“I think it’s cool to be part of a burgeoning art form. We frequently say we feel like it’s like when silent movies were moving into talkies, where you can see that there’s all these lingering after effects of silent films…You can see the artists working out the new rules of this art form. We feel like we’re in that space right now“.
CirqueSaw’s remote theatre, which uses a bespoke interface to invite its audience to interact with shows that take us from the science lab to deep space, feels like it is addressing a new frontier. We talk to the creators behind the company about the origins of their groundbreaking practice, the practicalities of creating remote interaction, and what it’s like to have a spaceship in their basement.
Voidspace:
Nicole and Nathan, welcome to the Voidspace. I’m so thrilled to have you here with us today.
Nicole Orabona:
We are so excited to be here today. It’s been a while leading up to it, so it’s really cool.
Voidspace:
Tell us a little about who you are and what you do in this space.
Nicole Orabona:
We run a production company called CirqueSaw that we created in 2020. I have a background as an actor, primarily.
Nathan Leigh:
I’ve worn a lot of hats in my life. Most of my professional career, I’ve been either a writer or a composer, and have recently become more of an animator than anything else.
Nicole Orabona:
We started CirqueSaw because when COVID hit, and we suddenly didn’t have the ability to make our art, there was a big surge of folks moving things online. There was a new forming of online remote theatre, and some of it was really cool and innovative, and some of it was a fun way to pass the time with your friends by reading a script on Zoom. We had done some online work with various other companies, and we thought, we could do this, too.
Nathan Leigh:
We laid out broadly how we could divide up labour and what our overlapping skill sets were, and where we had gaps in our skills, and mapped out a way that we could, just the two of us, be the show.
I think it took a while for us to figure out actually how to do that and what it was that we wanted to do. We produced a couple of short films during the lockdown era, but it wasn’t until fall of 2021 when we figured out artistically, what it was we wanted to put into the world as artists, and how we wanted to approach our work.
It was the moment that people were leaving, those who had been working in remote performance who were doing it because they had no other choice. And suddenly the people who were left standing were the people who were doing it because we were like, this is cool. There’s stuff that you can do here that you can’t do in a theatre. All the people who were trying to recreate the experience of seeing a show in a proscenium, they went back to the proscenium and we looked around and went, okay, now I think we can start to really make some art.
Nicole Orabona:
Yeah. I have a background in immersive theatre already, and that was definitely something that was not… I was like, I don’t want to be doing immersive theatre where I’m getting right up in an audience member’s face and they might sneeze on me and kill me.
Voidspace:
Right. It was such a different feeling, wasn’t it, when we all first came back into public spaces after lockdown.
Nathan Leigh:
We also have also had to continue to have to navigate some of that stuff a lot longer than other people have.
Nicole Orabona:
Basically, we had a little weekend retreat where we had some other more traditional shows that we wanted to develop. We wanted to commit to creating ethical, sustainable theatre, where everyone was being paid well, everyone was being not asked to do too much. And we were like, well, we can’t afford to do that.
Voidspace:
Yeah. It’s such a huge struggle, isn’t it? It’s so difficult in this space. One of the big myths that I want to bust is you have to have a fancy set and a load of tech and a bunch of money. The more I dig into this scene properly, the more I’m interested in the lo-fi and the low-tech solutions. Because as you say, it’s sustainable. It’s something that people can actually do without having to get a lot of outside funding.
Nathan Leigh:
Yeah, exactly. Both of us are union members and have been active in labour rights struggles. We’re looking at this budget, at these raw numbers and going, there’s no way that we can produce these shows without doing things, that if someone did them to us, we would be up in arms about.
Voidspace:
You realise the compromises you have to make.
Nicole Orabona:
And that compromise was, well, we can’t do anything that the two of us can’t either already do or can’t learn how to do.
Voidspace:
That’s a great creative restriction, I think.
Nathan Leigh:
I think the thing that has been born of that is this very pragmatic approach of like, alright, what can we do. Not like, what do we wish we could do? We do dream big a little, but we don’t imagine the $100,000 version of anything that we’re doing, because we’re not going to get $100,000.
Voidspace:
I hear you. To be fair, if you got $100,000, it might not be as good. I’m interested in what you were saying about how you’ve got quite different backgrounds, and the process you went through to work out the art that you wanted to put into the world.
Nicole Orabona:
We do have different backgrounds. When I was doing a lot of in-person immersive theatre, that was not Nathan’s favourite art to experience, because he didn’t want to be put on the spot to be forced to create with an actor.
