Here's a bit from us about the TEDxCanberra talk. Questions by David (currently overseas), to Jack and Michael.First of all, here's the video of the talk:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN2N7gqAax0]The full production script from the talk can be downloaded here.David: How did this talk come about?Jack: We had an email by Stephen Collins, the TEDxCanberra organiser, who very kindly offered us a spot on the bill. Not sure who nominated us but very grateful to whoever it was.Michael: We'd also like to thank Dr David Newth and Dr John Finnigan from the CSIRO Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Research for their help in getting us focused in the early stages of scripting.D: What was the approach to producing this work?J: The first thing we looked at was areas where TED talks and our usual work met. We had to be careful to ensure that what we were doing was a performance rather than a talk, and that the focus was on interpretation rather than explanation. None of the research itself is ours - and most of it had to be ludicrously simplified to keep each section down to a minute - so the task was to identify a good progression of simple ideas which led to the conclusion - that ignoring complex systems will basically kill us all. Then we set to thinking about ways we could get creative in communicating those ideas.M: In the future, Boho is looking at presenting more of our work in lecture theatres and conference halls, so part of the aim was to test out as many ideas as possible to see how they worked in that environment. Most of the mechanisms we'd used in some form or another in the past in a theatrical setting, but not in the same way they were employed at TEDxCanberra. We decided that a primer on Game Theory and Complex Systems would be a topic that would suit the TED style, while being a good stand-alone manifesto for the company. In the end, though, we approached it like we usually approach performances. The format, content and interactive styles were all tackled at once to hopefully make the final result for the audience a more concrete experience.D: 18 one-minute talks produce a bit of a grab-bag of ideas and formats. Which of the short talks would you like to be taking forward?M: The types of ideas that would benefit from further development are the ones that engage the audience quickly and intuitively, either non-verbally or through limited on-screen information. The Mexican wave was great for this - it's easy to engage with while allowing the audience to develop a participatory understanding of the concept being presented. One bit that required a little more prompting, but that also could be interesting in the future, was the use of audience members in their seats as a grid, resulting in a model through cellular automata. I'd love to get a top-down view of this going onscreen in the future, and it'd be great to add some more complicated rules into the mix. And then there was the balloons.J: We'd done the balloons sequence previously in True Logic of the Future, but with us throwing the balloons into the crowd, whereas at TEDxCanberra the spread and escalation was entirely audience driven following a feedback model. To be honest it took off quicker than we thought it would - we didn't have three hundred people to playtest with so it was a gamble and we wanted to err on the side of lots and lots of balloons for effect - but between that and the epidemic spreading model there were some really interesting uses of the whole audience as a system, and I want to do more with that in the future. The Mexican wave, funnily enough, was probably the big stress for the performance - we're control freaks when it comes to the bounds in which a show can operate and while we were pretty sure people would be into doing a wave with us, if it hadn't worked there wasn't a lot we could do to force it. But the audience were a very supportive lot, and it did work, so the result was nice and real.M: With larger crowds it's hard to give everyone the interactive experience - you can give one person a controller and they have a great time but everyone else is a spectator, or you can put things to a vote but then nobody gets to make a real decision - so with big crowds I think the focus should be on giving people a view of the micro, by letting them be a small part of the system, and the macro, by letting them watch how the scene as a whole unfolds.J: Besides all that I liked the puppet show, I'm a fan of the ludicrous and it's nice how well it worked as a kind of palette-cleanser mid-show.
