Designing the emergent theatre: developing emergent narratives between audience and performers

Abstract

In this practice-based research project, a piece of software called the Emergent Data Generation Engine (EDGE) has been developed to help create narratives that emerge from a multifaceted relationship between audiences, performers, and the EDGE’s emergent data generation mechanisms. The term emergent data generation is introduced and defined as the process of emergently generating data for changing stage equipment configurations. This data should be created within a digital environment via digital agents to visualise identifiable causal relationships between digital technology and the stage equipment and should be useful for improvisational theatre performers and accessible to audience members. This qualitative study explores the integration of interactive emergent narrative elements such as simulation, curation, and participatory and/or authorial interactivity into live narrative-driven performance. In technology-enhanced performance, audience agency is often curtailed by the devices that mediate their interactivity. This allows audiences an easy way to understand their potential actions and influence over performance but limits these actions to pre-designed interaction models and a set of actions defined pre-runtime, restricting the performer’s ability to respond and interpret audience interactivity. The resulting performances rely heavily on pre-authoring and/or narrow improvisational potential, limiting the audience's and performers' interactivity.

The EDGE acts as a mediation tool between the audience and performers, creating data that is used for controlling MIDI and DMX-enabled stage equipment such as lighting, projectors, and smoke machines. The resulting stage changes are interpreted by the performers and audience and used for their narrative generation processes. The EDGE can be dynamically set up at runtime by the performers, and the EDGE’s data creation mechanisms can be accessed and manipulated by the audience using electronic equipment such as phones, smartwatches, and VR headsets. The project examines how performers and audience members can dynamically develop/negotiate the narrative meaning of stage equipment changes and select subsequent actions, facilitated by the emergent data generation mechanisms of the EDGE.

Date of Award	24 Oct 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Stephen Gibson (Supervisor), Paul Goodfellow (Supervisor) & Lars Holmquist (Supervisor)