Nathan Leigh:
Yeah, completely. Nicole would do these really fantastic shows, and I would always come. Just because I have a background as a writer, some actor comes up to you and starts talking to you, and they’re imbuing you with qualities of a character and asking you to respond verbally. I write a draft, and then I sit with it for a week. They’re asking me to improvise on my feet. I’m like, I’m not enjoying this. This is making me feel overwhelmed. I just wanted to go into the side room and open the drawers and see what was in them.
Nicole Orabona:
Part of it was a desire to make art that would utilise my skill sets as an immersive performer, and to be something that Nathan would, if we were not making it, would want to experience, where there’s a lot of rich detail and places to explore, agency to play in a way you want to play.
Voidspace:
That’s so important. I do think the best interactive pieces, or the ones the interactive creators I like the most create, are the ones that find ways of allowing that to happen. In terms of that richness of exploration, how have you found ways of doing that online? Because when I think about exploration, I still think of environmental pieces where you have a set and draws to rummage through and all of that. How have you incorporated that into your digital-led work?
Nathan Leigh:
A lot of it has come down to the way that we deal with the interactive interfaces. We use web portals and code to create an experience where Nicole’s performance is the emotional anchor of the experience. Then there are moments where audiences are given an opportunity to dig into this interactive platform, either in ways that are direct instruction or in ways that are self-directed moments of exploration of like, now go forth and see what you find.
Voidspace:
You’re constructing the world within it using a digital platform?
Nicole Orabona:
Everything is online, and everything is digitally native. We’re never trying to pretend that we’re all in space together. We’re acknowledging that we’re in a computer world or we’re online, and the show can only occur in this space in this time online. You’re just in your little box.
Voidspace:
Something I’ve been trying to pin down is, what is the essence of theatricality? And a lot of people go into whether something is interactive or not, whether it has to be in person. I think what you were saying there about something that can only happen in this moment in time is such a great way of framing it, because no matter what the trappings are, for it to be theatre, it has to be something that relies somehow on that in the moment-by-moment experience.
Nathan Leigh:
I think actually it’s pretty great that what we’re doing here is painting mandalas on the beach. The idea that the ephemeral nature of theatre, the fact that it does not exist once it’s over and did not exist before it began, is the thing that actually gives you that magic because there’s a little bit of a tightrope walk, both to its impermanence, and a little bit of inherent dreaminess, because it isn’t a real thing.
You can’t go to this place and really be there. You can only be there while the doors are open. That has been, I think, the core of it. However you choose to define theatricality, the core of it is the time that you’re experiencing it, the time that you are present, however that is defined – whether it’s asynchronous or synchronous or whatever – the experience is what it is because of that time, because you’re experiencing it in that time.
You can’t choose to rewatch it and have it be exactly the same. You can choose to come back, and it’ll be similar. But even in more traditionally scripted work, it will always be a little different. The actor’s timings might be a little bit different. That might be an understudy. There might be your emotional context. I’ve done shows that happened to coincide with major world events, and suddenly a show that’s set in Russia hit really differently after Russia invaded Ukraine in the middle of the run. That change in context of what’s happening when you’re watching it, to me, that’s what theatre is, and the rest of it is just cultural, whatever you feel like defining it as.
Voidspace:
I think that’s such a great way of thinking it. It’s so funny that ephemerality as well. As an audience member in those moments, there’s always that incredible wonder of, “oh my god, this is happening right now, right here, right now. This is amazing”. But also that sense of, “oh god, this is passing moment by moment, and it’s already moving into the past, even as I’m watching it.” In the way that when you go to a live concert, it’s literally marking time, decorating the passage of time. I just feel like theatre is another layer to that. It highlights the passage of time and that could be quite morbid, but also beautiful.
Nathan Leigh:
It’s not morbid, because it’s inevitable. There’s nothing to be done about the passage of time: it’s going to pass whether you want it to or not.
Voidspace:
You may as well let it pass prettily.
Nathan Leigh:
Exactly. Decorate it while it’s happening.
Voidspace:
Tell me more about your approach to interacting. You before how the interactions that leave you feeling put on the spot and forced to improvise, are not so good. I’m really interested in what makes good facilitation and the difference between performance and facilitation and all of that, because how a particular company approaches performance/facilitation is the flavour of the company’s work from my point of view. I’d love to hear more about that.
Nicole Orabona:
That’s Nathan’s area, as most of the interaction comes from the ways the audience plays in the interface. Me, as the sole performer of any of our pieces, I might give them direction or suggestions, and they can choose whether or not they want to listen, depending on if they trust that character or not.
The interactivity comes from the way Nathan has coded it. With our very first piece we created, POV: You Are an AI Achieving Consciousness, the audience, literally every time they click on the interface, they’re impacting the music, they’re impacting the visuals. So there’s subtle changes in that way the music changes might impact the delivery of my text. That’s the only show we have where we actually ask anyone to even speak back.
