Technology and the Future of Theatre

more than 60 years ago

norbert viner wrote that to be

successful in this new world

either the engineers must become poets

or the poets must become engineers

i’d argue that this was always the case

in theatre

i’m the director of digital development

at the royal shakespeare company

and it’s the first role of its kind

within the organization

and it’s been specifically created to

bring together

artists and technologists poets and

engineers

to imagine the future of theatre it came

from an

interest in the possibilities created by

the profound changes

and new technologies of the internet age

this is the royal shakespeare theatre

the rst

in stratford-upon-avon it’s our home

and every night over a thousand people

come here for a shared experience

with and bear witness to some of the

best storytelling technology there is

the actor but the actor at the heart of

the play has always been supported by

other technologies

the poet and the engineer have never

truly been separated

and my role is a new one but has always

existed in different forms

because candlelight was a technology

electricity was a technology the

printing press was a technology and we

wouldn’t

have or be able to perform shakespeare’s

shakespeare’s plays today without that

technology

technologies of the time brought into

the theater and used as part of the

theatre making toolkit

now as we encounter new technologies we

see the new possibilities

the royal shakespeare theatre i’m

standing on today here

right now is not a photograph it’s a

millimeter accurate scan

captured using cutting-edge lidar

technology

and rendered into a games engine we can

do anything we like with this image

our theater is now not only a 3d space

in real life

but a virtual 3d space too this stage

a smart stage i’m standing on means that

we can connect

and broadcast in 3d space too

scanned in a pandemic now more than ever

we see the desire for connection

liveness togetherness and storytelling

what a virtual 3d space allows us to do

is not only to broadcast but to redefine

how we be together working alongside

each other with all the tools that we

have to make theatre

but back to craft another great quote is

by arthur c

clarke who says any sufficiently

advanced technology is indistinguishable

from magic

and look no further than the tempest

shakespeare’s last and arguably most

magical and innovative play in 2016

it was the 400th anniversary of

shakespeare’s death and in the years

leading up to it our artistic director

greg doran wanted to explore the tempest

through a 21st century lens

and i began my research in the place

where we mainly go for our ideas now

the internet during my search i found

a clip from the consumer electronics

show keynote speech from intel

ceo it was a small two-minute youtube

clip easily findable for those in the

industry

but not no connection with theatre and

watching the clip i saw the promise of a

virtual and physical world come together

using augmented reality

i saw a whole whale on a screen and then

a whale leaving the screen and moving

over people’s heads

in the auditorium it was technology as

magic

the people who were in that auditorium

were trying to touch the whale

above them and gasped in excitement

seeing it transform

and it made me think about all those

people who had heard a voice

on a phone for the first time all those

people who ran

out of the cinema thinking the train was

coming towards them

our relationship with the promise of

magic is completely connected to the

promise of theater

i wanted to see what would happen by

bringing this new technology into our

theater

to create a virtual and real world come

together and shift ourselves from the

idea

of digital as another space

knowing no one at intel i emailed their

customer service website and waited

patiently for a response and two weeks

later i had a reply

with an email back saying let’s talk

from a call came an invitation to

stratford-upon-avon

and from that invitation to a week-long

visit a team of poets

and a team of engineers both innovative

both visionary but talking two different

languages

meeting eating together and finding ways

to imagine together

it was an intel engineer who said do you

know we have enough

processing power to render a character

in real time

and in that moment we didn’t know what

this meant at all

i mean we couldn’t conceive of the

possibilities and we literally

didn’t know what he meant processing

power

rendering these are not words that we

were using in our world

but as he explained we realized that

this was puppetry

the movement of an actor driving a

digital avatar in real time

a new way to represent that most magical

of characters

ariel and a new way to bring to life the

magic of shakespeare’s

imagination

two years later that vision took flight

336 joints in the avatar the equivalent

to recreating

every joint in the human body 200 000

files running simultaneously to bring

the avatar to the audience

50 million times more memory than the

first

flight to space so many tiny challenges

solved through the creativity of two

teams

what we pre what we projected what would

we project onto the avatar

we tried some of the most high-tech and

expensive different solutions

and at the end we used simple technology

of the double layering of a mosquito net

those two worlds coming together made

140 performances

reaching over a hundred thousand

audience members broadcasting to over

500 cinemas

and more importantly a contribution to

the toolkit available for future makers

of cinema theater but more importantly

we had welcomed a new technology that

crossed generations

that brought them together new audiences

came in with the technology

and went away with the shakespeare and

our current audiences came in with the

shakespeare and now with the technology

and that was the start into our worlds

where we were creating with our 21st

century engineers

the coders the programmers developers

riggers

3d modelers motion capture artists

the new communities that we take with us

now and imagine

on this 3d virtual stage

because the embrace of new technologies

and forms has always allowed us to be

more open

and this is the seven ages of man seen

from as you like it

performed for the first time a

volumetrically captured actor

performing the scene with a digitally

engineered set created on your tabletop

because the embrace of new technologies

and forms has allowed us to be more open

to experiment

on different digital platforms and thus

to expand and diversify our thinking

about our audience

and conversely to understand and harness

our potential

it’s shown how theatre is a driving

force and can work alongside those who

are solving problems

to imagine and enable communities to

stay open to the new tools and

technologies that are taking us there

so let’s converge this craft and

connection accelerated by a disruption

of a pandemic we are far faced with a

stark adaptation

and new forms of connection some are

born from necessary functional means

but as theater makers how can we get a

sense of togetherness

when we are apart what if our audiences

could breathe or gesture or the data

from their own movement or mood

many aspects of the nuance of connection

in our real worlds

connect with performances virtually

what if we pushed our technology to

unlock new possibilities of the internet

to expand reach in real time push server

power

to service our connection in real time

and move from puppetry

and character to real-time connected

worlds at scale

this is starting to happen this stage

becomes our stage and our stages connect

to become our world

and the promise of theatre is its

liveness

and being together but what if you could

choose your stage

make home your destination not just as a

sat nav

instruction but as a space for life

performance

we are experimenting with the feedback

loop between the performer and the

audience

and experimenting with virtual

co-presence in how we can breathe

together

and be together and experience together

the uk cultural icon david bowie once

said tomorrow belongs to those who see

it coming

because it shouldn’t just be the

engineer or the industry representative

at the kes keynote

holding the conversation about the

future our future is connected

it’s inclusive and it’s together where

we go

we’ll go with the technology we’ll be

with our poets and our engineers

and our audiences and our communities to

those who can see the technology

differently

and work with the engineers to imagine

and those who are open to explore

our processing powers are more than

faster better

smarter they are magical

you