To me, the immersive experience is the finger pointing at the moon. My interest, or my hope for people, is that the things that they find, they take either as a question or as an answer and then live their life. Live their life through games, through play, through whatever it is they do. But that there’s one little accretion of knowing, “Oh, actually, I can make meaning.”
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien’s belief in the power of immersive takes much received wisdom and turns it on its head. His experiences for an audience of one – remote experience The Telelibrary and in person show Undersigned – are not about shock and awe, overwhelming participants, or steering them through detailed narratives. For him, it’s about crafting a container in which a participant can find their own locus of meaning.
Yannick (and guest Lyra Levin, the immersive creator who was performing in and co-producing the UK/EU run of Undersigned) join us in the Voidspace to talk about the that craft, the power of the invitation, how to create true safety without compromising experience, and why a good immersive experience is like the TARDIS.
Voidspace:
Welcome to the Voidspace, Yannick. Thank you so much for joining us. We usually start by asking you to introduce yourself, and what you do in this space.
We could start by saying that you are probably best known, among other things, for your remote telephone experience, The Telelibrary, and your 1:1 in person experience, Undersigned.
But actually, talking about what you actually do within those frames is very hard to describe or even pin down.
This, of course, isn’t helped by the fact that it seems to get harder and harder to get anyone to agree to a definition of anything, in this space. Everyone is so competitive; so reluctant to acknowledge that their work shares anything at all with anything else.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
Lyra and I were just having a conversation about what I jokingly call the ‘Shonen mindset’, which is when you take the idea that when you meet anyone who’s in competition with you, you just declare, “Yes, and we’re friends!”.
Voidspace:
That’s completely the right attitude.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
Lyra often says, “Our worst competition is not something like us. Our worst competition is bad art. Because you have these networks of people travelling through this work. It’s all spread by word of mouth, and there’s this astounding openness that audiences who find this work have, which is a really great impulse.
(Especially when they end up in my room. I can see on the faces of some people – or at least on the portions of their faces that are not covered – the thought: “How did I end up here? I didn’t think it would be like this!”)
But most importantly, there’s this willingness to try something, and that willingness can be so easily blunted by a bad edge. By something that promises a lot or that borrows this language of transformation, borrows this language of co-authorship, but doesn’t actually follow through.
I think part of it is actually this interesting trend in immersive right now, where everyone’s trying to take this word “immersive” and break it into categories.
Voidspace:
It’s become devalued as a term. This stuff has been around for so long. There are shows that we would now call ‘immersive’ that were written in the 70s and 80s and 90s, that were not called that. People call it different things because it fits into the structure of the time in different ways.
People get very hung up on the label. I’m very interested in making the argument that actually this thing is broader than we think it is, and it’s united by a different impulse than necessarily immersion, although that’s been a useful framing for this particular turn of the wheel.
The fact that all of these things have so much in common, people don’t necessarily recognise it because people are getting hung up on labels or defending their own territory. A lot of silos, a lot of distinction.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
I think the problem is that we feel we have to give everything a specific label. We have to give the ESRV rating for what emotion it’s going to be. There’s this impulse towards clarity in the taxonomy, which isn’t necessarily all that useful. For me, we can either be concerned about identifying or we can be concerned about inviting.
Voidspace:
Completely.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
But I also am very encouraged by the fact that consistently, when people come to Undersigned, when they come to The Telelibrary, and they invite people, I see them pointedly say, “I’m not going to tell you anything. I think it’s really important.”
I see people reify the idea out of care, having experienced the thing, that they want someone to have the same entry point they did.
Then it becomes this question of, what does it mean to invite people to not know what’s going to happen, which actually is a thing that human beings quite like.
Particularly from my vantage point of a certain share in the universe, I actually, again and again and again, hear people sit with it and go, “No. I wouldn’t want to know. I would want something larger than I expected. I would want something different than I expected. I wanted to be bigger on the inside.”