Voidspace:
That sounds like an incredibly dense environment that you’ve created, to have that. To have something where you don’t have to speak, you don’t have to necessarily consciously give an explanation, but you are affecting your own experience by that environmental exploration. I’ve never seen that effectively done online. Did you build up this reactive interface from scratch? How do you even begin to do that?
Nathan Leigh:
I’m a nerd and I’ve been poking at code since I was a kid. But in 2019, I broke a toe and I was laid up in the ER. You have a real health care system, so this may not be how things work in a real country, but in my country, they don’t do anything for a broken toe unless it gets infected, and mine had gotten infected. But even then, you are triaged to the bottom of the list. I waited for about 14 hours for someone to see me. I’m immunocompromised. I have a condition where my lungs collapse. I have also been moved to the front of the list of the triage quite frequently. I didn’t begrudge it but I was so bored.
I was sitting there in the waiting room and I was poking at something on my laptop. I was trying to make it work and it wasn’t working the way I wanted. I just googled some instructions for how to write a programme to make it do the same as I wanted. It spiralled. It kept me occupied for the rest of the time that I was waiting to be seen.
Voidspace:
That escalated quickly.
Nathan Leigh:
When lockdown hit, I started getting really invested in actually taking learning to code seriously. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, I was making a ton of little tools just to make my life easier. Just little audio things to do repetitive tasks or to simplify queuing stuff when we were doing live things with other companies. I was building up this toolkit of miscellaneous little doodahs.
But it was coincidental with our retreat that we started looking at it, okay, what do we have? What can’t we do? And I thought, well, I’ve got all these little digital doodahs to do little interactive things. What if we just stitched them all together? What would that be?
Voidspace:
A frankendoodah.
Nathan Leigh:
Exactly. That’s all POV is. POV is held together with Scotch tape and hope. It’s all of these little things that I had made previously that we added a little bit of connective tissue to, to make them talk to each other, make them interconnected, but they were just stuff I had lying around on my hard drive, effectively.
Voidspace:
It’s like the digital equivalent of the classic show in someone’s basement where you just grabbed whatever shit you’ve got lying around the house, basically, and made use of it.
Nicole Orabona:
That piece came together very quickly because it was just like odds and ends, and then we realised, oh, wait, this could actually be a lot more. We could make this be cleaner, more specific, cooler. Nathan then started over two years ago, coding a platform with its own coding language.
Nathan Leigh:
After we finished the first run of POV … I’m in my 40s now. Nicole is not yet.
Voidspace:
Hey, I’m all for finding your space in middle age.
Nathan Leigh:
POV was the first thing that we did together. We had done a couple of things prior to that which had had varying degrees of traction. POV was the first thing that we did together that there was actually more demand for than we had the capacity to support. We kept adding performances and extending the run.
Suddenly we’re looking around and going, so I think we found the thing that we can do well that people want to see. We had mapped out a couple other story ideas, a couple other character ideas that seemed interesting to explore. I looked at the POV code, and because it was just this taped together pile of odds and ends, there was basically no way I could adapt that to do another story. It was so chaotically constructed because it had been constructed chaotically, that all of these other story ideas we had were impossible or would require actually starting from scratch with a whole new code base.
I sat down and was like, alright, if we move forward with these ideas, and it’s just the two of us, because we can’t afford to hire a third person, the only way we can pull any of this off is if I can construct a system so that as many components as possible are shared between shows. So that I’m not having to programme a whole new platform every time we do a show.
It’s a lot of work. POV came together because we had most of the parts. But if I wanted to do something that had different parts, we wouldn’t be able to adapt them. I started two years ago studying old school ’50s and ’60s programming languages. Because I wanted to see Fortran, ALGOL.
Voidspace:
I never really learned a programme apart from doing a bit of BASIC, and stuff in twine, but I was always fascinated by those things.
Nathan Leigh:
When they actually click, they’re beautiful. They’re very simple and elegant. I was like, I’m not going to make Unity or Unreal Engine. I’m a person who learned to code in his mid-30s, so I’m not going to be doing something on that level of complexity. What was more important to me was making something that could function on as many devices as humanly possible.
The idea was: what’s the simplest thing? They could do basic 3D models in the ’60s on computers with less processing power than my microwave: how did they do that? And how did that work? Why does my computer in – I guess it was 2023 – now overheat the second there’s four colours on screen? It was like, go back to the first principles, strip everything down to the basics and then build up from there. That took two years of work, but now we have it, and now it’s underpinning all of our projects.
Nicole Orabona:
Eventually, maybe other folks could use this?
Voidspace:
That seems like the obvious thing. To have this functioning system sounds awesome. I’m already thinking, unfortunately, the money that we tried to get didn’t come through, but I’m looking to find a way of creating a digital version of the physical festival space that we are using in June.
