Where there's smoke: digital storytelling for healing

Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, in collaboration with Columbia’s Department of Narrative Medicine, developed Where There’s Smoke, a story and grief ritual that mixes interactive documentary, immersive theatre and online collaboration to invite healthcare providers and others into resonant conversations about life, loss and memory, and to imagine how stories can be used to create empathetic healing spaces. When Robert Weiler was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, the complexity of healthcare and ensuing grief for the family, led his son Lance, a storytelling pioneer, to realize that a straightforward story wasn’t enough to explain and explore the experience, so he created Where There’s Smoke. Where There’s Smoke premiered in 2019 at the Tribeca Film Festival where it was hailed as an “absolute can’t miss” (Backstage). However, when COVID-19 submerged the world in loss, uncertainty, and isolation, Lance reimagined the piece as an online experience. He also combined the piece with protocols of Narrative Medicine as provided by faculty, Deborah Starr. The piece traces a heartbreaking journey through end-of-life care and grief, embracing grief as nonlinear and immersive, grief as an escape room with no escape. Participants sift through artwork, videos, and conversations and are provided with immersive moments for individuals, pairs and groups to have opportunities for self-discovery, unexpected intimacy, and ensuing healing. This is a personal yet universally relevant narrative, which gradually reveals itself to be something more…the possibility of immersive storytelling to create space for empathetic healing, grieving, and connecting.

The risks of wearing Mr Punch and other costumed performances

When identifying risk and ethical issues in live performance the focus is predominantly framed around the audience, and even more so with the popularity of immersive theatre. However, with the unpredictability of audience behaviour in immersive work, the safety of performers is starting to rise to the surface. For example, concerns of performer safety in the immersive work of Punchdrunk were raised in 2018, including allegations of sexual assault against performers by audience members who were veiled behind the anonymity of white masks. This visual article will refocus the discussion of risk onto the performer, as well as on the often overlooked theatrical element of costume and its potential impact on performer behaviour and embodiment, in addition to the impact it can have on the audience. The live performance case study Six O’clock Swill (2009), a piece based on Mr Punch, will be used to interrogate perspectives on these performative risks.

Developing arts-based methods for exploring virtual reality technologies: A university–industry case study

Collaborations between human–computer interaction (HCI) researchers and arts practitioners frequently centre on the development of creative content using novel – often emergent – technologies. Concurrently, many of the techniques that HCI researchers use in evaluative participant-based research have their roots in the arts – such as sketching, writing, artefact prototyping and role play. In this reflective paper, we describe a recent collaboration between a group of HCI researchers and dramatists from the immersive theatre organization Kilter, who worked together to design a series of audience-based interventions to explore the ethics of virtual reality (VR) technology. Through a process of knowledge exchange, the collaboration provided the researchers with new techniques to explore, ideate and communicate their work, and provided the dramatists with a solid academic grounding in order to produce an accurate yet provocative piece of theatrically based design fiction. We describe the formation of this partnership between academia and creative industry, document our journey together, and share the lasting impact it has had upon both parties.

Madhouse

Until the very end of the twentieth century the history of learning difficulties was subsumed into other histories, of psychiatry, of special education and, indeed, of disability. Initiatives to enable people with learning difficulties and their families to record their own histories and contribute to the historical record are both recent and powerful. Much of this work has been led or supported by The Open University’s Social History of Learning Disability Research (SHLD) group and its commitment to developing “inclusive history.” The article tells the story of the Madhouse Project in which actors with learning difficulties, stimulated by the story of historian activist Mabel Cooper and supported by the SHLD group, learned about and then offered their own interpretations of that history, including its present-day resonances. Through a museum exhibition they curated, and through an immersive theatre performance, the actors used the history of institutions to alert a wider public to the abuses of the past, and the continuing marginalization and exclusion of people with learning difficulties. This is an outstanding example of history’s potential to stimulate activism.

Interactive performance: the digital of theatre

The purpose of this MRP is to explore the nature of Peak Experiences, which Maslow refers to as the combined response of the emotions, senses, intellect and imagination that are often experienced by people who have achieved self actualization. Using the theatre as an environment that creates meaning and fulfillment and exploring the relationship between theatrical engagement experiences and digital media experiences, the goal of this paper is to determine how engagement practices between both media can function in harmony, in order to produce the hedonic experiences that Maslow describes. This analysis is done by comparing various immersive theatre companies and interactive design companies who are pushing the boundaries of their fields and attempting to produce infectious and enlightening experiences in their area of expertise.

Interactive performance: the digital of theatre

The purpose of this MRP is to explore the nature of Peak Experiences, which Maslow refers to as the combined response of the emotions, senses, intellect and imagination that are often experienced by people who have achieved self actualization. Using the theatre as an environment that creates meaning and fulfillment and exploring the relationship between theatrical engagement experiences and digital media experiences, the goal of this paper is to determine how engagement practices between both media can function in harmony, in order to produce the hedonic experiences that Maslow describes. This analysis is done by comparing various immersive theatre companies and interactive design companies who are pushing the boundaries of their fields and attempting to produce infectious and enlightening experiences in their area of expertise.

“Space Plague”: an investigation into immersive theatre and narrative transportation effects in informal pandemic science education

Stories are fundamental to human history, culture and development. Immersive theatre has created a landscape where participants have agency within stories, and within this landscape the concept of narrative transportation provides a framework where change within stories creates change in real life. “Space Plague” is a co-designed, fully immersive theatrical experience for young people and families about a fictional pandemic. It was developed using community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) employing a novel model for engaging underserved and under-represented audiences, “SCENE”. Results confirmed that indications of narrative transportation effects were achieved, demonstrating enhanced learning and understanding alongside changing attitudes and indicated positive change when negotiating the COVID-19 crisis.

Tandem Dances

Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance proposes dance and choreography as frames through which to examine immersive theatre, more broadly known as immersive performance. The idea of tandemness—suggesting motion that is achieved by two bodies working together and acting in conjunction with one another—is critical throughout the book. Author Julia M. Ritter persuasively argues that practitioners of immersive productions deploy choreography as a structural mechanism to mobilize the bodies of cast and audience members to perform together. Furthermore, choreography is contextualized as an effective tool for facilitating audience participation towards immersion as an affect. Ritter’s close choreographic analysis of immersive productions, along with unique insights from choreographers, directors, performers, and spectators enlivens discourse across dramaturgy, kinesthesia, affect, and co-authorship. By foregrounding the choreographic in order to examine its specific impact on the evolution of immersive theater, Tandem Dances explores choreography as a discursive domain that is fundamentally related to creative practice, agendas of power and control, and concomitant issues of freedom and agency.