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