To find a way of populating it, maybe with alternate exhibits, it’s like a night version of the festival and to have a little story happen in it. But unfortunately, as I say, we have no money, so that might not happen. I was like, oh, but how would we build it? Because that has to be so reactive and that has to be so nuanced. How the hell do you do that? This sounds like exactly the platform that you’d need to do that project.
Nathan Leigh:
Those are the same questions that we were trying, that we were asking that led to us realising, oh, there’s a bunch of tools out there that are fantastic that you can adapt, and use 5% of this one programme and 5% of this other program’s capabilities. You direct one thing to another, to another, to another, to another.
Voidspace:
If you can even begin to do that.
Nathan Leigh:
I mean, exactly. The process of taking these different tools that each have one little thing that makes that depth of interaction possible and getting them to talk to each other happily, it’s hard and it’s not reliable.
You’re always going to hit a thing where it’s like, I want to do this thing because artistically or emotionally or narratively or whatever, that feels like the right choice for this moment. But this programme I’m using, it’s not possible.
Voidspace:
I think just having that bespoke solution is so exciting because it’s going to open up so many possibilities. It sounds like you’ve built what sounds like this incredible system, mind-blowingly complex, so much creative potential for yourselves and possibly for other people.
I want to know now about the stories that you’re deciding to use that system to tell, and more about how that works. Because I know you’re putting on a rep season shortly with a few shows. You’ve got Void Main, which is your space show, and the one about lab rats, labRats. I think some others as well. We’ve got the tech underpinning of it, and so I’d love to know about what you want to use that for.
Nicole Orabona:
This season, we’re doing three shows in rep, all of which have had at least some iteration in the past. Like I mentioned earlier, POV: You are an AI Achieving Consciousness was our first show. This is our third year running it because the first year we did it, we did another run, it sold out. We ran it again last year, it sold out. We were like, this is a story or experience that people seem to enjoy, so why shouldn’t we keep allowing folks to come and do it? I’m glad to keep doing it until people stop coming. That one’s very abstract and vibey, moody, artistic.
Nathan Leigh:
It’s poetic.
Nicole Orabona:
It’s poetic. That’s the word. Then Void Main is our anchor piece for this season, which we did a workshop of last fall. This one is in space. I think all of these ideas have come mostly from Nathan, but I love that they’re pieces that allow me to play really interesting roles.
Nathan Leigh:
They do come from you, though, because I feel like as an actor, you always plant a seed in me of like, oh, okay, I want to make characters that are fun for you to play.
Nicole Orabona:
I’ve always wished I could be an astronaut, but science is not my strong suit. So this is like such a dream come true. I get to be an astronaut without the rocket science.
Voidspace:
I love that so much.
Nicole Orabona:
Yeah, we’re both big nerds. We’re big Star Trek fans. We both love sci-fi. And so I think Void Main is really a culmination of us wanting to tell a sci-fi story.
Nathan Leigh:
Us trying to find the things about sci-fi that we love, and home in on them, and put them all in one box.
Voidspace:
That’s so interesting, because people always talk about sci-fi as if it’s just one thing. But if you’re talking Star Trek or you’re talking Firefly or Deep Space Nine, you’re almost talking a completely different flavour entirely.
Nicole Orabona:
This one, this is very hard sci-fi. It’s very inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a lot of research that went into it. We have tried to make it very…it’s not just like magic, like dilithium crystals. It’s like, we’re going to nerd properly hard.
Nathan Leigh:
We set a challenge of like, okay, look, it’s in the future. There’s technologies that we’re hedging our bets on whether or not they will be invented in the time frame we’re having them be invented. But at least as far as we understand it, the science is possible.
Voidspace:
I love that. MacGuffin free.
Nathan Leigh:
Yeah, exactly. There’s no flux capacitors.
Voidspace:
You can do that more online because you can actually incorporate so much more hard science. If you were in a physical space, you have to have a little bit of wibbly-wobbly MacGuffin-y to make it work within those limits.
Nicole Orabona:
Yeah. Sci-fi theatre is not an easy thing. I’ve done a couple of sci-fi shows, but they are challenging. You have to build out a futuristic world. If people are sitting there three feet away from your stage, they just notice the flaws.
Nathan Leigh:
Suspension of disbelief is hard in general, in any context. But you can suspend your disbelief a lot easier in a black box if you’re pretending it’s someone’s living room. If you’re in a black box theatre and you’re pretending it’s space in 200 years, it’s a bit harder to ask an audience to suspend their disbelief for. It’s why I think sci-fi thrives in the novel form. Because you can imagine that. Nobody has to build the set.
