Digital Dramaturgy and Dream

Premiering in March 2021, Dream was a digital performance based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream created by the Royal Shakespeare Company together with a 15-member strong collaborative team of performance companies, research universities, and tech companies.1 It was staged at the Portsmouth Guildhall in a specially-created studio and livestreamed on Youtube and a bespoke website to an audience of tens of thousands. The twenty minute performance took place almost entirely in a virtual forest created using the Unreal Engine, with actors appearing via motion capture. However, key moments captured on-camera featured the performers out of role and out of the digital realm. From the beginning, audiences saw the technological trappings: motion capture suits, cameras, floor grids, lighting, and the VR headset through which the performer playing Puck entered the forest. Once they put on their headset, however, the performer was immersed into the forest, taking the audience with them. The performance was free to watch, but audiences could elect to participate through a £10 ticket that gave them the opportunity to interact with Puck by flinging fireflies into the forest so as to light the way. In this paper I use Jon Lee’s notion of ‘diffractive dramaturgy’ to investigate the ways in which this performance might be seen as one that “stays in the in-between space, to get in among the messy entanglements that resist categorisations.” I draw upon my work as a research dramaturg on Dream as part of the Audience of the Future consortium to explore how this performance attempted to position humans and nonhuman technology as collaborators, exploring the materiality of both man-made machine and game engine-driven world.

World Shakespeare Congress ; Conference date: 18-07-2021 Through 24-07-2021