Voidspace:
You want to be in a TARDIS.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
I think that all of it comes to, you can call it play, you can call it connection, you can call it intimacy. It’s all of it the outside of the circle, right? We’re in the circumference. And the centre of the circle is the same.
Voidspace:
This thing can be so many things. It can be an exploratory piece where your main agency is going around a space. For me, The Telelibrary is a sort of exploration in a different space. It can be a piece that is more centred on a situation, or a game, or a conversation.
The point that I’ve got to that’s closest to a universal that this sort of work holds in common is that it’s something that needs the participant to complete the picture. It’s true, of course, that you go to any theatre and you need an audience in the seats for that to really work, because of the energy.
But the difference is that in this sort of work, the participant forms a concrete part of the dramaturgy of it.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
For me, that comes back to invitation. What I want is to go to a proscenium theatre (I don’t actually. I try to avoid it), but when forced to, I want to go, and I want to have someone come up before and say:
“Hey! Just a quick heads up. First of all, very glad you’re here because we need to be here, because this is the thing that we’re going to attempt to do together. This is part of a tradition that we do, where this is a story and it unfolds, and everything that happens causes everything that happens. And in a lot of ways, we’re sitting here wondering if it could have gone some other way. And to be frank, holding anyone’s attention, mine included, for 80 minutes is very hard.
And so we’re going to do it together, which is going to make it easier, which is to say that we’re all going to put our attention on these events that happen. And by doing so, we’re going to make them important. And we’re actually going to have the chance to see how important they are.
And, oh, your attention is going to wander. If it does, that’s fine. If you find yourself distracted, just find someone in the audience who’s paying attention and borrow their focus. Let them guide you back. And if at any point you’re locked in, just know that there’s someone who really does actually want to get to the bottom of what’s happening here. Because knowing that when you’re focusing, when you’re really giving yourself to it, someone is getting strength from you. And when things happen, we’re all able to feel them more because we can feel them together. And at the end of it, we can all have a little prosecco.”
You can take anything, and make us need to be there. Through the invitation, if you mean it, if you ask it. And that brings us to this question of what it would mean to meaningfully ask.
But then what happens, is that instead of offering an invitation for us all to come and do this thing together, we have a bunch of expectations from our audiences, that there are things they should do and things they shouldn’t do. Those expectations become demands, and those demands become culture. One dresses for the theatre. One does this, one doesn’t do that. Then it isn’t an invitation or a clear expectation or even a demand: it becomes something you’re just supposed to know.
I think this defensiveness, saying it has to be this, it has to be that, comes down to this: the invitation, and what happens when these expectations turn into culture. Even when I was in conservatory training to be an actor, I noticed how funny it was that any time you moved from one style to another style, they would always say, “It must be this, or it’s false, it’s fake, it’s nothing, it’s garbage!”
There’s the popular notion that the only person who can bring things like this together is someone with no skin in the game, which is a notion I really push back on. The other person who capable of holding them all is someone who’s simply secure in what they have. If you don’t need to be the only correct answer. If you can just say, “Well, something’s working here.” And then certainly, you can have an ideological leaning towards why you would want to be doing it. But the second that you say that you’re doing it that way because it’s the only way that can work, then you’ve begun to defend, not based on what your investment in it is, but just the presumption that nothing else will work, apart from your way.
I just blame capitalism. It’s part of the tension of consumption: the whole idea that the creator creates and the recipient – not participant – consumes. And even in a play, the play that changes someone’s life had at least one actor in the audience, right? And they were throwing the doors open, and they were really letting something happen. And I think that there’s a particular kind of co-authorship that occurs in any good art, in any art that successfully rings the phone enough times that someone picks up: a co-authorship of meaning.
This ossified convention we have is that we think that for the creator and audience to be co-authors, there has to be an explicit co-authorship of narrative, or co-authorship of content. A partnership.
I’d actually be very excited to play a game of asking what we think the ossified conventions of immersive are at the moment.
But I think that I can pin them down for this particular subject. I’d be curious about what mine are.