Voidspace:
So true. I wonder why, though. Because I think the greater the level of abstraction you can get, then the easier it is to create without a budget, basically. I wonder why sci-fi resists abstraction in a way that other genres might not… I don’t know the answer to that. It’s just an interesting question.
Nicole Orabona:
I don’t know either. It’s actually a really interesting question. It is an interesting question.
Nathan Leigh:
I think I take it for granted that it does, but I don’t think I know why.
Nicole Orabona:
The nice thing about this is we did actually build a spaceship in our basement.
Voidspace:
Beautiful.
Nicole Orabona:
Because we’re online, we have a camera, so we can control the angle and we can control the view of that. I think it allows for a little bit more suspension of disbelief.
Nathan Leigh:
That’s something that we’ve been really been quite intentional about in all of our stuff. Asking people to suspend the least amount of disbelief. Obviously, it is not 300 years in the future, and obviously, Nicole is not in space.
Nicole Orabona:
They’re sitting at home in their underwear getting nachos or whatever.
Voidspace:
That’s what I’d be doing. But to create something where within the concept of the fiction or the dramaturgy that you are actually able to be at home in your underwear eating nachos…that’s got to be the most important thing. Because for me, with online theatre, the biggest barrier is knowing that I’m at home here and you’re there. If you can create something that incorporates that dynamic, then you’ve won half the battle, right?
Nathan Leigh:
Exactly. Those are the questions that we start with whenever we start batting back and forth an idea. The thing we’re always trying to ask is: Why is this online? Why are we doing this this way? And trying to come up with a reason that we are not physically in the same space or lab.
In both of those, we are embodied in a network together. Physical space is irrelevant, because we’re embodied in a network and you are 2 billion miles away and the audience is on Earth watching on their laptops. The fewer the number of steps we can ask the audience to pretend aren’t happening, the more we get buy-in from them and we don’t have to fight as hard for their attention or for their investment, because it just feels real because we’re only asking them to pretend a couple of things instead a lot of things.
Voidspace:
I think with interactive, particularly, the role of the audience is so crucial. If you can pin down who the audience actually is and why they’re here, then you’ve got it. Or you can deliberately play with that – there are some shows that really lean into meta, which is harder to do.
But generally, I think you have to really pin down why the audience is here, more than in any other medium. As as an audience member, if you feel like, “this world is around me and it’s happening, but I don’t really know why I am part of it”, then that just breaks everything immediately.
Nicole Orabona:
They’re not going to be able to play fully or feel empowered to play if they don’t know why they’re there and what they’re supposed to be doing. They’ll feel like a deer in a headlights, going, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do” and then the whole thing can fall apart.
Voidspace:
Completely. You set it up with the initial conceit: you’re a billion miles away in space, the audience at home on the laptops. That’s a nice easy intro to a situation where everybody knows quite literally where they are.
Is there anything else that you do? I’m really interested in the role of onboarding and how you set the tone at the very start of the experience to get everybody in the right head space. And then there’s also facilitation in the moment and how you keep that going.
Nicole Orabona:
I think that’s the hardest thing for immersive theatre, and it’s the thing that can get so overlooked or left until the last minute – how do we get people in to here? How do we onboard?
Nathan Leigh:
It’s true, in-person and online. Anything where you’re asking the audience to embody something, where you have to facilitate that, if you don’t do it well, you can lose the audience for half of the performance because they’re just trying to figure it out.
Nicole Orabona:
They’re trying to catch up.
Voidspace:
Or they’ve been knocked out before they’ve even started.
Nathan Leigh:
Even if the rest of the performance is really fantastic and riveting, they have to catch up to it. There will be a moment halfway through where they click, but if you don’t set them up from the beginning, you’re setting yourself and them up for a bad time and for conflict.
Nicole Orabona:
There are definitely challenges online that are slightly different than in-person, because you don’t necessarily have the real-time response. Where I can see that you’re very uncomfortable with me being near you. You’re giving me physical signals of how you want to play and engage. I can adapt my strategies and my techniques to play the way you want to play and try and draw you in.
We’re doing something online where no one has cameras or mics on, and we’re like, okay, we have to just rely on what they’re saying in the chat to adapt. And it requires us to do a lot of pre-thinking. We rely so heavily on wonderful play-testers, friends and colleagues who are willing to come when things are in their initial stages, to be guinea pigs, because it’s just a lot of trial and error. Every time you think like, okay, this is how the audience is going to respond, this is how they’re going to engage, even if you’re basing that on how they engaged last time, you’re always wrong.
Voidspace:
How can you be responsive when you’re not getting the cues to respond to? Do you track how people are clicking around in the interface as well?
Nathan Leigh:
To some degree. I try to balance giving people freedom, I don’t want to be watching anybody’s camera or doing anything that crosses any lines into surveying them. Anything that is public to everyone else, we are monitoring. I’m not really watching any data or interactions that people are doing that isn’t already public to everyone else.