D: Which sections did you feel were most effective, and why?J: One of the TED Commandments we were very aware of was not to sell from the stage, but we wanted to give a little introduction to who were were and why we were up there talking complex systems, and that was a contradiction for us. Scene 2 was I think an elegant way of dealing with this - playing some archival footage on screen but putting a controller in an audience member's hand, so the promo reel was an interactive experience, I think that was a neat solution to it.M: It was nice being able to give an intro to our background but with the focus being that 'if we can understand it anyone can', I think that was a good outcome from that section too. And the distributed monologue bit was surprisingly painful to learn and probably broke more often than it worked in rehearsal, but it paid off on the day.D: Why is it important that Complex Systems ideas are more widely understood?M: Policy-makers need to understand the wider impacts of their actions, and the greater public need to be aware of the potential overall gains before discounting policies (and governments) that are on the nose in the short term.J: Where complexity is involved, I think there's a failure to connect the dots when it comes to what is observed versus what that implies. Whether you're talking climate change, disease spread or the preservation of endangered species and ecosystems; people accept that the damage is being done on the local level, but there is a difficult leap in intuition required to appreciate the impact the consequences of that damage at the system level. There are some recurring concepts in complex systems that can be applied to a lot of these situations in a really helpful way - unintended consequences, feedback loops, convergence and divergence - and getting into this mindset is useful when trying to tackle just about any of those wicked-type problems.D: What is the appeal of performing in a lecture theatre rather than traditional space?J: Firstly, there are lots of them to perform in. They're a stripped-back venue, very outcome oriented, and they're all a kind of 'default' space - each is going to have a screen, audio, and not much else, but the stage is close to the audience and everyone has a good view. There's a simplicity there that if you can work with and use to your advantage I think there's a huge depth of effective work you can do. We all saw Version 1.0's The Bougainville Photoplay Project at the Old Fitzroy in 2009 and that was pretty instructive in the power of storytelling as a way of putting the play outside the limitations of the space you're in.M: We want to perform to a larger audience. Frankly, it's getting frustrating spending thousands of hours working on something that - because of the limitations we've worked into the script - only a few people get to see. Bigger crowds is a nice challenge when considering ways that interactivity can enhance a performance. And if this lecture/theatre business works, hopefully there will be chances to tour more extensively with limited requirements in terms of hauling a set around with us.D: Lastly; how can the arts fight for science?M: It must be incredibly frustrating for climate scientists, and others in similarly controversy-plagued fields, to be forever stymied by the rigour required in acknowledging the constraints of their observations, the ever-present grey-area of confidence intervals, while still somehow expressing the gravity and inevitability of the situation they know that we are all facing, but refuse to see. At the same time, the bastards picking over your studies can do whatever the hell they like. As a few artists who aren't quite so vulnerable to being held to ransom on technicalities, we have no such restraints, so we have an opportunity to do what we can to balance the scales by helping to realise these worst-case scenarios onstage.J: We can fight for science by being cool with the idea that it's not our jobs to be an encyclopaedia, and it's not our job to present a balanced view. Artists are supposed to be intuitive and feeling, so they should be encouraged to find things that make them feel strong emotions and try to channel that without worrying about coming across as biased or filtering it through a rational mindset. The instinct to qualify what you're saying is characteristic of scientists, and those sections of the media with any integrity, because they don't want to be proven wrong. But most media outlets have financial interests outside of presenting an even or scientific view, so impartiality isn't on the cards - it's up to the arts to do what it can to balance that out. The arts has always been the best way to communicate the beauty and the terror of science, so we just need to play to people's emotions on topics we feel strongly about. And we do that by yelling as loud as we can.
The Adventure Game
The next in our series of posts exploring different interactive performance styles is the Adventure Game. The name and form is derived from the genre of video games (which peaked in popularity in the late 80s to mid-90s), in which the player takes on the role of a protagonist working their way through an interactive storyline through exploration and puzzle-solving.
