the sceptical futuryst: larp

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Theatre in Pandemic

"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next." — Arundhati Roy

***

A group of Theatre in Pandemic participants test out a new streaming platform

This summer, together with my colleague Nica Ross from Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama, we staged an experimental research course called Theatre in Pandemic.

It took place against the backdrop of not only the COVID-19 crisis but also a national and global effort to confront police violence and structural racism.

Both call for radically different approaches to theatre, but seem to pull in different directions. The former made working in the same physical space impossible. The second demanded heightened attention to questions of power and consent; the terms of co-creation between artists as well as the terms of encounter between artists and their publics. In other words, one set of conditions militated against building the strong connections and trusting relationships that are central to theatrical art-making, while the other brought the importance of those same connections and relationships into the sharpest possible focus.

The result of our grappling with that challenging contradiction was one of the most experimental and exciting classes I've ever taught.

The syllabus started as a skeleton that we deliberately left under-specified so as to enable adaptation and emergence in the fleshing out. It included Fluxus scores, online larp, ritual design, transmedia ideation, critical examinations of media and their enabling constraints, and a whole lot of play.

That is, we put aside the temptations (and hazards) of trying to replicate on Zoom any kind of theatre as we knew it before. Instead, we set out in search of new possibilities through experimentation and games, resulting in a set of design briefs and performances for a pandemic-prompted "playable theatre".

An outline of our six half-day sessions or 'episodes' perhaps gives a sense of the arc.

Episode 1: This is Theatre Now
• In-Class Action: Pass Around a Shared Object
• Weeklong Action: Create a Score
Episode 2: Building Worlds Together
• In-Class Action: Play a Live Action Roleplaying Game
• Weeklong Action: Design a Ritual
Episode 3: Mediums and Media
• In-class Action: Research and Experiment with online tech/art projects
• Weeklong Action: 60 Second Play
Episode 4: A Play and a Project
• In-Class Action: The Thing From The Future
• Project Launch: The Final Action
Episode 5: Studio Time
Episode 6: Final Action

Gratifyingly, and as hoped, the three projects produced by our dozen participants were wildly different from one another.

Queerantine 2020 by Lyam Gabel, Lenora Gant, and Petra Floyd
A user-navigated web-based archive with mixed media content, both contextualising and telling the story of a triad of people trying to navigate the criminal justice system, queerness, academia, and life in a pandemic.

PBC by Zeja Copes, Sean Leo, Maggie McGrann, and Carey Xu
A live-streaming, 360-degree cut-up play incorporating the words of James Baldwin, Michelle Tea, Hua Chunying, and CNN to create a conversation at the intersection of diverse lives, conflict and care.

S.99520 by Davine Byon, Major Curda, Rachel Kolb, and Cynthia Xu
An online larp (or live action online game, aka ‘laog’) in which United States Senators and industry lobbyists persuade, bribe and cajole each other in the closing minutes before the crucial vote on the Bill for the Green New Deal. Hosted on the web-based virtual space and conferencing platform gather.town that stylistically emulates an 8-bit video game, the participants navigate their way around the game space to find each other, activate video chat, and engage in high-stakes negotiations.

Thanks in part to the interest that folks showed in what we were doing when I tweeted about the course a few months ago, we've open-sourced the Theatre in Pandemic syllabus, complete with all reading and media resources, in-class and weekly 'actions' or assignments, plus additional links and commentary, as well as a demo reel of the participants' efforts (see below).

My experiential futures practice and classes have for many years drawn on theatrical modes, including immersive theatre, live action roleplaying, and guerrilla performance –– and as it happens my first ever pay cheques, at 13, came from being in a professional production of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. But this was the first chance I've had to collaborate with the School of Drama. It was a blast.

Our hope is that others might find some leads or inspiration in these documents of our struggle to connect, co-create, and reimagine collaborative art in a very challenging time.

Meanwhile, much gratitude to Nica and to all our participants.

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Participation design

I was revisiting earlier today a podcast conversation between two people I much admire –– an episode of Team Human recorded by writer and host Douglas Rushkoff with security and privacy architecture consultant Eleanor Saitta.

Rushkoff's first book Cyberia (01994), for me as a teenager in Australia, was a gateway to a whole lot of things I'd never heard of before. I've followed his work for about 25 years, and we've met a few times over the past decade. Saitta, whom I first met when we spoke on a conference panel in Singapore together in 02013, blew my mind over breakfast, in I think our first face to face conversation, by putting me on to Nordic Larp, a big topic to dig into more at some stage. She coedited the excellent Knutpunkt book The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp (02014), a great entry point if that topic piques your interest.

So there's this exchange towards the end of their discussion that has come to mind more than once since I first heard it.

***

Douglas Rushkoff: [You have written about] our determination to maintain this illusion of individuality and selfhood in the face of an increasingly networked reality. In one of your essays, There is no Future, which is a way of saying that the future distracts us from the present that we're in, you say:

Our production of narratives runs very deep. We create the "self" as a distinct entity, different and separate from the world, and create a narrative about how that self has interacted with the world through its history. This, even, is where the problems start. We try to live in that narrative, instead of in the real world. The self we create doesn't really exist, and the narrative we create is more fiction than real.

Eleanor Saitta: And I should caveat that by saying: Creating and living in fiction can be an incredibly powerful tool for political change –– as long as you know what you're actually doing. As long as you you remember that you're doing this thing.

This is something that I've argued at a completely practical level. It's really interesting to look at the toolkits that people use to design, for instance, social networks. “Experience design” –– the experience that they're talking about there is the individual experience, and that is the thing that is designed.

DR: Right, UX/UI [user experience and user interface design] is the individual user. It's not community experience, collective experience.

ES: There is no practice of, the phrase that my friend Andie Nordgren uses is 'participation design'. And this is looking at a participation frame that says, yes, we have a set of personas, and they have their individual interests, but the participation actually happens between personas, and between different parts of the community, and that's the thing that we actually really care about designing.

It's useful to consider individual experiences, and certainly every system has interactions that are individualistic, but a lot of what is interesting [lies in between these].

If you've got the in-house wiki for some organisation, there's the person who always starts pages, there's the person who cleans up pages, there's the person who is really unlikely to start a page, but will absolutely go through and flesh out all the details and find the citations. And those are participatory roles that are happening between people, and you want to encourage and shape those interactions. And trolling and griefing and all of these things; these are also participatory roles that we want to discourage.

But there isn't a design discipline that focuses on those things, those interactions, those participations, as the first-class structures.

***

(Starts ~54 mins in.)

I've transcribed this to share here because it's interesting in its own right, and partly also as a bookmark: the fact it has come to mind multiple times seems to be tugging at some threads that are important and that I hope to tease out properly in another post.

For now I'll just say that this idea of 'participation design' rhymes with approaches we've been working with around 'structures of participation' (Natalie Jeremijenko), 'designing for emergence', and 'situation design' (including, over the past five years, and thanks to Ella, live action roleplaying games).

Engendering circumstances in which we can usefully speculate and improvise, it turns out, is all about this design terrain made up of the spaces between people.

Related:
> Dreaming Together (pdf)

> The Experiential Turn (pdf)

> Build Your Own Time Machine

> A Question of Scale
> An Experiential Futures Interview