Friday, November 19, 2021
Examining Digital Collaboration in Theatre Production Processes
AMT Lab @ CMU: Theatre is known for being a highly collaborative art form. As in most generative processes, the product that an audience perceives is just the tip of the iceberg of actual work conducted throughout the process. Theatre, at least pre-pandemic, was also an art form that was customarily shaped by in-person ideation and collaboration (Gillet/Sheehan).
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I know that this article used a standard description of theatre hierarchies in how it began to talk a bit about collaboration in the industry but one thing that I really enjoy about the individual places that I end up doing work is the small quirks in how their systems are arranged. Responsibilities are usually distributed a bit differently in each place and especially, as I think back to my highschool, since we were all there for up to 6 full years and worked with the same people for a good portion of that time those roles became defined and personally constructed, and sometimes had trouble being filled when the person who had designed and arranged a role for themselves in a crew or the greater structure left because of interests and abilities and working style. I would often watch those structures shift every year, especially in the set crew which I was in for my entire time at school.
I'll be interested to see what this study uncovers. During the pandemic, there was a lot of talk that 'this is how theatre is now' and that theatre would continue to be, if not primarily, at least significantly digital and distributed (basically, zoom theatre). I don't think I ever really bought that; distributed digital theatre is VERY difficult to create effectively, and of all the shows I saw on zoom during the pandemic, I can honestly think of only one where I really and truly experienced with the 'magic' of live performance.
That said, there's a lot of room for remote digital tools to remain in the industry at earlier points in the process, especially in the design process. I think at this point, most theaters use at least some sort of basic collaboration software (Google Drive, Slack, etc), and I think video meetings will become increasingly important in those early stages. Until the pandemic, the industry standard was for designers to fly across the country for certain design meetings. That's just the most obvious practice to eliminate, but it wastes theaters' money, designers' time, and air travel is a massive contributor to global climate change. Just delaying bringing designers on-site by utilizing video meetings would bring a massive positive change to the industry, and that's just the beginning.
I’ll just be honest… Zoom theater and digital theater are NOT theater. Sorry, not sorry. I have very strong opinions about the subject after last year and whatever I studied during the pandemic was not by any means what I came to CMU to study. I think that virtual collaboration has done more harm than good. I think that it separates people from those that they work with and turns designers into “gods” and technicians into overworked laborers. I think that people need to be in the same place to collaborate and communicate properly. Designers need to be with one another talking in person about their designs and ideas. Designers need to visit the shop that the carpenters and technicians are working in. It takes 2 seconds to change a lighting position in Vectorworks, it can take 5 minutes to move that light in real space (and that’s if it's an easy move) Theater is a wholly collaborative process from design to the show install. I think that if a designer is going to make a change within the collaborative process you better tell someone in person. I liked a portion from Love and Info where a worker talks about how you don’t fire someone over email. I feel like the fast-paced ability to share and collaborate virtually has made the art and shows that we produce lack quality and meaning.
I think that with every new solution to a problem it comes with its own short commings.
I think I have to echo the sentiments said by some others on this post by saying that while several digital tools have the potential to smoothen out the production process, there is no way in hell anyone is going to consider digital theatre to be the new normal. I personally believe that theatre's main draw is how intimate it is, and its ability to make emotional impacts and connections simply by being in the same space as the story happening. I've seen several zoom/streamed shows over the past year, and I'll be honest, it was pretty rough. I found myself tuning out of shows I definitely would've watched in person, just because the medium didn't engage me.
On the other hand, I think the pandemic has taught us just how much of the production process can be done remotely, without having to constantly fly out everywhere. Things like Slack, Drive/Dropbox, Zoom, all really help to keep things on track and to share ideas, thoughts and files easily at any time.
I think that this is a really interesting study, and not some thing that I’ve ever really seen before. But a lot of the comments that I’ve seen above say that zoom theater and digital theater is not theater. To me it is something that I’ve grappled with during the pandemic whether or not digital or zoom theater is theater, and going against the other Commenters I want to say that I believe that zoom theater or digital theater as they call it, is cedar. However I do want to qualify by saying that there are so many shortcomings with digital theater, especially when it comes to the immersive aspect of theater as a whole. When an audience member walks into a physical theater space with other audience members, they are essentially transformed and placed in another world. Audience members suspend believe that what they see in front of them isn’t real and let themselves be immersed into the story, however I feel like that is incredibly difficult achieve through a computer screen. So I guess the final question is, does theater inherently have to be immersive to be considered theater. I hope that this study goes further and I’m excited to see what comes out of it.
Digital collaboration is not new anymore and theater companies like Oregon Shakespeare Festival should not be trying to recreate the wheel to find solutions to their problems. When OSF mentioned needing a way to track updated changes to the script so that everyone is on the updated version, all I could think of is that sounds like exactly what GitHub does for programming collaborations. In fact, those are also often called scripts. Likewise in a TD office the biggest way we could digitally collaborate would be a cloud-based drafting software. Inventor has a vault system for checking out programs and it allows for combing parts into subassemblies and full assemblies. I really resonated with the “software should follow the changes not lead them” line. Often when administrations force software/tool changes there is resistance, and the change is not fully implemented. However, groups should be on the lookout in other industries to see when the changes they want to implement already exist elsewhere.
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