Something is wrong.In the last few months, a new disease has emerged that is transmitted not by water, by air, by contact – but by speech. Language. Via text messaging and email, telephone or video.This disease attacks thought itself, undermining our ability to think critically and resist other people's influence. This is an epidemic of harmful ideas and broken logic. And it’s spreading. Whole communities of people, highly contagious, wandering about, unable to talk, unable to take care of themselves, looking for things to believe in.In a few short months, the epidemic has hit a critical mass and gone global. The population of entire countries have been infected and gone under, and all international communications have collapsed entirely. In Australia, the last remaining survivors have been quarantined in bunkers, isolated from any potentially infected communications from the world outside.Now, as food and medical supplies are running short, a group of scientists from a medical research laboratory are about to embark on a last-ditch attempt to release a cure. Boho invites you join us as we open channels to the last functioning research centre in Australia for a lecture that will turn the tide of this epidemic.Don’t believe everything you hear.
Boho's new show Word Play is performed on-screen from across the city. The audience are situated in the CSIRO Discovery Centre lecture theatre, while the performers are live-streamed from a laboratory across the city using a high-speed video broadband connection.Using text messages and a purpose-built phone app, the audience are able to interact directly with the performance, communicating with the performers and controlling them through a series of live computer game sequences.Word Play is a performance lecture exploring concepts from epidemiology, a live cinema experience and a hands-on video game in the survival horror genre.Bring your phone.
Since forming in 2006, Boho's Michael Bailey, Jack Lloyd and David Finnigan have presented interactive cross-artform performances to festivals, theatres, science conferences and schools including the Brisbane Under The Radar Festival, the Asia-Pacific Complex Systems Conference, the Adelaide Fringe Festival, the Manning Clark House Centre for Scholarly & Cultural Research, TEDxCanberra, CSIRO’s Lecture series and the Street Theatre’s Independent Season.Boho's recent works include True Logic of the Future (2010), a science fiction 'parable for the Anthropocene' exploring the challenges facing Australia in the 21st century from the forces of climate and global change, and Food for the Great Hungers (2009), an interactive re-imagining of Australian history since 1901.Word Play combines Boho's unique style of interactive theatre with the world of film. For this project, Boho have welcomed on board director Marisa Martin, a film-maker and head of the Lights! Canberra! Action! film festival. Marisa says of the play, ' a filmmaker, the use of cameras in the production really appeals to me and throwing in interactivity makes for an exciting storytelling environment I've not been able to explore before. It should make for a highly engaging experience for the audience.'Word Play features performers Raoul Craemer, Cathy Petocz and Euan Bowen.
Created in residence at the CSIRO, Boho's new work looks at the behaviour of epidemics, focusing on an ominous trend in medical research over recent decades.As a result of widespread use of antibiotics, almost every type of harmful bacteria has become stronger and less responsive to treatment. Antibiotics that were once reserved as drugs of last resort are now routinely deployed, and the microbes are now overcoming even these final defences.Old scourges such as Tuberculosis are returning, completely immune to remedy. Meanwhile, new and appallingly lethal diseases such as Hendra, SARS and Ebola are increasingly brought into contact with people through evolving networks of human behaviour – urbanisation, agriculture and travel. The results are impossible to predict.Boho's research into this area included a visit to the Australian Animal Health Laboratories near Geelong, Victoria, where we were lucky enough to be taken to Biosecurity Level 3, and visit the room where the samples of Ebola, Hendra, Nipah and SARS were kept. Read more here.
Where: CSIRO Discovery Centre, Clunies Ross street, ActonWhen: 7:30pm Wednesday - Saturday 15-18 May, 22-25 May, 29 May-1 JuneTickets: $20 - buy tickets here.Images by Rohan Thomson.This is a Centenary of Canberra project, proudly supported by the ACT Government & CSIRO.
