“With words, we’re going to conjure things collectively. Yes, we’ve got the map, but we’re inviting you to walk around it. We’ll keep it for you, but you’re the ones exploring.” The ability to create spaces, buildings or even a whole town with words alone lies at the heart of Seth Kriebel and Zoe Bouras’ work.
They join us in the voidspace to talk about their human-driven text-adventure style experiences The Unbuilt Room and A House Repeated, their participatory mythical storytelling and the worlds that they can create together with their audience using words, choices, and a little shared imagination.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace! Thank you so much for joining us in our little haunted attic today. Perhaps you can start by telling us who you both are and what you do.
Seth Kriebel:
I’m Seth Kriebel. It’s always hard to describe what I do. I make performance, and that performance is almost always interactive in some way.
Zoe Bouras:
I usually just describe myself as a theatre maker. I work as a performer, an actor, director and devisor, but it mostly falls into the category of theatre, most of which is unusual.
Seth Kriebel:
That’s the intersection of our Venn diagram: We both make unusual performance.
voidspace:
I’d love to know how you ended up drawn to making interactive work, in particular.
Zoe Bouras:
I worked for quite a long time with an experimental theatre company. We never had a fourth wall, so it was very permeable. And sometimes we were directly dealing with audiences, and talking with them, so I already felt comfortable with that dynamic and was excited about it.
Even though I still see myself as a theatre person, I’ve been flirting in the live art arena as well because we could try things out that felt a bit more gritty, and interesting to me. I’d got a bit fed up with theatre, frankly, so I drifted into that arena, and that involves a lot of direct, hands-on action with the audience.
Seth Kriebel:
I was also in the live art sector. I was running a company that was facilitating other people’s work. And I’m a bit of a magpie. I tend to think in terms of “what if”? What can I try? Perhaps if I tried that, that’d be cool.
I don’t have theatre training. That’s not my background at all. But I was in that live art world, I was surrounded by that, and that experience led me this way. If I’d been hanging out with a lot of poets or boiler men, then maybe the “what ifs” would have expressed themselves in a different way.
voidspace:
How does your creative partnership work?
Seth Kriebel:
Zoe’s a proper theatre person with training and experience, and I’m the one who asks “what if we do that?” Zoe will either tell me that’s a terrible idea or she’ll figure out how to make it work.
Zoe Bouras:
When I met Seth, he was playing with a lot of conceptual art concepts, which were fascinating to me because I was a theatre person and I’d been tiptoeing into live art and looking at conceptual art, going, “what is this?” It is so exciting and fresh to someone who comes from theatre. I was really intrigued by what he was doing, the way he was thinking, and it freshened up all my jaded feelings and thoughts about theatre. I was looking for something different, and he had those things going on in his life.
voidspace:
There are a lot of different interactivities in theatre nowadays, so I’d love you to explain a bit about the particular kinds of interactivity that you explore in your work.
Seth Kriebel:
The Unbuilt Room is where it all started. That’s a show that started nearly 14 years ago, and is still going. It came out of one of these “what if”s. What if, a text adventure game, but live?
14 years later, we’re still doing different versions of it. We tend to present it in a theatrical context, so we use the language of theatre. We refer to it as a performance, and to “audience” rather than “players” or “readers”.
Zoe Bouras:
I also think it shifts the perception of the audience, going in. It’s very important, the words you choose. You’ve got one sentence you can give to someone, on the blurb before they arrive, to prime them, and I think putting it in that context just shifts that perception of what the experience is going to be, in an interesting and useful way.
Seth Kriebel:
The Unbuilt Room is a short show, 30 minutes-ish, for a small audience. It’s effectively a live text adventure, live interactive fiction.
We sit in a circle – I’m just one of the people in the circle – and I’m the computer, to put it in the language of the text adventure. I will describe a place, and then turn to one of the other people in the circle and say, “What would you like to do?” That’s the question that is repeated throughout the game: “What would you like to do?” It’s an open-ended question. They can say whatever they want, and then there are obstacles and solutions that they have to figure out. For instance, the door is locked. You go to find the key.