Sam & Max Hit the Road. Does it involve wanton destruction? We can only hope. The Adventure Game is a format that is pretty prevalent in our work, since it allows a non-linear exploration of what is fundamentally a linear text. The Adventure Games mindset is really useful when the main concern is for the storyline, rather than having the focus on the variety of options and customisability available to an audience. The focus is on solving puzzles and achieving objectives, so there are crossovers with The Treasure Hunt.The style is suitable for mysteries, or any story where there is an unknown that needs to be discovered, and you can get a lot of text out so it's equally suitable for comedy, drama, horror or whatever style of narrative is needed.The actors on stage play characters (rather than facilitators, or just themselves). The audience is characterised either as a God-like character, or they assume the role of the character who they are piloting about.The nice thing about the adventure game is that audiences can experience what interests them directly. They can ask for information on something and the performance fleshes it out for them. And everything they do is right, because even if it's not forwarding the story the fact that you've written dialogue or action in anticipation of their decision means that they are rewarded for their instincts. An important part of getting people to relax and risk failure is to amplify their input. A flick of the wrist on their part, and a whole sequence unfolds onstage. The people on stage are doing all the work.It's really important to make sure communication to the stage is mediated through a very tightly controlled channel - you probably don't want people yelling out instructions because it breaks suspension of disbelief and there's a good chance it'll be an idea which is incompatible with the scene (punch that guy!). So channelling the input through a controller or system of some sort is the way to go. There's a million ways to do this so it's a matter of programming, budget, style, and so on. Video game controllers are an obvious choice, and we've used playstation controllers without disguising them, as well as hiding wiimotes within small props. A torch was a great facsimile for a cursor. These days you could hack a kinect to pretty awesome effect, I'm sure. We have had controllers break and had to hand out painted arrows to hold up - not great. But really it's anything you can cue an actor with, so it only needs a little bit of data - an x/y is plenty, buttons are a luxury. You could do it with sound, actors could chase a remote controlled car around the set, or you could contrive a mechanism that tilts the whole stage like Marble Madness.The experience is better if the audience can see both what is going on onstage, and the mechanism of control. Depending on the feel of the room, audience members can communicate with one another and work together, or they might be more inclined to do it on their own.A risk is that the person with the controller will be overwhelmed if they can't work out what to do - it's not like in a computer game where it's fine if the player puts down the controller and plays again later - so a healthy system of increasingly obvious hints is good, and an atmosphere where it's okay either to ask for help from other audience members or to pass the controller on to someone else is good to have.My feeling is that Adventure Games are inherently a different form to the Choose Your Own Adventure, which is similar in that characters are led through a story but the focus is on the input of the audience leading the story down one of a number of paths. I think this has such an enormous impact on the way a story is written - the traditional moral arc of crisis, climax, consequences is almost impossible to faithfully apply when you don't know what the ending will be, and the idea of a conclusion that is unpredictable but inevitable goes out the window - a nice discussion on this topic in a gaming context can be found at GamePlayWright. So I differentiate the two, and I'll write about Choose Your Own Adventures separately another time, but I'm also happy to argue the point. Playable DemoAdventure Games can work over a particular scene, or they can form the main structure for an entire production. The first interactive scene we ever wrote, Playable Demo, was a daggy 10 minute adventure game we first staged in 2005. We're fond of this one.
This was a straight adventure game clone, born out of our nostalgic love for early 90s games mainly by LucasArts (and Sierra, I guess), with one audience member using a torchbeam as cursor to click about the stage. Interacting with non-player characters in different ways was achieved through coloured filters (pass the torch through through red filter to interact aggressively and through the blue filter to be more conciliatory, or green to question for additional information). This gave us room for lots of easter eggs to be hidden about the place, and the scene was very simplistic - get two items (a sock through conversation and some pennies by finding the in the space) and combine them to make a third (a bludgeon), then use it to escape from a prison cell (by bludgeoning). The key here was to have a lot of room to explore and to have contingencies worked out in advance for what people would try to make us do - we don't really like to improvise. But it's on the cards - and a good response that acknowledges what the audience member is trying to do is always going to be better appreciated than "I can't interact with that object".What was really fun about this scene was the way that the feel of the interactions changed over the course of the performance from experimental and random, to combinatorial and exhaustive of options, and finally to reasoned, logical behaviour. At first, the torchbeam goes everywhere and the majority of the contingency text comes out, so red herrings were avoided. A good way to imply that a particular choice was the not the one that moves the story forward is to end with a joke - that's the payoff, rather than suggesting they've achieved a milestone in the script. Then once the mechanism was understood and it was clear what components of the scene were important and had interactions that had not happened yet - door, guard, bed, bucket - these items were focused on by using each option sequentially, but without a specific outcome predicted. By the end, the feel of the torch in the space was completely different. It had stopped ambling about, there was no hesitation, it snapped from place to place in a logical series of commands - take sock, get pennies, bash guard, exit. The great thing was, I think, that there was excitement not just in the person controlling the performer, but in the rest of the audience as well - even though they hadn't been controlling the performer they had still been making the logical connections themselves, so those intuitions were still proven correct, and if worse came to worse and the person with the controller really didn't get it, other audience members were always happy to pitch in.You can download the script here, if you like.