Voidspace:
That makes sense.
Nathan Leigh:
We try and create opportunities and moments for check-ins and opportunities and moments where there are public events where people don’t necessarily have to engage, but they’re incentivized to or encouraged to, so that we get a little bit of feedback.
labRats is the one that I think has the most variability in terms of how people can engage with it. That one, every audience is so different. We’re just sitting there during off moments, checking in, being like, oh, did you see that person? Okay, it seems like a lot of people are going over there and doing that thing, and they’re missing this thing over there. Okay, what should we do to incentivize them to go over there?
Nicole Orabona:
Then we can adapt and come over the mic in-character and try and guide folks. We also have chats all of them, and we really try and encourage folks to form a little microcosm of a community while they’re in for the hour.
So especially, part of it’s practical, because there’s just two of us. I’m performing, Nathan’s stage managing. We don’t have someone to be full on just tech support or to answer questions. We really try to encourage people to chat with each other to help each other, which also creates some lovely moments.
Nathan Leigh:
I think some of my favourite moments have been when somebody is truly stuck and someone just… There’s a fair amount of open-endedness in terms of how people can embody themselves or how they can identify themselves within these worlds. Someone will imbue themselves with a leadership position and step in and be like, alright, we’re doing this now. Every time it happens, it’s awesome.
Nicole Orabona:
We basically always try to just affirm people’s choices. We try to never tell anyone they’re playing wrong. There are no right or wrong ways to play. As long as you’re having fun.
Nathan Leigh:
If you’re having a terrible time, you’ve picked the wrong way to play.
Nicole Orabona:
No-one’s done it, but if someone were to come in and be hateful or violent or something like that, then obviously, we would step in. That hasn’t occurred. Hopefully, it never does.
Nathan Leigh:
But we do have some moderation tools that we’ve built just in case it does.
Nicole Orabona:
When we were creating POV, because you can draw, we were like, somebody’s going to try and draw a dick, right?
If they want to just fill their own screen with dicks, fine. But the people at the other side of the screen, they might not want a screen full of dicks. We had to have Nathan’s 13-year-old nephew, and we were like, here, take the computer. He was like, okay.
Voidspace:
A 13-year-old’s dream.
Nathan Leigh:
We had this competition where he was trying to draw stuff, and I was trying to use the moderation tools as quickly as possible to tamp it down. If he got through, we’d stop and hold it and be like, okay, what did you do? How did you get through? Then we’d check in and I’d look at his screen.
Nicole Orabona:
He was like, okay, great.
Voidspace:
Graffiti speed running. Incredible.
Nathan Leigh:
Basically. I read this comic yeas ago, so I don’t know how it’s aged, but there’s this comic that I loved when I was a kid called Penny Arcade, and they had the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. If you give somebody a screen in anonymity, they’re going to be a dick. Or at least you open up the possibility that someone will be a dick.
Nicole Orabona:
Or draw one.
Nathan Leigh:
Or draw one. But we go into our stuff knowing that our community is really supportive and kind, but sometimes people are dicks. We have to know that that’s a possibility and create a context where we can either diffuse it as we need to or eject them or just disincentivize it in the way that their interactions are allowed.
Voidspace:
That’s the thing. Crowd control has two elements to it. There’s the last result, how you’re going to deal with trouble, but there’s also the environment that you’re creating in order to get that response that you want out of people. I think that’s a real skill.
And I’ve been trying to think recently a lot about what distinguishes interactive theatre from LARP. And I have so many thoughts on that and so many people disagree with me.
Nicole Orabona:
That could be a whole other podcast. It could be a whole other thing.
Voidspace:
There are so many things to say, but one of them, I think, is about the role of conscious workshopping and the participants building their own atmosphere and having the tools to do so.
One question is: who has the responsibility to create that atmosphere in that community? In LARP, it rests with the participants to do it in the community. There will be moderators, but the participants will do the work beforehand, in the workshops etc. Whereas I think in theatre, you have to expect that not everybody is going to be an expert in doing that or will want to do that. It’s much more your responsibility as facilitator and as creator to create an atmosphere that allows people to experience atmosphere that you want, without having to really consciously think about it.
Nathan Leigh:
We put a lot of time and thought and energy into gaming it out that so that we know how it might impact people. Obviously, you can’t predict everything people are going to do, because people are very surprising. But we try. Every time there’s a new idea that one of us pitches, we’ll game it out. If we do that and someone comes in and this triggers something for them, or this reminds them of something, or this evokes something, does that distract them from the experience? Does that incentivize them to play in a way that’s outside what we’re hoping they’ll do?