The audience work as a group, acting as a single avatar. They can say anything, and most things they say will make something happen, but only a few things will advance the experience. If you say, “go east”, then I’ll describe the room to the east and I’ll turn to another person and say, “what would you like to do?” They could say “jump up and down”, and I’d say, “you jump up and down”, and that happens, and they imagine it happening, but it doesn’t really progress things.
And the only goal expressed at the beginning is “explore”. That is the only thing we’re here to do: explore. See what you can discover. That is the one kind of base type of interactivity in our work. Zoe and I, if it’s a two person show, are holding this world in our head. It’s not improvised at all. The world we invite the audience to explore stays the same. We describe it to the audience, and they explore it by one response to the question “what would you like to do?”, and the next one, and the next one. It unspools.
Zoe Bouras:
It isn’t improvised. There’s a fixed map for every show. The geography is fixed. We can’t change it. It would be crazy if we tried to mid-show. That is what we all work off, and the audience are stepping into the same world as we are. We’re all in the same place.
Seth Kriebel:
They’re exploring, just trying to see what’s out there. Ideally, when circumstances permit, the game world that’s being explored is based on the building that the audience is in. So, they’ll walk into the theatre, pick up the ticket, have a drink in the bar. When show starts, they’ll come in, sit down with us, and we will put them back outside. We’ll describe that they are back outside the theatre, and the first thing they do is walk in.
That lets us rewrite the building. And we can do that to highlight the history and the heritage of the building, if that’s what we’ve been commissioned to do. Or we can just change things and go nuts. So, the audience will be exploring the building that they’ve already walked through. When the show is over, and they leave the room, they’ll walk back through the place that they had just walked through. Now, they’ll know that as they walk past a door it’s not just a janitorial cupboard, but a secret staircase, or whatever. We can’t always do that, because commissions are expensive and time consuming, so there is also a non-site specific version.
We did The Unbuilt Room in lots of places, for lots of years. We did a version at Battersea Arts Centre, that was based on their building. It was celebrating the 120th anniversary of that building, which had been Battersea Town Hall. We went through a development process after that, where we took the The Unbuilt Room and bent it, and broke it, and stretched it, and tried to figure out what else it might be.
One of those other things it turned into was A House Repeated, where we took the audience and expanded it. How many people can we do this with? That show then became a full-length hour and 15 minutes show. It had an audience of up to 80, in two teams. It all expanded, but it was based on the same core interactivity.
One of the other things we did in that process of trying different things was a completely different type of interactivity, which is much more akin to a ‘Choose your own adventure’ style book (though I know we can’t legally use those words), than a text adventure computer game. It was more of a storytelling show, called We This Way.
We also did our version of Beowulf, which asked the question, “how do you make an existing story interactive?” Because for a story to be a story, it has to hit certain beats. If the rebels don’t blow up the Death Star, is it Star Wars? But Beowulf is still largely based on the Unbuilt Room style of interactivity in that one, it was built for a more traditional theatre setup where you had an end-on proscenium arch, but we brought some of the audience on stage with us. They were the people playing The Unbuilt Room, guiding Beowulf around, and the rest of the audience watched.Then it developed much more.
Based on that Unbuilt Room type of interactivity, we just recently finished doing The Death of King Arthur. That’s back to the We This Way: Do you want this? Or do you want that? Do you want to hear the tale of Merlin? Do you want to hear the tale of the Lady of the Lake? You pick.
Arthur is born, and that’s codified. And Arthur dies, and that’s codified, but the middle is a little bit wibbly. It was changed, over hundreds and hundreds of years, by all these different authors. The audience can pick if they want to hear this story or this story or this bit or that bit. They shape their own story of Arthur.
voidspace:
I’ve been getting into – very belatedly – parser games, and discovering the unique frustrations of trying to answer that question. “What do you want to do?” and the forms of language that you need to be able to do something that the computer will understand.