Showing of New Work by Boho Interactive
We are very excited to invite you to a work in progress showing by Boho Interactive, on Saturday 27th October at 12:00pm, at the CSIRO Discovery Centre Theatre in Acton.
Following several months of intensive research and script development, including visiting the Australian Animal Health Laboratories in Geelong, we are presenting a development showing of our project based on concepts from epidemiology, microbiology and antibiotic development.Conceptually Transmissible Aphasia: Current understandings of pathogenesis and modern methods of control is a performance in the style of a scientific lecture with videoconferencing, that looks at the emergence of a novel disease agent. At this showing we will present a small suite of ideas that we are hoping to get your input on. This showing is the culmination of research and development work that has been undertaken with the support of an ACT Arts Fund Project grant for 2012, CSIRO and Centenary of Canberra.Following the showing there will be a Q&A session, where we would very much appreciate your feedback to assist in the ongoing development of the work. Refreshments will be provided and we will be happy to have a chat with you in person at the end of the Q&A.
In coming months, we will be heading back into script development to prepare for the presentation of the work in its full iteration as part of the Centenary of Canberra program in May 2013, once again generously supported by the ACT Government and CSIRO. You can see our program listing here. RSVPs are appreciated, to info@bohointeractive.com or through the Facebook event. We hope you are able to attend and help us shape the future of this work.About the project
About the projectAs a result of widespread use of antibiotics below effective levels, every type of harmful bacteria has become stronger and less responsive to treatment. Antibiotics that were once reserved as drugs of last resort are now being routinely used, and bacteria are now showing resistance to these medicines. Meanwhile, dormant animal reservoirs of novel diseases such as Hendra, SARS and Ebola are increasingly brought into contact with people through evolving networks of human behaviour - agriculture, travel and urbanisation.
We use systems of antibiotic resistance and pathogen emergence as a jumping off point to apply to other resistances – our inherent ability to resist external social and cultural influences. We consider the potential ramifications of epidemic failure of critical thinking and an unstoppable spread of harmful ideas and broken logic. For instance, were a disease to emerge that was transmitted person-to-person via text messaging, email, telephone or video, what steps of biocontainment could be taken to identify the pathogen, halt its spread and develop a cure?The format of the showing draws on conventions of scientific lecture. This repurposing of an existing presentation style for narrative theatre offers the potential for a hyper-real experience wherein a seemingly mundane and credible presentation is contrasted with a surreal and highly speculative scenario.The showing employs elements of theatre, film and video gaming. The performance will be viewed by audiences in the CSIRO Discovery Centre lecture theatre, with one character in the theatre and one in a second venue, elsewhere within the CSIRO Black Mountain facility. For part of the showing, this second performer is visible on a large screen in the theatre via high bandwidth videoconference. The audience interact in real time with the other stage using mediated communications channels. The audience as individuals and as a group solves a series of puzzles within the narrative to resolve an immediate crisis.
With the advent of accessible, high quality live video transfer, new methods of performance interaction have become possible. Given the pace of the National Broadband Network rollout, these techniques are likely to be ubiquitous within the next three years. The use of lecture theatre spaces opens up a vast new resource of readily available, high capacity, low cost venues which are otherwise underutilised for creative works.Videoconference is essentially scale-free, offering the potential to tour nationally or internationally with minimal cost, with the performance set, cast and crew remaining in place in Canberra and performers travelling with nominal technical equipment to venues with appropriate broadband capacity. Future implications of this or similar work include the presentation of the work to multiple theatres simultaneously, vastly increasing our potential reach, and it would be a trivial step to simulcast performances to desktop computers anywhere in the world.The development of this showing is supported by the ACT Government through the ACT Arts Fund 2012 project funding. The upcoming major performance season in 2013 is supported by the ACT Government through the ACT Arts Fund 2012 project funding.This is a Centenary of Canberra project, proudly supported by the ACT Government.