Voidspace:
Yours is very difficult to pin down, and that’s what’s so good about it.
I love this idea that receiving art, any art, is in itself an act of co-creation of meaning.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
There’s an interview with Jacob Collier where he’s talking about how listening to music is a creative act. How that, in particular, when you have a feeling and you’re in your playlist really trying to pin it down, when you’re finding that this song does it and this song doesn’t. And he makes a gesture – like this! – and he says “It’s colour. You’re pulling this feeling out of you”.
Voidspace:
You’re doing it right now: pulling and pulling something from your chest, like a magician drawing an endless chain of hankies out of a hat.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
I love it so much because, I really do think it brings to life that sense of co-ownership, of the fact that we are two people meeting, playing together, sharing this.
And one of my things that I rave and rave and rave about, and I’m very much like, it has to be this way – my ossified bones – is in Undersigned. We have this principle – our gold standard – that is it’s you, the participant, who should have the mic drop moment. It’s you who should say the thing. Even if we can feel the thing coming, the training in part is to resist naming it and instead ask, can you, in a Socratic way, position someone to say the truth that has emerged? Here we are, we’re getting to it, and as it gets closer and closer and closer, can you stop putting down all this track that you’ve been doing?
My job in Undersigned at first is to say things that you can go, yes, no, narrow it down. And then as we go along and you get closer and closer to articulating it for yourself, my job is to step back and let you take that moment yourself.
Voidspace:
What I love about Undersigned is that the heart of it is a conversation. Something that’s really interesting is that a lot of work goes into building a scaffolding for that moment. The tub I’m thumping at the moment is that if you can get that scaffolding in place – making a world and a clear role for the audience in it, creating a structure that holds the action and the flexibility to really listen and respond to the audience within that – basic dramaturgy essentially – and that if you get those right your work will hit hard, even if you’re doing it on no money.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
My focus is always that a human is a very high tech tool. It solves a lot of problems. It can do that more than most tools.
I think you see creators who solve a problem, solve a problem, get into a pattern of solving problems, and then all of a sudden they’ve been doing it for 10 years, and they are just this remarkably strange widget that can do this, this, and this. And they make a bunch of work that involves this, this, and this.
Jessica Creane says a thing that I adore, which is that in a lot of her work, she says: “It’s not necessarily that I’m the best actor or love my work so much. I’m just the only person with my skillset in my budget.”
Voidspace:
What I love about what you said before about listening to music and co-creation of meaning, is how in Undersigned you can use that, taking something which from the participant’s point of view, feels like it has been done purely instinctively, and use that as a scaffold to build something more intentional.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
It’s such a lovely gesture to move people between modes of engagement. It’s a lovely way to broaden someone’s experience, and let them find it.
One of the things that I push back up against is this understandable desire that participants have to know how to prepare, how to make sure they do it right.
My point is when you arrive, something’s going to happen. You’re going to respond, and you will do it right because how you respond to the situation is the story.
Voidspace:
You are the narrative.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
I think that there’s this ultimately affirming thing of being able to have an experience, in which you didn’t have to do anything. You just had to be – which is plenty business enough – and something wonderful happens.
One of the things that will happen sometimes is that participants will write to us and say “Oh, thank you!” And there’s, in a self-protective way that has to do with boundaries, but also very much in an ideological way, a framework. They’re always going to get back a message that says some variation of, “We’re glad you were able to make the experience meaningful.” It’s beautiful. Because truly, they did.
Voidspace:
There’s a whole conversation there about the A* boundaries that you maintain in Undersigned. You structure it in a way that you know the experience you’re getting.
[At this point we were joined by Lyra Levin, an immersive creator who was performing in and co-producing the UK/EU run of Undersigned.
Over lunch orders, we catch Lyra up, and the conversation turns back to how we define immersive / interactive and pin down what makes it powerful].
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
Part of the beauty of this kind of work is its ephemerality. But then when something’s long running, the compulsion to pin this butterfly to glass gets stronger.