I can see the appeal of being able to ask that question of a human agent who can interpret natural language and actually work with what people are asking.
Seth Kriebel:
Frustration plays an important role in it, though.
Zoe Bouras:
We’ve found you need a little grit, as you do for any theatre to work. You need a little grit, a little frustration, to make a little friction with the audience. But it’s a matter of balancing it, and knowing when you can use that, and how much is too frustrating.
Seth Kriebel:
If it’s not frustrating enough, there’s no challenge. You need to make their experience just a little bit frustrating, so that when they overcome an obstacle, there’s a sense of achievement.
voidspace:
How do you make that balance?
Zoe Bouras:
It’s tricky because audiences are different. Of course, we were particularly working mostly in theatres where they’re not a gaming audience. They come in with no knowledge, quite often, of game-type language and experiences. So, the frustration could be very high very quickly. We had to work out ways to be able to smooth that experience and also have different levels of help we could give them to lubricate the mechanism a little bit.
Seth Kriebel:
It tends to make the frustration structural rather than formal. There’s no frustration or very little frustration, in terms of the kind of frustration you’d get with a language parser. I’m very rarely going to say “I don’t understand”.
But they quickly get the idea that they have to do a bit more. The frustration is more in terms of obstacle and solutions. They can’t open the door; they have to go find the key. That makes them retrace their steps, which makes them hear the room descriptions again, which makes them build it more in their minds, because the first time, when they first start the game, they don’t know what’s going on. It’s just some guy very gently saying, “imagine a place like this. You’re in this place, you’re in this place”, and it just bounces right off their forehead. It takes a moment of wandering around in a circle and retracing their steps to settle into it. Then they finally figure out that they can use the things they find, and interact with the world.
We always encourage them to talk with each other. They learn how to interact with the world, and they overcome those moments of frustration and feel a real sense of achievement. We build the frustration in that way, not in that “I want to hurl a brick through my computer” sort of way.
Zoe Bouras:
The language needs to have an ease to it, and the mechanisms need to have an ease to them, so that people can step in as quickly as possible, and as painlessly as possible to get to the nub of the thing, which is where the really satisfying type of frustration lies.
voidspace:
Do you have the ability to be responsive? So that if it seems like you’ve got a particularly stuck or potentially antsy crowd, you can make it a bit easier and harder if it looks like you’ve got a more savvy crowd?
Seth Kriebel:
You can’t change the obstacle solutions to make it easier. We can use little subtle performer tricks.
Zoe Bouras:
It’s in the performing of it. And this is where it is quite a human thing, because you can suss out across the crowd by their look sometimes, but not always by their body language, how they’re doing.
Obviously, we want them to enjoy it, but we know there are built in frustrations. They’re going to hit walls at certain points and they have to hit them and they have to hit a wall where, for instance, we won’t give them what they want; they have to turn to their neighbours and start working together. That usually happens by about ten minutes in. By ten minutes in they have to talk with each other, otherwise their frustration level goes through the roof. Usually somebody in the group will work that out. But performatively we can do things to bring it back.
If the room is getting a bit serious, you can try and lighten the mood a bit by very obviously adding a little emphasis to it. But you just have to play the room a bit. We’ll use a very little light improvisation within a very tight structure, and very scripted scenario. We cannot change the words. Just how we play it might shift a little, according to how we need to just help them out a little.
Seth Kriebel:
We will try to help. We want everyone to have a good time.
Zoe Bouras:
We’ve changed so much since the very beginning, when Seth first did The Unbuilt Room on his own. He had a complete computer persona. There was almost a live art sort of feel to it. It was very cut off, expressionless. The performing style was completely different. Over the years, we’ve warmed it up and warmed it up.
