Blackfriars or Bust
The Hidden Room has been invited to present a staging session at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars Conference. We will be performing scenes from last year's Taming of the Shrew - Original Practices and discussing Original Practices techniques.
This kickstarter campaign (and accompanying video) is geared to get us there. And hopefully also make you smile.
Cadence Degradation
Effective communication relies, at core, on rhythm, cadence. Prior to affection or antipathy, empathy and comprehension, there is a cadence that invites us to listen, to engage, to participate. Competent communicators establish a cadence and manipulate it according to narrative, emotional, and other requirements. Superior communicators and performers establish this cadence with the audience with great celerity. And the building of a relationship, in part, is the building of patterns and activities that support being in sync. This holds for a speech, a conversation, a dance, a piece of theater, a business meeting, romantic intimacy, and so on.
Theater (and communication) that transpires not merely across a room, or a network, but across the internet faces a significant challenge: the latency introduced by transfer of audio and video data. And while this can be variously mitigated, it cannot be (and indeed, at a global scale will never be) eliminated. As data latency increases, the conversational cadence degrades. At latencies of 250 milliseconds, sustaining cadence, and thus narrative and dramatic connection, becomes stilted and awkward. Conversely, as latencies drop to sub 100 milliseconds, the rhythm flows and the artistic and emotional value of the communication is more readily established. A primary challenge of the work then is the prevention and mitigation of cadence degradation.
My goal in setting up the technology is a two-way lag of less than 100 milliseconds. Higher than that and we start "stepping on each other's lines." Unfortunately, at half-globe distances, even the speed of light yields a roundtrip lag-time of 200 milliseconds. So, it is crucial to get key participants on board with how to engage in conversation in ways that tolerate lag time.
Technical solutions should be deployed everywhere available to reduce cadence degradation. This requires consideration of network dynamics, including quality of service (QOS) packet prioritization, as well as microphone placement, etc.
But crucially, the solution cannot be purely technological (at half-globe scale, the tech solutions are unequal to the task). It also requires a panoply of communication human (humane?) techniques. For example, Beth Burns, playwright and director of the play that has been the crux of this work and exploration, discovered early that the little verbal cues we offer each other during conversation can themselves, as a result of lag time, be interruptive, compounding the issue and contributing to cadence degradation. She discovered that non-verbal cues such as a nodded head, a thumbs up, will indicate the desired assent and support in ways that diminish the interruption.
Among the ways to mitigate is to deploy the most effective data compression available to streamline data transfer. But there is, here too, technological limitations and opportunity for human techniques. The questions arises, how do we create visual/audio data that is most compressible? Still video images are more compressible than video images with dynamic movement (see the well-wrought wikipedia article on video compression for summary info on this point). As lag time builds during a video conference conversation, a way to address it is to create more compressible data, specifically, to be more physically still.
What this excitingly points to is the existence of a set of latent techniques for "acting for the real-time compressed data stream" that mirrors, but is not at all identical to, the set of acting techniques that the pioneers from stage to cinema first discovered. And no one I've found is talking about this yet.
Latest Project: Digital Interactive Theatre
Since January, I've been designing and integrating technology for a trans-atlantic piece of live theatre that tethers performance venues in London and Austin into a single theatrical venue via video conferencing, with actors and live audience in both physical locations transacting the play, and while the collected audio/video data is streamed live to the web. To deliver global digital interactivity, we tossed in a twitter stream behind a select hashtag (#TexasLondon). The result is a single, highly interactive play occurring in three discrete geographical locations, Austin, London, and the web.
The project, titled You Wouldn't Know Her, She Lives In London (in Austin) and You Wouldn't Know Him, He Lives In Texas (in London) was originally conceived by playwright and director Beth Burns as a means to collaborate with London's dynamic theater community.
The production, which ran in March, was co-produced by Austin-based company Hidden Room, London-based company Look Left Look Right, and London performance venue, Roundhouse.
The production recieved some fantastic attention and press, including a BBC radio and podcast interview, a bunch of praising critical and audience reviews and mentions, a guest post at the Skype corporate blog, and the opportunity to discuss the project, the process, and the new genre in a panel discussion at the 2011 South By Southwest Interactive conference.
To continue the conversation about the genre, we've created a topic-focused LinkedIn group and some starter documentation to aid in set up, preparation, and troubleshooting. I'd love for you to join the conversation. I'll be writing here more about the lessons and exploration as we continue.
We are excited to be remounting the production for the 2011 Edinburg Fringe Festival, where it will take place in the amazing Underbelly venue. Hidden Room Theatre also in early discussions to partner with arts companies in Russia and the middle east for additional productions.
Affinity, and Proximity
A particular cup of kool-aid from which I've drunk deep: Social computing enables Us, increasingly, to align our social structures and experience with Things That Matter to each of us, with our shared affinities, and does so in a way untethered to our geographical location.
We have, then, the communities we choose, and are decreasingly bound by the the communities we inherit or over which we otherwise have limited control. We can filter out the spam and connect digitally to what we like, regardless of whether it is located physically near us. And for business and culture, this is a rich vein of opportunity.