Art and science: the fistfight that's been brewing for a while
Food for the Great Hungers. image by 'pling
So recently, David was interviewed by Artshub's Erin Bradshaw regarding the intersection between arts and science in Boho's practice. The resulting article has just been published, including some interesting discussion about scientist-artists throughout history. For the sake of an interesting discussion, we've posted the full interview below.ERIN: As part of your group, are you guys finding people are surprised at the combination of art and science?DAVID: Hmm. Not exactly, but there are a set of perceptions which aren't very useful that come with the territory. We're a long way from being an educational theatre troupe - our process is to go in to meet with research scientists, read everything we can on the topic we're investigating, and continue to work with scientists as consultants the whole way through. The result is that the science bleeds through in all aspects of the work, but we don't have an educational message or a required set of concepts that we expect audiences to understand at the end of it.The most common misconception that we've had to counter is audiences assuming that the work will be too academic or difficult to comprehend for them. In reality, if anything in the show is unclear or confusing, that's our fault and not the audience's. Unlike educational performances or lectures, our plays can be as tangled, messy and conflicting as real life - but then the science we're dealing wth is frequently tangled, messy and conflicting as well. That's part of the excitement of it. I guess anything really worth exploring, through art or science, is going to be tangled.Usually the people most surprised at the combination of art and science is us. When we started doing this work back in 2006, we kept looking around for other artists doing similar stuff - we weren't really interested in reinventing the wheel. And there are lots of other arts-science makers out there, but they're all so different and using such different approaches. Artists and groups we've worked alongside - like the Masters of Space and Time, Tom Doig, the Landlords, Owen Collins - all have wildly different methods and results.ERIN: Your tagline is “we fight dirty for science”- how did that come about? Do you think the arts can make scientific concepts and issues emotional/matter to audiences?DAVID: I don't know! But man it's got to be worth a try.Putting aside any questions of climate change and etc, the world population is increasing by 150,000 per day, which is a new Canberra every two days. The world is changing really, really fast, and science has provided some of the best tools to understand and get to grips with those changes. Sciences such as complexity theory, game theory and network theory have enabled the creation of predictive models of our world. These models can function something like flight simulators for governments and policy-makers - you can use them to test out ideas virtually before trying them in the real world.For instance, rather than just dump thousands of tons of fertiliser on an area of farmland or dam a river system, you can use a model to test out what some of the effects and impacts might be. Governments worldwide are using these tools to help them plan and respond to situations.For us, the theatre work we do exists as another kind of simulation - they're what-if scenarios that we can look at and consider. Our show Food For The Great Hungers was a series of interactive scenarios leading to the creation of an alternative Australia. The audience made decisions throughout the show that resulted in a counterfactual history of the 20th century. What would have happened if Australia hadn't fought in the world war one and experienced Gallipoli? What would have happened if we'd abandoned the White Australia policy in 1930 or 1990, rather than 1970? And the point of that show was to ask: what are the major turning points in our history? And where are the cracks where we can insert a wedge to change the future to one that we want?These concepts aren't hard to grasp - if they were, we wouldn't have a chance, because we're all interested laymen rather than qualified scientists. Rather than make these issues emotional or matter to audiences, I guess we're just trying to say: they're right here. Let's talk about them.ERIN: What has been some feedback from your audiences about your work?DAVID: The response to the TEDx talk that Jack and Mick gave last year was pretty incredible - that was exciting.
TEDx Canberra - image by Gavin Tapp
Perhaps most interesting was the response to True Logic of the Future. That was a work we created in 2010 at the Belconnen Arts Centre thanks to a commission from the Powerhouse Museum and National Science Week. It took place in a hypothetical future Australia where the issues of climate and global change had continued to be volleyed back and forth between the two political parties, until a series of consequences had impacted on the country more or less simultaneously. The central question of the show was: are there situations in which we might willingly surrender our freedom to a totalitarian dictator?