We realised we didn’t need that mechanical style of deliver, just because the concept came from computers. We’re humans in the room, and it makes it more pleasurable for us as the audience to deliver it in a more human way.
voidspace:
I still have a very vivid memory of the performance of A House Repeated that I saw. felt like an exercise in collective storytelling. I know in a way it isn’t, because you’ve got control of the map and you’ve ultimately got control of what happens . But it felt more like sitting around a campfire and creating something together.
Seth Kriebel:
That’s the vibe we’re going for.
Zoe Bouras:
The Unbuilt Room. It’s in a circle. And we often light it with a sense of campfire, because it should have that sense that it’s just words. With words, we’re going to conjure things collectively. Yes, we’ve got the map, but we’re inviting you to walk around it. We’ll keep it for you, but you’re the ones exploring. That’s the notion, and the feel we are aiming for.
voidspace:
I love the way that you carry this whole place around in your head. It really struck me that Beowulf is one of the stories that you brought to life in that kind of way, because it’s all so deeply rooted in the oral tradition of storytelling.
Zoe Bouras:
Beowulf was the first time we’d ever mixed up different mechanisms. It had Unbuilt Room style exploration as one component amongst others, including some straight storytelling. We did drop in some straight storytelling at various points. And even a little bit of first-person narration, which was new as well.
Seth Kriebel:
Even a little bit of improv.
Zoe Bouras:
Which is not something either of us do, usually. We brought a couple of people onto stage and around a table, wanting a kind of pub feel. And we only did it for specific moments of fighting, where there were two key fights. Because, in a sense, as long as we’re on a trajectory, we have to get everyone from A to B. The plot is a bit like the geography of the house. It’s immovable. We can’t change it. That’s not our fault either. It just is what it is. So the structure, the plot, stays the same. But what happens in the fight? We suddenly realised that it doesn’t matter. Let’s have some fun. So, what could happen? It became this story in the pub. We’d ask the audience members, “what happened in that fight you were in?” And they’d answer, “Well, I pulled his hair…”
Seth Kriebel:
So, it changed every time. Every night the story is the same, except the story is completely different. Because it’s a story for and with these particular people.
voidspace:
How do you hold this fixed geography in your head for your Unbuilt Room style shows? How do you learn a space?
Seth Kriebel:
Think about your house.
Zoe Bouras:
The room you’re in now.
Seth Kriebel:
You could talk us around your house. If you got the cardinal directions in your head, you could describe that room and say, “oh, to the west is the kitchen, and in the kitchen is this. And there’s a door to the north”, and you could just do it.
As part of the scripting process, we’ll make the map, and either that’s the non-sited map or it’s a map of the building that we’re working with for a given commission. For a commission, we edit it selectively. Take, for example, Battersea Arts Centre. You couldn’t go everywhere in A House Repeated, when you came in. You could go up the stairs, down the stairs, or north, but you couldn’t go into the bar, you couldn’t go into the ticket office. We massage it and try to keep true to the geography, the architecture, but we’re not doing everything. We whittle it down. In the early days, we spent a lot of time perfecting this format. So, there’s a certain number of rooms in The Unbuilt Room, and there’s a certain geography to them because you don’t want it just to be one long corridor.
You need to have intersections, so you have a genuine choice, rather than just forward and back. You want to go back, forward or left. Now you have a choice. It needs to be structured so that you bump against things and have to retrace your steps so that the repetition helps build the memory and the internal conjuring of the room. You want to have to do that multiple times.
There’s one story we like to tell from an early Unbuilt Room. One of the obstacles was a wall of balloons and you couldn’t get past them until you figured out that you had to pull a pin out of a board of butterflies and then pop the balloons. We never said what colour the balloons were. Afterwards in the bar, we’d chat with the audience and say, “so, what colour were those balloons?” And everybody knew what colour they were. “Oh, they were red.” No, they weren’t. I didn’t say that. They’re imagining it, right? We’re trying to give them those moments to fill in, that they share in the creation of the world in that way. So, there’s not that much script to remember. It’s not nothing, but each room only has a small amount of description because if we give them too much, it’ll just bounce right off of them. We can’t go into detail. We give them a couple of lines and let them do the rest of the work in conjuring it.