Lyra Levin:
Some people go to Narnia and think it was the wardrobe that was what made it special.
Some people go to these things and they think, “Oh, the thing that makes it special was the fact that it was dark and that there were people with a problem”. Because the mechanics are invisible when done well, they don’t know that what they’re actually hungry for is the feeling seen. Finding people who are meeting them on their plane of imagination, and willing to play with them. There are all of these things that we do as creators that make these very magical experiences. But those are hopefully invisible, if we do it well.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
The people who just feel a thing that they don’t have another name for. They think “This feeling comes from the fact it’s Macbeth in a contact environment”. Actually, anything that you felt, anything you encountered, any profoundly awake moment you had: those moments existed in you. At the very least, it couldn’t exist without you because the basic experience that mattered, not the replicable component of it, but the irreplaceable.
The moment in there that could not exist again. It is your authentic, open, really alive responsiveness to that moment. You felt it take over your whole body, and you were there.
I think some people lose the wood for the trees, and they just keep chasing your mechanic.
Voidspace:
But then I wouldn’t expect them to know that as audiences. I think as a creator, you have a different perspective. You need the right scaffold around the experience to give people the space and the ability to show up like that, even if it’s so well constructed that you can’t see the joins. To say otherwise is to do the care behind the mechanic a disservice.
It also loops us back into the safety aspect because while this couldn’t exist without you, the particular individual participant, it also doesn’t exist just with that person.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
There’s absolutely an enormous amount of craft. My wrinkles and my ulcers can testify to how much time I think about the invitation to that experience.
Voidspace:
So, it’s all in the invitation?
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
What I mean by that is this consciousness that the experience is always in the end something that you, the participant, have made. Everything that I’ve done is an invitation to you to make it. Part of it is about boundaries, because I want to make sure that when I’m inviting somebody to make something, it’s truly theirs. If you’re going to write a sad story, it’s got to be your story. You have to own it.
But I think also about this essential part of the experience – the transformative part – that they own. That they did. I think about what it means for someone to leave an immersive experience that’s moved them. For them to say, “Oh, my God! Here’s this piece of me. I have to go back to the same place, to the same person so I can have this piece of me again”. Versus leaving with the sense of ownership of that piece. I wonder what it’s like for that person to exit that space, and then go into larps, go into games with their friends, go into genuine human connection.
Because ultimately, to me, the immersive experience is the finger pointing at the moon. My interest, or my hope for people, is that the things that they find, they take either as a question or as an answer and then live their life. Live their life through games, through play, through whatever it is they do. But that there’s one little accretion of knowing, ‘Oh, actually, I can make meaning.’
What does it mean to take that ownership? What does it mean for you to think of yourself as creative just by existing? To think, “Oh, I have the capacity to create my life.” What does it mean to then go to these spaces, and to gradually not need to be making something anymore, because you are the something that you are making?
Lyra Levin:
These groups that leave people bereft when they disappear have created this dependency on themselves. Partially as a marketing technique, partially because it can be really addicting to have people be addicted to your art. But it means that people aren’t given a chance to get over their own feelings.
With Undersigned, the experience is created entirely by them. Obviously, they wouldn’t have this experience without what we’ve made, but it’s a catalyst. The idea is that at the end, even if they put a lot of their weight on the experience, even if they did have a large amount of weight sharing, they are left at the end back on their own feet.
Voidspace:
How you take people out of the experience is really important.
Lyra Levin:
Immersive experiences do blur the lines about what’s in and what’s out of world. That means that we have more transference than in a traditional piece of media.
Voidspace:
That is completely right.
Lyra Levin:
It can almost be like the sort of extreme interdependence you might find in real life, such as being cared for medically. There’s almost more in common with someone like an EMT helping you, than being at a theatre show or a movie.