The audience response to the work was really divided, and often very heated. Some people agreed that we might reach a point where a dictator would be a more effective ruler than a two-party democracy. Other people said that we should never surrender our freedom, ever. Some people were adamant that the situation would never reach the point we depicted, while other people felt it likely that it would. It was a really fascinating debate, and one which we had no firm opinions on ourselves, so we were able to take part in it as much as anyone else.
True Logic of the Future - image by 'pling.
ERIN: How has the scientific community reacted? Have you been accepted/praised? Or have they accused you of “sugar coating” their work?DAVID: One of our earliest and most fun gigs was performing A Prisoner's Dilemma at the Asia-Pacific Complex Systems Science Conference at the Gold Coast in 2007, to an international audience of practicing scientists. It was great, because they're not used to seeing their work reflected as theatre or performance, so they were quite passionate about it. Our work is interactive, and that show involved audience members using modied gaming controllers to direct performers through scenarios. Along with college students, scientists are easily the most competitive audience we've ever had for that work - which was a lot of fun.Boho's next show is exploring issues of epidemiology and disease spread, so we recently went on a research trip to the Australian Animal Health Laboratories in Geelong. We had two days of touring through the facilities, meeting all kinds of different scientists and even suiting up in Biohazard suits and going through the airlock into the virus containment facility. (We got closer to Ebola, SARS, Hendra and Nipah viruses than I ever anticipated getting.) It was an incredible experience, and it continually amazes me how generous people are with their time if you're genuinely interested in the work they're doing.ERIN: You recently won a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust award to go overseas studying- where are you going and what do you want to achieve when you’re over there?DAVID: I'm going to visit a whole raft of institutions that link together artists with scientists in the UK, the USA, Canada and Japan. I'm most excited about visiting the Resilience Centre in Stockholm - the Resilience Alliance has been a really exciting new hub of ideas over the last few years, and they've been extremely foresighted in how they've connected with artists. The study of Resilience - how systems respond and cope with change and stress - has offered some fascinating insights into all kinds of different areas, including into how Australia can manage things like the Murray-Darling River Basin. So I'm going to go get my head into all of that.The end goal, of course, is to come back to Australia and try to formulate opportunities for more artists to do work like this. We'd love to see other artists connecting with the sciences in this way. Organisations such as Tipping Point Australia have done a great job raising awareness of some of these issues among Australian artists, but there's room for so many more theatre and performance works to grapple with these ideas. And the more artists are out there doing it, the more chance there is of someone making something truly memorable.ERIN: Do you think art will find a bigger place in the scientific community in the future?DAVID: Yes, absolutely. As the climate debate has dampened down post-Copenhagen, and it's largely vanished from public discourse even while the issue is rapidly worsening, there's a sense that the climate deniers and the carbon lobby has won, at least for the moment. There's been a realisation that facts, no matter how clear and how substantial, are not what is needed to shift public opinion. People don't take their opinions from facts, they choose facts to support their opinions. That seems obvious now, but I think 15 or 20 years ago most scientists believed that all it would take was clearly explained evidence to convince and activate the public. Instead, facts have been countered by spin, and what can you do with that? Scientists are in the business of uncovering and making sense of facts. Even though many scientists have been forced through necessity to be very sophisticated public-relations experts over the last two decades, they aren't inherently spin doctors.Artists, on the other hand… On one level, art is spin. Artists tell stories, they make things felt, they can make things tangible and immediate in a way that a graph or a table can't. So it's my feeling that in the future, scientists will be increasingly using artists as an alternative interface to engage with the public.(this is kind of an answer to where the 'we fight dirty for science' tagline came from as well)Boho's currently working on two projects. The first is a new show about epidemiology, network theory and disease spread, which will premiere next year in Canberra as part of the Australian Theatre Forum and the Centenary of Canberra. The second is a live game about systems modelling, which will be developed later this year in the UK at the Environment Institute of University College London, in collaboration with Sydney ensemble Applespiel and UK company Coney.
This room contains: Ebola | Hendra | Nipah | SARS
The CSIRO Australian Animal Health Laboratories (AAHL) is a world-class biological research, diagnosis, surveillance and response institution situated on the outskirts of Geelong, Victoria. As part of our research into themes of epidemiology and disease as part of our upcoming 2013 production at the CSIRO Discovery Centre, we visited AAHL and met with some of their most experienced staff over two days. AAHL works on a broad palette of animal health issues, ranging from those with potentially catastrophic economic impact, such as possible foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in livestock, to issues whose impact predominantly concerns human health, including their high-profile discovery of and research into the Hendra virus. In the case of an outbreak, AAHL has the capacity to screen ten thousand samples per day, and offers laboratory space that operates at the highest level of biosecurity possible in order to work with pathogens of appalling lethality.
We visited AAHL as research for our upcoming production, which will explore the consequences of a fictional disease outbreak. We predominantly focused on the emergence of novel diseases from animals, and the response from an organisation such as AAHL in case of an outbreak to isolate, characterise and neutralise the threat. We also wanted to know what sort of interagency cooperation would be needed to coordinate an effective response.
Foot-and-mouth containment and the pigeon-fancier problemDr Sam McCullough, Diagnostics Services Manager "If foot-and-mouth disease comes in, it's a big problem. If it comes in we could not export."Foot and Mouth Disease is the most critical and plausible situation that the AAHL is designed to respond to. A scenario similar to the UK's outbreak in 2001 would be a massive blow to Australia's livestock trade, which would then majorly impact on the entire economy. AAHL have a massive capacity to deal with this issue. As soon as a report of potential FMD comes in, virtually all the building's resources and staff can be swiftly dedicated to coordinating a response.Sam's role also includes recommending appropriate responses to different outbreaks. One issue that occurred in the last several years was an outbreak of Pigeon Paramyxovirus in Victoria. Pigeon Paramyxovirus initially appeared in fancy pigeons which people keep in their backyards and lofts, not for eating or flying, but for their looks. According to Sam, "the birds are red and have feathered legs and apparently look quite pretty." The issue with this outbreak was that unlike farm animals and livestock, the owners of fancy pigeons are usually city-dwellers who don't make their livelihood through their birds. This means that they don't traditionally have a relationship with AAHL, which makes it harder to provide recommendations.This is an example of one of the key issues with containment - the number and variety of different groups who must work together and in coordination in order to contain and respond to an outbreak. To prevent the spread to wild pigeon populations and subsequently farmed animals, the action in this case was to quarantine to prevent any movement of show pigeons, which minimised contacts between groups but led to greater die-off within infected coops. Somehow, the disease did manage to jump to wild birds, and so management of the relationship with the pigeon fanciers became quite difficult - the disease was already out there, so what was the point of maintaining the quarantine? Put together, Pre-border, Border and Post-border surveillance gives us a realistic overview of the risk vectors and can help frame an appropriate and fluid response to situations like these.Foot-and-mouth as a bioterrorist act Dr Peter Daniels, Leader Diagnosis, Surveillance and Response Group"Worst case scenario would be an act of bio-terrorism using foot-and-mouth disease, multiple outbreaks around the country, different strains of the disease."We asked every scientist we spoke with in AAHL for their 'nightmare scenario', their worst-case vision for an outbreak in Australia. Dr Peter Daniels described a deliberate series of deliberate FMD infections, targeting cattle at different locations around the country with different strains of the disease. This would entail a massive hit to Australia's economy and be the hardest kind of outbreak for any authority to respond to. However, this kind of action appears not to align with the methods and intentions of most terrorist groups - causing damage to infrastructure and hurting people - which is good news for us.A more mundane but common concern is people evading quarantine to smuggle animals in and out of the country. Peter told us a story about a man who'd smuggled in ten green pythons stuffed down his pants, taped to his belt. One of them died mysteriously, and on investigating this, AAHL isolated a new virus which targets snakes. This virus is now known in-house as the Trouser Snake Virus.That's Ebola, BabyDr Alex Hyatt, Head, AAHL Biosecurity Microscopy Facility"For each disease there’s an image, a eureka moment – it’s like being in a darkened room and you see what is the cause of this major disease – major in that it has economic, environmental health impact, and everyone – politicians, trade, newspapers are demanding to know what’s going on – you’re the only one to see it – alone in a darkened room. You feel pretty good – briefly – then it’s back to reality."Dr Alex Hyatt told us about the role of electron microscopy. When an infected sample taken from some sick animal is sent in to the AAHL, one of the key things to take place is that Alex and his cohorts will example those slides under the microscope. There's no computer substitute for the human eye when it comes to identifying the tell-tale shapes of specific viruses. Ebola, apparently, is shaped like a shepherd's crook. Another description I've heard is that you'll see a slide full of what look like little question marks, like they're asking - "What are you going to do now?"
When we dropped by, Alex was examining a sample taken from one of the four white rhinos to recently fall ill and die at Dubbo Southern Plains Zoo. At this stage, there is no clear answer to the question of what killed them, though the three surviving rhinos are apparently doing okay.I reckon probably don’t Bomb the Bats Dr Linfa Wang, CSIRO CEO Science Leader/Senior Principle Research Scientist"Maybe there’s a symbiotic relationship between the bats and the viruses"
We were fortunate to get to chat with Dr Linfa Wang, whose study into bat viruses has had some fascinating results. When a new virus broke out in a suburb of Brisbane in 1994, killing a number of horses and several humans, Dr Wang was the person who discovered that it was a virus which had originated in bats, and gave it the name of Hendra, after the suburb of its origin. Examining the source of Hendra, Dr Wang and his colleagues discovered that bats are major reservoirs of viruses.AAHL's research into bat viruses, which also included investigation of the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia, meant that when SARS erupted in 2001, they were able to advise authorities in affected areas to begin testing bats. Recently, Dr Wang's team have demonstrated that SARS is a bat coronavirus - from the same family as one of the most common cold viruses - most likely transmitted to humans from bats, via civets."People wanted to take bat-related matters into their own hands, with guns. But it’s almost certain that particular stress factors are responsible for causing virus levels to go up."With the news that farmers will receive permits to shoot at bat populations, and in light of the Courier Mail's famous newspaper heading in response to Hendra 'BOMB THE BATS', Dr Wang told us about a range of poorly thought out system-wide responses like colony moving. Many of these have had unintended consequences. With the recent spate of Hendra cases in 2011, there is the possibility that human responses to bats have in fact exacerbated the issue. Veterinary perspective and the role of the communityDr Deborah Middleton, Senior Veterinary Pathologist"The virologist thinks the virus causes disease, I think the host causes the disease."We also talked to Dr Middleton about bats, and she filled us in more about the utterly terrifying symbiosis bats have with their viruses. Numerous viruses have been isolated from bats which are violently pathogenic to humans but which are completely asymptomatic in bats. In fact, bats are so riddled with viruses in their natural state that there may be some symbiotic relationship at work. Bats have existed in close to their present form for fifty-plus million years, which is easily long enough for co-dependence to emerge. To test whether bats somehow need these viruses as part of their biological function, AAHL has bred a Specifically Pathogen Free (SPF) colony of virus-free bats for observation. As an aside, among the few viruses which produce symptoms in bats are lyssaviruses, such as rabies, which infect nerves directly and may bypass the bats' innate resistance.Dr Middleton had a great deal of insight into the human element in instances of animal disease, and the importance of communication when companion animals are involved. In the recent Hendra outbreaks, besides the fact that there were a higher than usual number of separate cases, the most unusual element was the infection of a domestic dog. Although dogs appear not to show symptoms of Hendra, it is believed that they could spread the disease to humans they came into contact with, so the normal response in such an instance is euthanasia of the animal. This sparked an unexpected level of public interest - "the dog had its own Facebook page - Save Dusty the Dog. People were saying 'Hide from the Government, Dusty.'"The big pictureDr Martyn Jeggo, AAHL Director"If you come together to tackle the issue you're more likely to get a solution."AAHL director Dr