As it’s repeated and repeated, they flesh it out more. If the description was too long, repetition then would get boggy. So you need to just have just a few lines, just enough that they can start to imagine it for themselves.
Then the next time they come through, they’ll know where they are, and then what they imagine gets bigger. Then they imagine the chequerboard floor, and then they imagine something else. So holding the world in your brain, it’s not nothing, but it’s easier than doing Hamlet. It’s not that much.
voidspace:
It feels like more, maybe because of the collaborative nature of it.
Seth Kriebel:
I think the trick is you do have to have a firm grip on the world, because if you accidentally move a door…
It’s a real performing challenge, because you don’t know what the next line is, you’re waiting. If the audience say upstairs, well, you’re going to do that. But if they say, west, well, you’re going to do that.
Zoe Bouras:
We have to be very accurate. If I’ve been tired, particularly in the days when we used to do The Unbuilt Rooms at festivals up to twelve times a day, because you’ve heard so many different versions of where people want to go and they’ve filled in the room, so much has happened, that sometimes you have to be extra careful slip about where the exits are. Because if you move one, you’ve completely screwed up the geography. So, you have to correct yourself.
What’s the only time we correct ourselves? If you give that piece of information incorrectly, it messes everything up. So we have to be very accurate on repeating things, even the initial description. I always think of it as a line sketch of the room, sketching out the basics that you will fill in. You’ll just naturally fill it in to whatever level of imagination and visuals that your brain does, or however your brain wants to fill it in.
We do the line sketch. But the line sketch has to be accurate, and the details of exits have to be absolutely spot on every time. Then every time, as soon as we’ve said it, I can find myself poised, because I’m waiting to see how quickly you’re going to take me to the next room, because I might have to switch my brain to any one of three spaces.
I also have to remember if you’ve changed anything. In one of the early iterations, we perhaps foolishly, very foolishly, had a black wall, and you found some chalk. So then people, every time they went in, would draw something on it, and we’d have to remember everything that had been added.
Seth Kriebel:
We didn’t do that again.
Zoe Bouras:
The other thing that happens sometimes in performing is if you get quite a gamey crowd, they understand the mechanisms, and sometimes they skip as if we’re computers.
They buck the convention of politely listening to every description. As soon as we said the drawing room, they go “go north” and they won’t listen. It’s okay because then it’s quite fun, we’re on our toes, we go, “right, so you’re into the next room” and it does make it suddenly bubble along very fast. That can be quite fun.
voidspace:
What does interactivity in theatre mean to you?
Seth Kriebel:
From my point of view, I think interactivity means that the audience has a meaningful impact on the experience. If the show could be performed to an empty room, it’s not interactive.
We all know that there’s always some kind of feedback loop in any live performance between audience and performer. Even the West End show that’s been on for 40 years still has “that audience is flat, that audience is great” and it energises the performers, or the performers have to work hard. It’s not like cinema, where you can walk out of the room and it just carries on. There is always that kind of that feedback loop, but it’s difficult to describe that beyond vibes.
I’m talking about meaningful impact, where the audience does something, gives some sort of feedback that changes the experience. That’s how I think of it. There are other types of interactivity. Panto is interactive. The audience yelling, “oh, no, it isn’t”. It doesn’t change the course of the show, it just changes the jokes in the show. If they pull somebody up on stage and if that person is fun, then the jokes are different. But the show just kind of still ticks along. A to B to C.
Whereas with The Unbuilt Room, you’re going to get from the beginning to the end, but you might take a straight line or you might take an incredibly circuitous route. You’re going to have an impact on how the show unfolds. Same with the more ‘choose your own adventure’ stuff with Arthur. Arthur’s born and Arthur dies. But the bits in the middle will change.