Increasingly, however, I am thinking about the challenges inherent in the ability to persistently filter out, for example, the annoying neighbor down the street, or a disagreeable political opinion, or everything with which we share no obvious affinity. What do we lose?
How do we prevent a devolution to affinity-based echo chambers? If the industrial revolution allowed us to build efficiency of manufacture around the division of narrow niches of labor but also elimnated a sense of wholistic craftsmanship, will a parallel phenomenon occur around affinity division?
Recently, I attended a presentation by Richard Florida (organized by the amazing folks at Leadership Austin), author of Rise of the Creative Class and The Great Reset. During the lecture he asserted that the City is the great engine for creativity because they enable a rapid and recurring collision and recombination of people, and thus also of ideas ideas, and that cities ought to be developed and designed with this process in mind as a high goal (apologies to Mr. Florida for my paraphrase). Initially, his observation stuck in my kool-aid drinking craw. It is our affinities that bind us, not the accident of our location. And the world is getting flatter in ways that are liberating. Ideas collide and recombine digitally with ease, and it is getting easier.
And yet, creativity is borne in part out of chaos and collision, that much is obvious to me. Great innovation doesn't appear to come from echo-chambers but from crucibles of (preferably peaceful) contention and contradiction. And a city introduces something (partially) arbitrary, a variable that cuts the deck on affinity. [Of course it also offers us connections that our reptile brain wants and that video-conferencing has a disadvantage at offering, a touch, a smell, a reminder of our protein-ware and our mortal coil.]
Maybe the neighborhood, the city, is the anti-dote to the risks of affinity-based connections.
The privilege of foolery
Some years ago I wrote a letter to the students of The University of Texas' Shakespeare at Winedale program (c/o of the incomparable James Loehlin), of which program I am a former student. Recently, while conducting a workshop on Shakespearean prosody, I dusted off this old letter and shared it to kick off our work. This letter continues to capture a touch of what I find valuable about work in the theater, and on Shakespeare's work specifically.
Now are you in the forest of Arden. Hurry! Do not waste one second of it . . . but then linger too, it is precious. This particular Arden is a workshop in fearlessness, a shining flashlight in the dark and co
bwebby corners of your soul, and a factory for future friendships, so stay busy. It can be a lofty work of art and it must be a sloppy mud-fight. It is hard, occasionally lonely, and frequently exhausting. It will invite the strongest part of you to speak louder than it has before, and it will invite your weakest parts to transform.
The text is locked on paper without your breath to give it sound, and exists only in memory without your bodies, voices, and passions to give it current life. This play is yours, completely and wholly, for a handful of weeks. This relieves you entirely of the responsibility of “living up to other productions” and places firmly on you the responsibility of creating the play's present. You are its current instance, and its giddy hope.
You have the privilege of foolery. You have the opportunity to be students of Shakespeare, which just means the opportunity to be students of Life and the human spirit . . . to create worlds reflective of the whole of humanity. You are not only actors (though certainly that too) but also Allowed Fools, players. You are the part of society tasked with telling the world about itself, the fools in the larger play. And those of us who will seek your story in the theater are coming to hear the wit and wisdom of the fool to enrich our lives and carry it home with us. We need you as surely as you need us.
Give, give, give. There is no point in keeping, it stales – but giving keeps ever fresh and will inspire generosity in those of us who observe. Give everything, because it is more interesting than not. Create something sublime and rare, how often do you get to do that? And listen to each other every moment. We’ll listen more when you do. I am excited for what follows.
Ignite Your Pecha Kucha in 140 Characters (Rise of Short Form)
The [speed of data transfer via broadband internet] + [low-cost data storage] + [speedy bit replication] = a functionally unlimited space for content creation and consumption. And yet this unprecedented lack of resource constraint might foster intellectual laziness, a lack of refinement. (Surely these also contribute to information overload.)
- O'Reilly Ignite series
- Pecha Kucha
- Twitter's 140 Character Limit (Mashable article)
- Agile/Scrum code sprints
Games as learning engines
As part of the Authors@Google YouTube series, Tom Chatfield (author of Fun Inc.) spoke about games as learning engines and "Why Play is the 21st Century's Most Serious Business." The presentation is long, but richly worth watching.
Of special interest to me is his observation that games, and more broadly, play, can work to de-stigmatize failure, and in so doing, foster boldness, courage, innovation, originality. It puts me in mind of Sir Ken Robinson's brilliant 2006 TED Talk wherein he asserts:
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.
Gaming at home: The Austin Chronicle has a nice article this week about indie game dev in Austin, featuring, among others, Austin's own Twisted Pixel Games.
Review: Taking Back My Contacts With 'WhoPaste' Software
Royal de Luxe's massive marionettes
Someone recently tipped me off to the existence of Royal de Luxe, a French mechanical marionette street theater company. I hope you enjoy these linked movies and still images as much as I do:
