IS IT THEATRE OR IS IT FILM?
Innovations in Socially Distant Performance, as a team and as individuals, is most often asked, “But is virtual theatre actually theatre or is it film?” We feel that the myriad of responses to this question from the community of artists making virtual theatre will be a richer response than simply centering our own. Below, we coalesce statements we have collected from performance makers and scholars who have worked to wrestle with the binary between theatre and film or who have pushed against a definition of theatre. We asked them, “Is virtual theatre film or theatre?” with no expectation about the answer.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Artist and Writer
“I'm going to tell you a secret. There are no rules. Everything we know about traditions that dictate form in art, design, and engineering, are all imagined. Yes, shows happened, yes, people made these objects or created these experiences that taught us something, that moved us, that entertained us. And that history means something.Theater, art, design, engineering, and performance histories are all important. But who says that we, artists today, have to repeat history made by our predecessors? If that's the case then why bother learn about what came before us? If we don't learn from that history and build something new with that knowledge, then what value does that history and its preservation have? With virtual theatre, we have an opportunity to set new expectations, we have an opportunity to innovate. It is not the same as in-person theater or film. It's its own thing, and what is happening now online is very inspiring, particularly during the pandemic, where in-person performance has shifted online and artists who have, for years, been working in the video, virtual, or digital spaces are pushing the envelope even further. It's incredible.
Making performance for these new spaces also allows us to establish and expand traditions of inclusivity, diversity, and equity that weren't part of many popular aesthetic traditions shaped by a predominantly white and often male, wealthy elite who have supported their development. I'm excited to continue to realize my wildest dreams by embracing the limitless storytelling possibilities we as artists have today by using new technologies when making performance for video, virtual, and digital spaces. My play, Black Feminist Video Game does just that, it makes the most of the latest technologies we can access to create performance that is accessible worldwide. I'm honored to share with the world the story of Jonas, a biracial teen on the spectrum coming of age while learning about love, friendship, and Black feminism. I'm excited to watch audiences play the interactive video game and guide the characters of the show through a video game that will shape the main character's journey and the outcome of his quest.
The show is produced by The Civilians and presented as a part of a national collaboration with 59E59 Theaters in New York, Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and co-commissioner Lafayette College in Easton, and includes a team of filmmakers, game makers, music producers, all sorts of designers, and performers who have all helped the show be a one-of-a-kind experience for the audience. I hope new theater, in whatever form, continues to be interactive, multimodal, mixed media, inter/intra and/or cross disciplinary, and one-of-a-kind shows that can be different every night. May we all continue to blur lines that never really existed in the first place!”
“Si vamos a los tecnicismos de lo que ha sido el arte hasta antes de la pandemia podríamos diferenciar claramente todos los elementos que distinguen al teatro del cine sin embargo el tiempo nos ha enseñado que el futuro está en la fusión, en la mezcla. Lo puro no se conserva. Como creadora parto para mi creación desde el teatro y adopto los lenguajes cinematográficos que me permiten elevar, evolucionar, transcender las ideas que solo imaginaba en un escenario y que ahora tiene la posibilidad de ser una criatura omnipresente. Yo le llamo teatro porque es mi lengua materna, estoy segura que quienes crean desde el lenguaje cinematográfico, le llaman cine porque ese es su primer idioma. El teatro virtual tendrá otro nombre en el futuro, estoy segura. Esta es la manera que le hemos nombrado por todavía no encontrar una mejor… por ahora todo va a depender en qué idioma aprendiste a crear.”
[translation provided by Janika Romero] “If we focus on go to the technicalities of what art has been up to before the pandemic, we could clearly differentiate all the elements that distinguish theater from cinema, however time has taught us that the future lies in fusion, in mixing. The pure is not preserved. As a creator, I start my creations from the theater and I adopt cinematographic languages that allow me to elevate, evolve, transcend the ideas that I only imagined on stage and that now has the possibility of being an omnipresent creature. I call it theater because it is my mother language, I am sure that those who create from the cinematographic language call it cinema because that is their first language. Virtual theater will have another name in the future, I'm sure. This is the way we have named it for the lack of a better name ... for now everything will depend on which language you learned to create. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
Chris Anthony, Assistant Professor at The Theatre School at DePaul University
(she/her)
“There are so many different permutations of theatre in the virtual space, it is hard to say exactly what the “it” of it is. And I wonder if it really matters what we call it. Is this the birth of a new form? Several new forms? Possibly.
Before this year, I absolutely believed that “theatre” required performers and audience to share space in real time. There is undeniable energy exchanged between everyone in the room. There is magic in that exchange. That will always be true.
At the same time, the virtual space has allowed me to be in online “rooms” with people all over the globe. I have had conversations and listened to stories that I never would have been able to access before. I have seen theatre that challenged the way I think about the world. Theatre that brought me great joy, moved me to tears, shook me to the core, and soothed my soul.
Those are all things that I want to do with my work in the theatre.
And lots of questions are swirling in my brain.
Who has been able to join the virtual theatre community that would not have had access to live theatre? Who have we been able to reach?
What have we learned in this pandemic year that we want to keep?
How will theatre in this space help us create a Beloved Community?
Technology will rise to meet whatever we imagine. The magic of sharing space and time will never go away. Both things are true.
How can this new space help us build the world of our dreams? That’s what I am excited to find out.”