Beneath a Steel Sky. Great interactive storytelling from the good and old, set in Australia for some reason, and free to download. It's the mutts nuts.
Climate change in theatre
25 years ago, the conversation around climate change and global warming was beginning to take off in earnest among scientists and policy-makers. Then, in the early 90s, a well-organised campaign driven by the fossil fuel industry began to target the science and scientists behind what had until then been a relatively undisputed scientific phenomenon. Suddenly, the existence and extent of humanity's impact on the earth system became a topic of contention and dispute. A scientific debate became a political debate and the issue has become a divisive issue in popular culture.While there are no shortage of examples of the environment as a subject in theatre, the current climate crisis has generated its own unique array of theatrical responses. Rather than attempt to survey the entirety of a huge and swiftly-growing field, I want to explore the topic of climate change in performance from the perspective of a theatre-maker, looking at some of the challenges and opportunities created by the form and highlighting some specific lessons from plays which I have a personal experience of.Why do people choose to create theatre about climate change? From my own perspective, and through numerous conversations within Boho, I can see compelling arguments for and against choosing to address the topic through performance at all.On the one hand, there are few topics less amenable to theatrical presentation. Theatre thrives on personal tales, narratives of family, domesticity and the like. Climate change is abstract, impersonal, incomprehensibly massive in scale and with hugely diffuse impacts that occur over a timescale of decades. Trying to condense a massive global phenomenon into a show of an hour or less is an intimidating challenge, and it's hard to figure out where you can even find a starting point.On the other hand, there are few topics more engrossing, vital and important for artists in the 21st century. In one weird way, climate change is the story of our generation - you can tell it badly, tell it well or refuse to tell it, but you can't deny its resonance - people used to feel about nuclear war in similar terms. So for many artists, Boho included, it's sometimes worth the risk of diving in and getting it wrong.So how do you apply the narrow focus of theatre to the colossal specimen of climate change?The Landlords - Bringing Some Gum To A Knife Fight
The Melbourne duo of Sam Burns-Warr and Jordan Prosser comprise The Landlords, and their 2011 show Bringing Some Gum To A Knife Fight responded to the challenge of the enormity of the topic by focusing on a very specific and concrete aspect. Their acerbic black comedy took place on the island of Tuvalu, the Pacific nation with the dubious honour of being the lowest country in the world, and consequently the first to be completely submerged in the event of sea-level rise.Bringing Some Gum takes the form of a presentation by two Australian scientists to the Tuvaluans, informing them of their impending doom and assisting them to come to grips with their own extinction. By taking on the role of enlightened western scientists, Jordan and Sam provided a well-observed and devastating satire of Australia's self-interested attitude towards its own welfare. The most brutal moment in the entire piece came with the awkward reminiscence that Australia had rejected Tuvalu's appeal for sanctuary for its small population, as it was not commensurate with Australia's stance of climate denial.
Bringing Some Gum offered neither solutions, nor hope. Instead, it was a measured and all-too-recognisable satire of Australia's current political strategy of ignoring and minimising the issue at all costs. In this way, the theatre can provide the vital and ongoing task of highlighting and lampooning the failings of its society and times. At this stage of the debate, satires such as Bringing Some Gum are an equally if not more effective means of countering the activities of the carbon lobby than engaging with them in formal debate.Tom Doig - Selling Ice to the Remains of the Eskimos
Writer/performer Tom Doig's one-man show Selling Ice to the Remains of the Eskimos offered a vastly different take on the subject, both more ambitious and doomed to fail. More of a series of interconnected sketches and stories than a single play, Selling Ice's battery of high-energy theatrical experiments examine the issue of climate change from a range of perspectives. From Tom's apocalyptic entrance in a wetsuit on a bicycle fleeing from a biblical flood, to a wholly politically incorrect depiction of an Inuit humiliating himself for money, to a Cormac Mcarthy-esque Winnie-the-Pooh story, to a fight with a dolphin staged in a one-man tent; all try and all fail to convey the significance of the crisis.These tricks and wildly varying setpieces are not merely captivating and entertaining to watch - they are a showcase of Tom's extensive exploration into how to express the catastrophe of climate change on the stage. This restless search is made explicit in the show's most moving moment, when Tom stops mid-scene and addresses the audience directly, confessing how afraid and concerned he is about his subject, and how helpless he feels as a performer to convey the full seriousness and impact of the issue.Selling Ice is admittedly, defiantly imperfect, but for me it is a vital addition to the body of work on the topic of climate change. To any theatre-makers interested in the subject, Selling Ice is a laboratory showcase of what works and what doesn't, as well as being an absurd and entertaining performance on its own terms.Third Ring Out