There’s a line from in the beginning of Beowulf where, I tell the audience that this story ends with a dragon. We know what’s coming, and through the whole thing, you’re waiting. You’re waiting for the dragon. You know it’s out there. But at the very beginning I say: “but it’s not how a story ends that’s important, it’s how you tell it.” So that’s where the interactivity that we work with comes from. It’s not full improv, where no one knows how it’s ending. We know how it’s going to end, but it’s how you tell it, and how we’re going to make it and tell it together. That’s how I think of interactivity.
Zoe Bouras:
For me, it’s a question of degrees, because I’ve worked a lot in a lot of different kinds of theatre. The interactivity, it just varies a lot. It depends how much you’re taking back from the audience and making obvious. I think quite often a lot is taken back by performers, but not made apparent on stage.
Everything that comes back from the audience is made present on stage. That’s what feeds in for me, because I worked with an experimental theatre group called Apocryphal Theatre at Camden People’s Theatre, and we toured around for many years. That happened a lot there, where the audience would feed in and then what they’d given us would become present on stage. That’s how it works for me.
voidspace:
Can you tell us about any particularly memorable moments in your experience of performing this work?
Seth Kriebel:
In one iteration of The House Repeated, you might recall this. One of the things you had to do to overcome an obstacle was you had to sing a song. All that was required of the audience was to know the right song – you found that information elsewhere in the building. You had to go in a certain room and then you had to say, “sing We’ll Meet Again”, and that unlocks a door.
In one show, a woman stood up, turned to her side of the audience and conducted a sing along. Everyone was singing “We’ll Meet Again”, which we didn’t see coming. That was cool.
Zoe Bouras:
Because the audience do get performative sometimes. One I particularly liked was we were doing The Unbuilt Room in Shoreham-by-Sea. We were in one of the houseboats that they have on the river.
The starting point was in the church. And I think the first thing they could do was go up the bell tower to look out, and get an overview of the town before you went down and out again. We gave one woman this choice of going up and she said, “oh, no, I’m afraid of heights”. Now we’re just sitting on a chair in a boat and she just has to say, “go up”. But she would not because she was afraid of heights. It was an incredible moment.
Zoe Bouras:
Sometimes people get their own personal things, but this was so immediate and immediately stymied her from doing something. And I felt a little sad afterwards, because I don’t like heights either. And this was her chance to do it. It was a brilliant, beautiful, slightly sad, poignant moment.
When we were at Battersea Arts Centre as well, people did get a little enthusiastically invested and one time, I don’t know what instigated this, but we were doing A House Repeated there, and suddenly – fairly early on in the show – someone felt inspired to stand up and leave the room to go and find something that we’d been talking about.
voidspace:
That’s a testament to the power of imagination right there.
Zoe Bouras:
I’m glad they came back. We didn’t know why they’d left.
It is brilliant. It’s so lovely afterwards, because at the moment when you’re performing, there is a bit of a panic because you’re trying to hold everyone in your palm and gently guide them. So if someone goes completely off-piste for a moment, you’re left wondering “what the heck is going on? Do I need to do anything?”
But it’s always great to see how invested people get.
voidspace:
Is there a challenge that you are most proud of overcoming?
Seth Kriebel:
It’s often just a matter of persuading people to actually let us do this stuff, and then doing it, and then doing another one. Because it is kind of weird stuff, I suppose.
It’s this strange combination of incredibly niche and also super-accessible. We pride ourselves on being very accessible, because once you’re in the room sitting down, we’re just having a chat. We’ve done it with so many different types of people.
voidspace:
It’s persuading people that they want to get into that room in the first place.
Seth Kriebel:
Yes. And before that, it’s persuading someone to let us in the room. And that can be really tricky because even 14 years in, I do not have a good 20-second pitch of what this is.