We really try to strategize to make sure that we’re shaping the space, this ephemeral hour that we’re all together, into something for the people who are showing up to it, who want it to be good, and they want it to not be disturbed or disrupted. They are less likely to be disruptive or be disrespectful. Why come to a show with trouble?
Nicole Orabona:
Mischief is great. Mischief is fine, but we try and think, mischief versus disruption.
Nathan Leigh:
Yeah.
Voidspace:
The thing is, again, it’s how you structure it and it’s the play that you’re creating and encouraging. I mean, for example, if you’re going to lean very heavily into a PvP-type dynamic, you have to handle that so differently than if you’re running it as a collaborative game.
You have to build so much more into your structure to handle it. One issue is you’ve created a dynamic that is going to bring out in people competitiveness or tension or whatever, and another is if you’ve just not created something compelling enough and people get bored and try to break it. I think those are the two big pitfalls, really. It doesn’t come down to in the moment moderation. It comes down to everything you’ve done before that moment, to create your environment, that makes it easy.
Nathan Leigh:
Something that I think…we didn’t do this at first in POV, and we learned the hard way. We had a performance where things started glitching out really weirdly. It started to look a lot like a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. I’m looking at things on the server while I’m trying to stage manage the show and things are glitching out. I’m freaking out because we had talked about what to do in case of a disruption like this, but we’d never really done it. We’re going oh god, someone’s like, we’re being targeted. What’s going on? We’re just two nobodies. Why is someone doing this?
Voidspace:
A DDoS is when a hacker is deliberately targeting a particular site with the intent of disrupting what it’s doing, right?
Nathan Leigh:
Yeah, and they do so by overloading the server, by making way too many calls to the server in a very short period of time. That was what was happening to us, was that the server was getting overloaded. We had tested how many participants we could have, and we had tested different response times, and it all worked out. We keep our house sizes to what they are based on what our systems can handle.
Eventually we worked out that it was one of Nicole’s friends who had been playing on multiple devices. We’d never said not to.
Nicole Orabona:
We love when people play in a way that we didn’t tell them that you could. We say: there are no rules! Play however you want! And then we’re like, oh, wait…Not that way.
Nathan Leigh:
Now we try to be really upfront with language about how it’s just two of us. We’re two people. We’re doing this. We break even doing this. We’re not funded by anybody. We’re just doing it because it’s important and meaningful to us to do. Everything is held together with hope and a dream. Please be gentle. Don’t try to break things.
I think since we’ve started including some of that messaging and some of that language in our onboarding process, we haven’t had anything like that since.
But I think we realised the hard way that you cannot just onboard in terms of, here’s who you are. Here’s what the rules of the space are. You also have to onboard with, here’s who we are. Here’s what our limitations are. If you start trying to see what you can get away with or trying to do disruptive things just because you’re bored or because you think it’s fun, please understand that there might be consequences for us, and we’re just two people who are doing this in our spare time. We are trying to be upfront about the fact that we’re people and not an institution.
I think that has, I hope, got the result we’re after. It has reminded people that, look, we’re all here to have a good time, so let’s not try to have a bad time.
Voidspace:
I think if you’re just really upfront with people that you’re all doing this for the love of it, then you draw to you the people that understand that and who want to be part of it in the way that you want it to be.
Nathan Leigh:
I think that’s very true. I think there is just culturally right now a lot of attention and in some cases animosity towards just the very idea of an institution. People are really frustrated with a great many things in their lives, mostly justifiably so. I feel like if you pretend to be an institution when you’re just a couple of jackasses on the internet, you’re inviting a level of widespread hostility that just is out there in the air for no reason. Why not just be honest that we’re just some jackasses on the internet who just thought it would be fun? We hope you’ll think it’s fun, too. It’s pretty wholesome, actually.
Voidspace:
It’s super wholesome.
Nathan Leigh:
I think because we’re honest about that, people see that.
Voidspace:
I think sometimes you get back the energy that you put out in these situations. What do you see the future having in store here?
Nicole Orabona:
As far as the future goes, this is our first repertory season. We’d like to continue it every year because, again, we’ve put in so much time and effort and resources into creating this platform, into creating these shows. The traditional theatre making model is really unsustainable. They build these elaborate sets, and then four weeks later, throw them in the dumpster. In our commitment to having a sustainable arts practise, we want to be able to bring these shows back as long as people are interested in experiencing them.
We also do a couple of times a year remote salon called Beta Test. We really want to build the community of remote theatre, digital theatre, online theatre, whatever. We’re really invested in this community and growing it and making it as good as it can be. In those salons we pay artists to come and showcase 10 minutes of a work in progress.
Nathan Leigh:
They’ve been really cool.