Zoe Svendsen and Simon Daw's Third Ring Out is an interactive module looking at the consequences of climate change at the regional level, taking place in a shipping container with a playing audience of twelve. Developed in 2009 with the support of Tipping Point, Third Ring Out has toured extensively throughout Britain over the last two years. Over one hour, the audience are seated around a table and presented with a simulated series of climate-triggered crises. Starting with rising food prices and escalating to heatwaves and tidal surges, the audience are invited to vote on a series of measures responding to these disasters, managing growing problems with finite resources.Originally growing from research into fallout shelters and training simulations preparing people for nuclear war, Third Ring Out is based on the concept of practice. The audience are presented with the scenario in the guise of a training simulation, and invited to consider what decisions might be necessary or desirable in that situation. In this way, Third Ring Out avoid a lot of the baggage and contention that comes with making predictions or assumptions about the likelihood or consequences of climate change and simply asks, 'If this crisis occurs, what should we do?'Like the creatives behind these three productions, Boho has been drawn to this topic. Both A Prisoner's Dilemma and Food for the Great Hungers touched on issues relating to climate change, and True Logic of the Future specifically constructed a what-if scenario for Australia in a changed climate. In a future post, we will discuss and explore in more detail why we covered this territory with True Logic, and the lessons we learned from it. For the moment, I want to conclude by suggesting that the struggle of theatre artists to effectively grapple with the issue of climate change may be a measure of society's capacity in general to understand and engage with the topic. Perhaps when we see sophisticated, coherent and nuanced theatre about climate change, it will be a sign that our culture is itself properly engaged with the topic.
Good news!
We're super-chuffed to announce that we've been successful in our application for development funding from the 2012 ACT Arts Fund. We'll be undertaking a residency for much of next year at Belconnen Arts Centre to look at ways of building on the stylistic work we did for TEDxCanberra with a new project that will try to fuse narrative theatre and lecture techniques as a way of broadening our audience reach, looking at the subject of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and broader themes of epidemiology and population health. This is a project we're really excited about, you can read more about it here. More info soon - for now, celebration ice-creams all round.
The Usefulness of Failure
Attending the PLAYER Festival of live gaming at the London Science Museum this last weekend, I took part in Seth Kriebel's excellent Unbuilt Room performance, a live text adventure for five players. The game is structured as an 80s-style text adventure (think Zork or Adventure), with the audience taking it in turns to move the protagonist through a maze roughly mapped to the human brain. The game lasts twenty minutes, and after several early fumbles we ran out of time before we solved the last puzzle.
Seth Kriebel's The Unbuilt Room.
In correspondence after the festival, Seth advised that only 20% of playing audiences 'completed' the game. Far from being a frustration or concern, my experience with the Unbuilt Room was that our failure to solve all the puzzles in time was one of the most exciting things about the game. At its simplest level, I am now imagining all kinds of exciting endings to the story, to which the real ending cannot possibly compare. At another level, the Unbuilt Room demonstrates one of the key principles of interactive performance which Boho have discovered/rediscovered through our work: the audience needs to be allowed to fail.
Failure serves a few purposes - firstly, it's a way of demonstrating that the interactivity is real. As an audience, if I go into an interactive work and manage to somehow get everything right first time, I might be convinced that I (and my fellow audience members) am a genius. But I'm probably going to assume that the game is rigged, and not really as interactive as it claims to be.Secondly, failure is the best (possibly only) way to learn. Without the opportunity to make (and correct) mistakes, an audience is only rewarded for playing it safe. Trial and error is an intrinsic part of learning - trial without error is just a rather pallid fantasy.How to build failure in to your games without discouraging your audience is a more delicate exercise, and one with which Boho is continually struggling.