Zoe Bouras:
It’s really hard to describe. I think we’ve narrowed it down as tightly as we can. The best thing is it’s so low tech. It can be no tech. It’s the most tech free show I’ve ever done, and probably ever will do.
But I love the fact that sometimes when Seth’s been trying to go and sell it to someone, describe it to a producer or whatever, he’s literally sat in a café and said, “All right, the best way to do it is if you do this show. So we’re going to do it right now. Here we go.” And he’s done it, literally over a table in a café.
Seth Kriebel:
Once you do it, you immediately understand it. But to describe it is difficult.
I guess the other thing is, over the years, to refine the exploration game form mechanically, to make it work. To kind refine The Unbuilt Room and then The House Repeated form to make it bulletproof. It took a long time and a lot of iterations, but we got there.
Zoe Bouras:
It’s a piece of clockwork, basically. It’s a piece of clockwork, very carefully presented. Seth does the clockwork, and I’ve been interested, over the years to refine the language and the performing style. All of these things have changed quite drastically over the years.
hey have to work together, and there’s nothing else we can go to, to look at to see how this might work. So we’ve had to work it out on our own. That was the biggest challenge, and the thing I feel the most sort of proud of. We know it can work, and it can work for anybody.
voidspace:
What advice do you have for aspiring creators in interactive performance?
Seth Kriebel:
Interactive performance work is really tricky, in two ways. It’s tricky to produce. Rehearsing and presenting, all of that is really geared for non-interactive stuff. Physical structures like theatres, where the audience is in the dark, even stuff that’s all based on fourth-wall assumptions, pitching to artistic directors, explaining to the media or publicity departments what you’re doing.
The advice is: you really need to know what you’re doing. There’s no room for waffle, so you have to have a really solid explanation of what you’re going to do, and how it’s going to work and if at all possible, let the people that you hope to work with experience it.
And the second way interactive work is tricky is it’s tricky to make artistically. It takes a long time to refine this stuff and it is never perfect straight out of the gate. And I know this is the same for more traditional playwriting. You write it, you workshop it, but this is harder.
Zoe Bouras:
Interactive performance is harder because we’re making the form as well as making the content. You’re creating a new form, in effect.
Seth Kriebel:
It’s doubly difficult because you never know how it’s going to work in the room until you try it. You think you know, you think you know exactly what the audience is going to do, and then they invariably do something else.
Zoe Bouras:
You need a large number of friends, or you need ways of finding people to try things out with. There’s a lot of that before you can get to that point. Your first point, to be able to speak coherently about it, is really hard. It’s really hard. It’s very hard to sell it in the early days because you don’t know exactly what it is yourself, and you’re refining it. It’s probably going to be a bit lumpy and bumpy at the beginning, so it’s very difficult.
Seth Kriebel:
It’s difficult to rehearse because now you need people. And then to rehearse it again, you need a new group of people because you can’t use the same ones again.
It is like a game in a lot of ways. Like a game, it needs extensive play testing, so you need to figure it out as much as you can on your own and then put it in front of people as much as you can. Revise, iterate, just keep going, going. It takes a long time artistically and it’s hard to produce. The advice is, keep doing it. Don’t think your first draft is going to be even remotely close to what it ends up being.
And when you talk to people, know what you’ve got, know what you’re doing, what you want to do, how it’s going to work and get them to experience it as much as possible.
Zoe Bouras:
And go for places where they’ll support you to try things out. Art centres, small spaces. A pub space that has a scratch night, anywhere where you can go in and try some things in front of an enthusiastic crowd who will give you instant feedback. That’s what you need. You need a lot of that.
voidspace:
An enthusiastic crowd is what we aim to find here, in the voidspace. Thank you for coming to talk to us.
Find out more about The Unbuilt Room and other shows here
Seth will be performing The Unbuilt Room at voidspace live (in association with Theatre Deli) on Sunday 9 June 2024.