I think it is really a responsibility for creators, but an insidious one that’s harder to see in advance, realising you’re putting yourself in a position of transference. People are going to project a lot of their needs and experiences upon you, and it’s really important to work out how to draw firm boundaries.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
Doing The Telelibrary trained me to do it first. I keep paper notes during the show so that I can keep track of what’s going on. And then I transfer those notes to a spreadsheet. So there’s a spreadsheet, and there’s my brain. And only when you put the two together, do you get The Telelibrary. One or the other couldn’t do it.
Lyra Levin:
That’s an important thing for your sanity, but it’s also a really important thing for people outside of the show to know. This isn’t a relationship I have with a real person. We want to give people that illusion when they are in the magic circle, in the container, that this thing is real. We’ll make it as real as possible. But it’s important to remember that it isn’t. This is not your friend, you can’t actually call them if you’re having a bad day.
Voidspace:
God, that’s so good. It’s so refreshing to hear that. You’re absolutely right about this point about transference, and the ways in which it can maybe be almost cynically employed.
You can still create these resonant experiences that in the moment have a strong sense of connection. But the important thing is to take responsibility for that process. It’s a very intimate space but it’s important to consider who takes responsibility for the impact that can have, and actively put in structures to make sure it’s handled responsibly.
Not just avoiding actively exploiting it, not abnegating responsibility, but actively building those structures of safety in. One thing I love about The Telelibrary is that there’s always a sense that there is a system here and that what you’re interacting with is a system rather than a person.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
I have an obsession with playing non-human characters. It’s interesting in The Telelibrary, especially in peak quarantine. A lot of people who would even reflect on how parasocial things were getting within the context of that show or saying to me, “You’re a really good friend”, and having these built-in structures to deflect that. I’d say, “What’s a friend?”
Voidspace:
The robot that doesn’t know what love is. It’s a great trope.
Lyra Levin:
I really do think that people love to use abstraction and world-building as a crutch to not talk about the real stuff. You see this all the time in science fiction, where you’re like, “Ah, this author did a 12-page diatribe on Sumerian language rules because they didn’t want to talk about the fact that this is actually a really hard moment for these characters.”
Voidspace:
I see this in larp and TTRPGs all the time as well.
Lyra Levin:
People who are in this situation where they’re being invited to, with no consequence, experiment with larger life experiences and feelings are like, “Well, these are all of my weapons. Here’s all their stats.”
Voidspace:
But maybe that’s what some people need. I GM a D&D campaign with players who want very different things. It’s possible to run a game that provides for the ones who want to talk stats, as well as the ones who want to get all up in their feelings.
Lyra Levin:
Yeah, there’s no wrong way to play. I think that us as creators, our job is to say, which one of these are we incentivizing? Coming back to D&D, it’s not my favourite system because the system incentivizes most of the play to be combat.
As creators, we get to decide what mechanics we’ve created and what the mechanics incentivize. We as creators get to decide what gameplay we are rewarding in our system.
Voidspace:
You can build your system to encourage a flavour of reaction, or interaction.
Speaking of different flavours: do people want different things in different cities?
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
It’s hard for me to say because I actually think the two most relevant variables are nothing to do with where we are. The first is, what’s going on in the world. Because I can tell you, week to week, the conversation changes. The second variable is how long have we been running. Because the first round of people we invite are to find networks that spread. I’m someone who’s absolutely guilty of relying on word of mouth.
Voidspace:
You’ve built into Undersigned a system where you can refer somebody.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
We’ve done it for a few reasons. One of which is that it would be helpful if you did. But another is that it is such an interesting question, after doing the experience: If you had to pick one person in your life who would do this, who would you pick? Because I loved the idea of someone looking at the back of their friend’s head at lunch and going, “Would you?” There’s this sense of “I have something to offer you”, but it’s also an enormous vulnerability, because what happens when someone does it? What if someone just hates it? And judges you for that.