Martyn Jeggo gave us an inspiring introduction to the idea of the One Health approach, in which human medical practitioners, animal health practitioners and environmental scientists come together to work on a holistic response to health crises. The idea is that the health of an organism - whether a human, animal or an entire ecosystem - depends on the interactions between these elements."Viruses don't respect borders."Martyn described an example of this holistic approach to combating disease: the eradication of rinderpest. Rinderpest is a cattle plague, and one of the most virulent and destructive livestock diseases in history. In the 1950s, a vaccine for rinderpest was developed, and an international effort was undertaken to eradicate the disease completely. Dr Jeggo was part of this effort, and received a UN medal for his part in the project. Rinderpest was finally declared extinct in 2011, only the second disease in history (after smallpox) to be intentionally wiped out.Martyn also talked to us about the institution's preparations for an outbreak of FMD. In the UK, there is a facility which contains FMD vaccine in storage. Australia owns 285,000 doses stored in a liquid nitrogen vat with the Australian flag on it.Going secureThe afternoon of the second day, we went secure, which means nuding up, walking through an airlocked shower cubicle, and collecting sterile clothing and shoes on the other side. Here's a model of the facility:
AAHL is a fortress spread over several levels, with a working level in the middle, plantroom levels above and below, and the whole thing encased in an impermeable concrete shell. Whole floors are devoted to waste management and air filtration.
Similar facilities designed around the time of AAHLs construction may use ten to twenty world-class HEPA filters throughout the building. AAHL uses more than a thousand, with every individual airspace filtered and controllable individually (down to each shower cubicle).
Nothing comes out of the bunker's secure area without decontamination - waste materials are separated according to their threat level and thoroughly roasted in these drums.
During our tour a new suite of labs was being prepared to be used for the first time, which entails decontaminating the rooms completely by burning a whole lot of formaldehyde in special woks (on the desk connected to the orange cable at the far end in this image)
At the end of the secure area tour, every bit of clothing we were wearing went into laundry baskets. Passing back through the shower cubicles is impossible without showering for a minimum of three minutes. There's a selection of shampoos and a helpful picture which reminds you which door goes to the lab and which goes to the outside world.Then it was goodbyes and back in the cab to Tullamarine, which was expensive.
We'd like to extend our thanks to the scientists who each took an hour out of their days to help us understand the intricacies of the work that they do.We'd also like to thank Emma Wilkins at AAHL for coordinating the visit and somehow convincing the staff to be so incredibly generous with their time, and Cris Kennedy from CSIRO Discovery for getting the trip off the ground. You guys are tops.
Choose Your Own Adventure
'Choose Your Own Adventure' is the name we use when referring to the style of performance whereby, as in the legendary book series of that title, the audience is able to navigate through a story by making a series of consecutive decisions that determine which of a pre-determined set of endings takes place. This works through a series of storyline nodes, operating like non-interactive cutscenes, with two or more options branching from each one - the graph below from FlowingData shows a typical structure.
CYOA techniques in theatre work much the same way - actors perform segments of non-interactive script, interspersed with opportunities for the audience to select one from a number of clearly delineated options.