Nicole Orabona:
They’ve been really great. They’re super low-key, but the audience loves them. The artists get something out of it. Multiple people that participated in Beta Test went on to fully develop those pieces into shows.
But also Beta Test is a chance for us to work out our next idea. We basically always have something in the cooker that we’re doing a little bit at a time and sharing a little bit at a time to make it work. We have a few more projects in the works. One of them is a partial by-mail experience, trying to do a little more asynchronous there. We’ve got a couple. We’ve got a music-heavy interactive show. We’ve got a murder mystery that’s just silly.
Nathan Leigh:
Our long-term plan is basically to build it out so that we can keep doing this because it’s fun and we like it and we like the people who come to it. We want to set things up such that we don’t have to… I think there’s so many companies who are our size who set their sights on like, if we get into Edinburgh Fringe this year, then we’ll get noticed, and then we’ll get picked up, and then everything will be possible. They go into debt doing so. The odds of moving to a next step from any of those things are so astronomically small.
I’ve been part of so many New York Musical Theatre Festival shows back in the day, where you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on a roll of the dice that the right person will come to your show and allow you to make it on the terms that you want. Our goal is to just keep making things on the terms that we can, and not go into debt, not overtax ourselves or do something that means this show is make or break.
We can afford to fail. I don’t think we will, but if we do, whatever.
Nicole Orabona:
I think it’s cool to be part of a burgeoning art form. We frequently say we feel like it’s like when silent movies were moving into talkies, where you can see that there’s all these lingering after effects of silent films. And vaudeville too, in these early talkies. You can see the artists working out the new rules of this art form. We feel like we’re in that space right now, and we’re invested in how other people are working out those roles and sharing those things with each other.
Nathan Leigh:
Because I think what’s cool about this medium and exciting about it now that it’s… I think up to about 2022, I would say it was a subset of the traditional theatre. It was this little weird growth on the side of traditional theatre.
Now I feel like it’s actually split off and it is its own thing. I think that’s wonderful. I think that’s the best thing that could possibly have happened to it because it is a medium that is really dynamic and flexible. What’s been really cool over the past year, especially, is seeing people who are technically working in the same medium as we are, using the same basic idioms and tools and framings and making work that is just totally different than anything we would come up with, both in terms of aesthetics and narrative and how you interact.
I think because it’s a theatre medium that incorporates performance and writing and design. This medium, remote theatre, whatever you want to call it, incorporates performance and writing and design and also code and also social dynamics and also philosophy and also social criticism through the means of ironic use of programmes. This wonderful artist, Parker Sela, created this piece that I think about almost every day. This PowerPoint piece, where it’s this ironic reappropriation of PowerPoint.
Nicole Orabona:
On one of our Beta Tests, she was working on a piece where she essentially is a TA trapped in a PowerPoint.
It’s meta and strange and deconstructs all of the online tools that we use for business and interactivity because people are working in the PowerPoint.
Voidspace:
That sounds amazing.
Nathan Leigh:
Strange and beautiful. It’s so different to what we’re doing yet also definitely in the same scene. I think it reminds me also a little bit of ’77 punk rock where you’ve got the Sex Pistols and you’ve got Ramones, but you also have Elvis Costello and Patti Smith.
Voidspace:
Half Man, Half Biscuit, off out there doing all kinds of weird shit that no one else is going to understand outside of that scene.
Nathan Leigh:
Exactly. They’re all punk, I think, even if none of them sound the same. I think that’s where this scene is right now, that none of us are making the same copy-cutter art as each other, but we’re all making stuff that’s super cool and definitely in the same world. Our big meta goal is just more of that, please.
Voidspace:
What advice do you have for aspiring creators?
Nicole Orabona:
My advice is that there are no stupid ideas. I am a very firm believer in the power of a stupid idea and to try everything once.
Nathan Leigh:
I would say learn to make your own tools because something that I think we are all experiencing right now, especially with the rise of generative AI cannibalising the internet, is that if you are reliant on other people’s tools, the master’s tools can’t destroy the master’s house.
If you’re relying on closed-source tools by private corporations and you only know how to do something using Zoom or to do something using Google Docs or whatever, but you don’t know how to make your own, even if you don’t have any interest in making your own.
But learn how these things work because certain elements of these things are atrophying and they are changing. I’ve had many times in my life where there’s a tool that I was using, a programme, piece of software, whatever, that I was really depending on for a project, and the developers rush out an update, and suddenly something that I was doing or using it with is no longer possible, and I just have to throw it out.
Voidspace:
This feels almost like advice for the apocalypse. When people say, learn how to grow your own wheat and spin your own wool, it’s like that, but for the digital world. Make your own tools. I like it.
Nicole Orabona:
Get out there and do it.
Nathan Leigh:
I think those answers pretty much sum us up as people.