Voidspace:
You know what we were talking about making playlists, as a form of art and a form of creation. It’s like when you play your favourite playlist to your friend. That vulnerability that you feel or the vulnerability that you feel watching someone open a gift that you’ve given them.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
One of the things that I hope comes through in the training we give the performers in Undersigned is a spirit of giving. Of having an experience and wanting to share it with someone. Which is also, in a way, saying, “I had this experience, which is profoundly me, and I want to share that me with someone”. That, too, is something that I want to see people work through.
When I was doing on the street interviews, in designing the questions, I would always ask myself, “What is a question that you could wear in your keychain and make use of every day?” How do you leave a piece with something that fits in a pocket, which is just a thought, as something that’s going to trouble, that’s going to let you continue creating? One of the ways you can do that is to haunt someone, and they are like, “Oh, God! I’ve been thinking about that show you did. It sits with me. It haunts me.” But is that what’s generative for someone? What’s actually going to generate more meaning?
Voidspace:
That talk of haunting really makes me think back to the concepts of safety, and holding space that we were talking about earlier. Ensuring the physical and also emotional safety of your audience.
Lyra Levin:
I think it’s about having an appropriate expectation for what you can assume your audience, the range of behaviour within your audience, especially if you’re doing something that is going to activate them. When you’re trying to get these big feelings out of people, people are going to behave in bigger ways. So you need to give them easy rules to follow.
One of my favourites is scare forward. Something I learned as a haunt actor, is always scare your guests in the direction that you want them to go.
Voidspace:
That’s such a beautiful metaphor.
Lyra Levin:
I think even if you’re not in a haunt, it’s still a really important thing. The rule I always give my guests is, if you’re told to do something, even if a bad guy is telling you to do it, do it. If someone says “run!”, run.
Voidspace:
Something I really like about Undersigned is how you’ve put in safety mechanisms that are not binary. They’re granular. You can skip over one thing or another, or you can get out completely.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
You don’t have to script your exit. That’s really important. You know that you can stop anytime, and it won’t be awkward.
I did a dance piece with public movement at a museum once, and the whole piece was about how ideas, ultimately, are smuggled through museums. We had an art crate that was ours, that we would just start pushing through the museum.
I remember, we were pushing this crate towards a man, he’s standing in the middle of the rotunda, and he’s just watching it come barreling at him. It’s a big fucking crate. Finally, a security guard touched him and said, “Sir, you have to move.” He immediately said, “Don’t touch me! Do not touch me!” I thought a lot about that. I mean, we were dancing. We were doing a lot of stuff in the museum during gallery hours, and we would be jumping, kicking, and dancing.
All throughout it, I was struck by how people would either freeze completely or they would make a very strong, very wrong choice. They would choose to run and try to get out of our way by running directly into the path of someone kicking their foot as hard as they can.
Voidspace:
You’ve put people into that activated state. When you have an experience, and it’s created pretty much exactly to put you into an active fight or flight state, you then have to know what to do with that, because that’s going to have unintended consequences.
If you want to create an environment where you’re going to put people in that state, that’s cool. But give them an off-ramp or give them some tools to handle that.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
One way to put someone in an activated state is to put them in a scenario in which they no longer know the rules of how to behave. You do that either by creating an unfamiliar space or you do that by creating interventions in familiar space.
In either case, we have to acknowledge that if we’re invested in certain outcomes, or preventing certain outcomes, then it becomes a matter of thinking, “What’s the behaviour that I’m affirming? What are the patterns they’re creating? What are the rules we’re giving people? How do we take responsibility for outcomes, particularly outcomes that keep occurring?”
Voidspace:
This is possibly why doing small capacity work is really good, because you are able a lot more to work with the response of a person to get them into the right place.
Lyra Levin:
I think there are some trade-offs there. I think with one person, especially when there are two actors there, you have a fair amount of control, you outnumber them.
But then I think you hit a median period, where it’s actually quite difficult to control a small group of people, which we see with escape room style things all the time. People in escape rooms are the most unpredictable groups of humans I’ve ever seen.