Playable Demo. Image by 'pling.
One method was in our very first interactive game, Playable Demo (which later featured as a module within A Prisoner's Dilemma). Playable Demo was an adventure game which an audience member operated using a torchbeam as an onstage mouse cursor. The aim of the game was to help Prisoner 101 escape from his prison cell by collecting and combining objects, and interacting with his guard. We quickly found when we handed the controller over to the audience that the first thing they wanted to do was direct Prisoner 101 to harm himself (no surprises). And, naturally, we wanted that too. So there were numerous easter eggs built into the game where 101 was bludgeoned by the guard for making mistakes. Our fear was that people would simply toy with the character, rather than trying to solve the puzzles we had devised for them.
Our way around that was not to minimise their chance of failure, just to make the pay-off for failure less and less rewarding. It's as simple as repetition - when Prisoner 101 hit his head on the cell door the first time, it was hilarious. The second time, still very funny. The third and fourth time, producing the same result, less so. The audience quickly learned that they could play the game to lose (the interactivity was 'real', so to speak) but that there was more fun to be had in trying to solve it than in trying to break it.
Jack Lloyd, David Finnigan and Cathy Petocz. Image by 'pling.
One other lesson was to get to grips with the fact that an audience can really, seriously go wrong, and when that happens, you need to let them work it out. In True Logic of the Future, we had a puzzle built around the Logic Piano (a replica of WS Jevons' 19th century early computer construct). In this sequence, two scenes played out simultaneously - one set in a hospital, and one set at the scene of a crime by the city's dam. The audience used the logic piano to separate out the two scenes, filtering the messy sequence into its constituent parts. It basically operated with the same mechanic as Mastermind, but with two potential correct combinations - I'm sure we'll go into more detail with this game in a future post.
Most audiences ran through the sequence between 5 and 8 times before hitting on a correct combination of keys. Some audiences got it within 2 or 3 goes, making the whole thing seem quite easily. During one performance, though, the players ran through the scene 13 times without hitting on the correct combination. As a performer, that's desperate. You can feel the frustration mounting as the audience are trapped in this same section of the play, and the concern of the players as they fear that they might not be able to solve it. And when a sequence of the show that normally runs for 8 minutes runs on to 16, you begin to freak out that the show is going to run hugely over time, and everyone will be upset.But when, on their 14th attempt, the audience got the combination correct and solved the puzzle, the exuberant cheer of the audience was worth all the stress and panic. The excitement they had for solving the puzzle was real and tangible, and carried them (and us) through the rest of the show. Afterwards, that was the scene the audience talked about - that was the memorable moment for them. In a very real sense, that was the reason they'd come - to genuinely interact with play with a live performance that really responded to their choices.How much you let the audience fail, or how much you let their failure influence the show, needs to be dictated by the data you're looking to get out of the scene. In A Prisoner's Dilemma, failure in a scene was used to dictate which of the characters in the main storyline had been tortured, so we were able to make the risk of failure quite genuine. Again, in Food for the Great Hungers, failure in scenes correlated to poor industrial relations and multicultural policies in an alternate Australia. By mapping failure to a broader element of the productions, we were able to build a reward of storyline outcomes into the momentary let-down of not succeeding. On the other hand, the purely narrative sequences in True Logic were set in stone, so failure in interactivity was used as a guiding mechanism - by letting people fail quickly, fail often, and rapidly prototype and test new ideas until something sticks - the Angry Birds model (thanks to Deloitte Digital for this analogy). And, if it's the right story, failure can be total, as with the Unbuilt Room, severing the narrative completely and leaving threads tantalisingly untied - but only if you're sure this is the feeling you're aiming to leave people with.Across all disciplines, failure is not merely an unfortunate outcome of a poor strategy - it's an intrinsic part of any serious enterprise. People use failure to adjust and recalibrate their strategies for dealing with the world. And in a live gaming / interactive theatre context, failure can be the most fun part of the experience. Don't underestimate the joy of making a live performer hit their head repeatedly against a wall for your entertainment.
(And sometimes you invent a scene entirely so the audience can fly the performers around stage like an old console game) Flying Dudes. Image by 'pling.