The main benefit of this style of theatre is that the audience is hyper-empowered - what they say goes, they can identify which story elements interest them the most personally, they can explore the morality of their own decisions, and generally tailor their own unique experience. Stories can have huge variations in potential outcomes. Decisions can be made by individuals who are singled out, or (I think more commonly) some kind of voting mechanism can be employed, such as in the case of Emergence by Synarcade, or Trouble on Planet Earth, Escape from Peligro Island and Half-Real by The Border Project. Finding a decision mechanism which doesn't unnecessarily hold up the flow of the show is obviously important - both of these companies have produced devices which generate colours and are distributed to audience members, which is a neat way of focusing the response through set channels while being nice and tech-y. This focus is crucial - options have to be clear and limited to the available choices since there may not be any room for improvisation.
A big plus with CYOA is that audience size can be very large and still have every viewer - this is limited only by the voting mechanism. On the other hand, after a certain point, the actual impact of each individual audience member is essentially zero, and I think this can become obvious and lead to alienation. That said, there's also the fun for a viewer of seeing areas where their instincts conform or differ from those of everyone else.
Choice paths are generally unidirectional so where decisions change the story, this narrative path carries out throughout the remainder of the show. Potential paths for an audience increase exponentially as the show progresses, so even with recycling of sections (as shown in the loops and multiple paths to the same node in the diagram above), there's a huge amount of scripting and rehearsal for sections that the audience will never see.
I must admit I often have issues with using this type of theatre from a scripting standpoint. For my money, an ending must be justified by the story, so a situation whereby the trajectory of a narrative lurches off track due to the intervention of an audience is likely to result in a story that would have been unsatisfying had it been a non-interactive work. It's a challenge to ascribe a meaningful moral arc to a story whose ending isn't inevitable. So it might be more rewarding to use CYOA techniques to allow an audience to change how they approach a story, rather than the content of the story itself. One of the things about Choose Your Own Adventure novels that I find satisfying is working backwards through the book and contrasting the various possible outcomes, so replicating this on stage presents opportunities.
We've also found that audiences can tend towards a median outcome - an extreme event that is caused by one vote will tend to be cancelled by a conservative or opposite one soon after - people want to see a bit of every possibility rather than commit to one course. And even if there's a good deal of audience cooperation with one another, the fact is that if you write ten endings, odds are that on a given night, an audience is going to wind up seeing one of the middling ones, quality-wise.
It's fun I think to have the option of failure for the audience involved in a CYOA, so that certain options are available only if they succeed in tasks, time-based games - we talk about failure and reward in a separate post.
If there are more than two options on a given choice, there's a chance that more than half of your audience at each point will see a result they didn't vote for - unless you get into some kind of preferential voting system, I guess. Another way to deal with that issue might be segregation of audience based on their decisions (somehow) so that each group has the experience they asked for - this subdivision could be interesting if the segments were then required to competitively or cooperatively complete a task at the conclusion of the performance.
Boho have used CYOA techniques a couple of times, particularly during Food For The Great Hungers, where it formed the show's conclusion and detailed an alternate history of 20th Century Australia. We didn't want to suggest that history was something where conscious choices were made in advance, so we extracted the 'decisions' from the behaviour of the audience during previous scenes, which were then mapped to social factors. A conscious vote on whether conscription could ever be morally acceptable became war willingness, an unconscious vote on tea preference became multiculturalism, a competition between unionists and factory owners became industrial relations, a cooperative challenge based on communication became media adoption, and a series of totally arbitrary moral choices based on emotional bias became political outcomes. These decisions having been made in advance, the 'adventure' through history was presented as a monologue (performed by two actors). A sample generated monologue can be found here. This was fun to do because the voting mechanisms weren't announced in advance, so the generated story was a surprise. Still, there was still a bit of an 'Okay, so that's what happened' feel, and once the history mapped on all factors to a middling path extremely close to what actually happened, which was confusing.
CYOA theatre is a fun format. The audience enjoy a lot of control and the link between their action and the outcome is strong, and it's a good overarching structure which can accommodate a lot of additional styles or kinds of story. The audience have a chance to view a performance like they might a sculpture, coming at it from different angles and seeing it in different lights. The trick is making sure that the format doesn't become the focus of the experience at the expense of the story.