But then once you get into audiences, groups of people, you start getting herd behaviour. It doesn’t mean you will get individuals acting differently, but you also have the ability to set out and enforce the rules. If you’re acting poorly, we will kick you out of the theatre, and the show will still go on.
The middle ground is when things get really spicy.
Voidspace:
Something I love about The Telelibrary – because of the generosity of it, and the cleverness of it, and the very explicit knowledge of the act of co-creation – is the fact that you are actually building things in increments.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
The participants go through in 50 minutes what I spent five years discovering. They get to see what happened.
Peter Droste is a creator in New York and just a really phenomenal material culture dude. But we were talking at one point about how I do certain things. And I explained that I just really do it. When people take an action in the library, it really happens. And he was saying that he thought I was just faking it.’ I was like, “No, it would be more work to fake it.”
What’s wonderful is that if you make a space in which real things can happen, then something will accumulate. And something will gradually start to shift. The centre of gravity of The Telelibrary has shifted quite drastically over the years.
I always think about when you go to visit an old temple and the middle of the stairs leading up to it are worn down because so many people have walked through.
This is a quality that is so desirable. In a crazy way, if you’re a creator and you’re just starting, you have to do this double thing of being open to all the fingerprints that people are leaving and not demanding them, not needing them, and not waiting for them.
You say, I’m going to make an exchange with a participant that’s worth doing today with what I have today. I’m going to understand that we’re going to give to each other. There will be spillover. There will be value added that doesn’t have a home yet. But if I do my best to notice, then I’m alive to the opportunities that are emerging, and that emerge with repetition. That emerge with just staying in the attempt over time, which this low capacity work lets you do. It lets you really live with something and change and grow.
But I think if you’re staying alive to it, then you are modelling a pattern of discovery. That is at least one path, one dramaturgical arc that you can offer to a participant. I think that it’s certainly easier to keep track of reality than to exist in multiple concurrent, alternate realities.
Lyra Levin:
When things are real, you can get things that wear down beautifully. When things are fake, when they’re like a veneer over a whole board, they just look shitty when they wear down.
Voidspace:
I love the acknowledgement that this has been done before and this will be done again. In Undersigned, it would be so easy to make the choice to pretend that this was the one and only appointment.
And so many shows will pretend that this is the one and only time. Maybe the discovery of the looping structure is a point of schism or surprise because within the world of the show the character discovers what we already know, which is that this has been done before.
I think to explicitly acknowledge that this isn’t the first and only time is quite freeing as a participant. It keeps the stakes where they ought to be, and it keeps it focused on, ‘Well, what do I want to do with this?’ Because that’s the bit that’s going to matter.
There is one last question: what advice would you give to somebody who wants to do this thing?
Lyra Levin:
Just do it. You don’t need a big budget. You don’t need resources you don’t have. Don’t take out a loan to start. Just look at the resources you have. If you have a bunch of people who are great voice actors, do a voice experience. If you’re a kindergarten teacher and you have a bunch of puppets, do a puppet show. Look at the stuff that you have around you. Think about the story you want to tell and figure out what the intersection of those two Venn diagrams is. And then see what happens and what works.
Don’t expect your first one is going to be massive. It’s going to be what you’re going to try out. Then see about the part of that that really inspires curiosity in you, and then do more of that.
Yannick Trapman-O’Brien:
I think if you can identify what’s most interesting to you, don’t spend too long thinking. Just move towards it. Take the idea that’s the most exciting to you and break it down to the smallest scale you’re willing to deliver it. But break it down to whatever scale lets you fully attempt it.
Because I think I’ve seen a lot of creators with a lot of really incredible ambition and they want something so big. Take really big swings in a way that taxes all their capacity. And so they don’t actually have the capacity to be there in the thing they are attending to.
Instead, our metric is, did we survive? What would it mean to operate in the smallest articulation of what you want, but to ask yourself, “Did we get there?”
And then, iterate it again, iterate it again. And things will accumulate. Things will happen. More interesting things will occur than what you set up to do. But if you set up to do what you want fully, it will take you somewhere.