university assessment.
By Luke Talbott
Rosies reflection of the performance
The performance of Reality Dream i felt was a huge success. Despite the some fall backs due to budget and availability of technology i feel we worked to the best of our ability with what we had. The performance ran smoothly which as a relief due to the tech run being so time consuming due to having to having to be on point with everything from lighting, sound,projection etc. This had to be perfect and even have a plan b in case an audience member read out a queue for the technicians which wouldn’t be heard. Run through’s were difficult due to the style of the piece because our main character was the audience members and they lead the story on. Without them we had to due line runs and iron out any area which could lead the audience astray.
I feel that the ideas the group came up with were of quality and room for expansion. When the initial idea came about, ideas were constantly being developed and expanded which lead to new avenues being explored. As a group we didn’t take any knock backs as a problem, but more as a challenge which i admired. I also enjoyed the group thriving to work and improve. The idea of having a cube came with problems due to budgets and space, but this just gave the group more of a reason to work for it. We wanted the enclosed, intimate space with a dream/clinical effect. So by ordering white draping material (courtesy of Lee Sass) we were able to hang the drapes from the balcony and and shine lights through to give a certain mood.
I feel the best part of the performance was the staging, layout and the use of the grid. I thought visually our performance was of high standard. The use of cushions, bean bags and pillows to comfort the audience and put them at ease. The drapes which added a feeling of being blocked away from the actual space they were in and the performance which took place on the grid. Though i feel that the grid part of the performance could of done with more movement or imagination, i felt that it was very effective and looked inspirational, though i appreciate the pain the actors (Luke and Olivia) put themselves under to make that effect worth while.
I was very worried about the audience interaction and relying so heavily on them. I feel that if the audience were not other drama students the performance could of lacked energy and would not of flowed so smoothly. Saying that, i felt that the group were confident enough within this performance that should a problem such as a shy audience member having to participate was too quiet for technicians and other audience members to hear we could improve to ask them to speak louder or reiterate what has been said. This was another reason as to why we decided to use a script, as a way to structure the performance and even structure rehearsals. The script gave us a plan of what we would put within the question card which were enveloped for the audience to ask us. We knew we would be able to give them a strong answer. Without a script the performance would of lacked a ‘back bone’.
I feel very proud to work with such a inspiration, positive and energized group. We were all patient, and caring enough to share ideas and appreciate each other. The performance showed the dedication we had to the module and the amount of time that we put in to perfecting exactly what we wanted the audience to experience as well as ourselves individually. The performance was unique, immersive and built ourselves from the staging to the footage on the projections. I will take from this experience pride and positivity as it was a pleasure to work with my group, research theorists and previous performances and take part in a multimedia performance.