Tara Ahmadinejad, theater director + co-founding member of Piehole
[Piehole Members: Tara Ahmadinejad, Alexandra Panzer, Ben Vigus, Jeff Wood]
“The theater work I do with Piehole is rooted in asking, "What makes this thing feel alive, and why is the audience necessary to its existence?" When approaching "virtual theater," these same questions around liveness and presence invariably come up. When we adapted an in-person interactive theater piece for Zoom, we focused on fostering connection across our screens, intimacy across inherent distance. Maybe achieving that felt like "theater." But we also used cinematic techniques, along with live TV techniques and Zoom techniques. So how do you classify it?
Fostering liveness or presence is especially challenging in cases when, for one reason or another, a "virtual theater" production needs to be pre-recorded. What form results when you do a pre-recorded remote production for a live, in-person theater script? It's not neatly film or theater; it doesn't have a name.'"
Labels and categorization are tricky – they help people buy and sell art. They have a tendency to pin a thing down, make someone say, "Oh, I get what that is!" and make it consumable. Finding common language can be helpful for bringing people together, but we shouldn't confuse accessibility with consumability. What good is a label that creates a false impression of understanding? Insufficient labels create incorrect expectations, preventing audiences from meeting an emerging form of art on its own terms, robbing them of experiencing the full complexity of such a work.
On the other hand, some days when I'm feeling feisty I think, let's just make a bunch of stuff and call it theater no matter what it is -- to help expand our sense of theater's potential. This past month, Piehole had the opportunity to publish a maze in a magazine--I'm calling that theater too.”
Melisa Tien, Playwright, Lyricist, Librettist
“So many art forms have found shelter, temporarily or permanently, under the banner of theater that it's hard for me to think of one that couldn't be considered 'theatrical' in some respect. It's hard, also, not to embrace less orthodox forms; I've come across Twitter threads that were pure, surprising, moving theater. So, I think of film as being at home in the land of theater. This is a conclusion I've arrived at while writing this essay.
A wholly unexpected gift of the pandemic (which, even as I acknowledge it, seems strange) has been my journey to other shores of theatricality—places I used to think might be fun to visit, but as a stopover on the way to a more intentional destination. I consumed a lot of the early remote theatrical work that began popping up a year ago. I remember when it felt rogue. I remember it before it became more self-aware, more polished, more mature. Somewhere in there, I started wanting to make it, too. Maybe it was a case of a child standing off to the side, envying other children on the playground. Maybe it was a case of boredom transforming into revelation. Whatever it was, when all bets are off, it suddenly makes sense to aim directly for what was once relegated to speculation.
I started with a recipe, in response to a theater 'bake-off', something I considered a modest blueprint for departure. Next came a mash-up of words with a map of New York City, in an attempt to theatricalize my emotional state in May 2020 (later anthologized in Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater). Then I found myself creating a piece for, and co-producing an audio series/podcast, and in doing so fulfilled a long-held wish to publish sound art and hear fellow playwrights try it, too. It was all theater to me, because it's almost impossible for me not to see things through theater-tinted glasses.
Therefore, the most recent work I put into the world—a live, online, remote song cycle—is perhaps the most recognizable as a form of theater. Never mind that you watched it on a screen, or that the visuals were so fancy they were at times mesmerizing, or that a separate window (as prominent as the one for the show) existed for ASL interpretation. Never mind that an archive recording remains available for those who missed the live performances. None of this is what one would term 'conventional theater', but theater it clearly was. Partly because it was live, partly because it was risky, and entirely because it was aiming directly for the viewer's heart and mind. Virtual theater remains theater to me because of its insistence on a real, immediate connection to the audience, and because of its obsessiveness around connecting audience members to one another. I'm not sure theater would make sense any other way.”
Kathryn Yu (she/her), Executive Editor, No Proscenium
“A live virtual production — particularly when it uses all of the affordances of digital platforms available to us — seems to be a completely different beast to me. I've seen fascinating new work that leverages different parts of the immersive theatre, alternate reality game, puzzle box, and escape room toolkit.
These hybrid experiences may show recorded video over Zoom and then have the audience and performers react to it in real time. A performer may send a mysterious link to the viewers in chat and ask them to interact with a custom web site while also receiving in-world text messages. Or a company may mail a box of objects to the participant, asking them to tune into a Zoom call at a later date or be available for a telephone call at a set date and time. Perhaps you might receive a postcard or an email from a character after a show has officially concluded.
We're at a moment where the boundaries between these forms have become quite porous. The potential for theatrical experiences that borrow from the best of the best in video games, cinema, puzzle boxes, self-guided audio tours, podcasts, and more is limitless.
We should all be "stealing like artists," to borrow a phrase from Austin Kleon.”
Lanie Zipoy, Creative Producer + Film Director
"Binaries are fractionating because they don't serve the current moment, if they were ever useful. Theatre and film have danced with one another since the advent of the moving image. For generations, theater practitioners have brought live and pre-recorded video/film and projections into their stage work. Some artists have even shaped the same performance for the stage and for the screen (see Christiane Jatahy's What if they went to Moscow?), excavating the differences between the mediums and solidifying the similarities. My mother watched a filmed version of the stage musical Kinky Boots in a movie theater, and swears that what she witnessed while sitting in a screening room was theatre. Blindness, which opens in New York shortly, utilizes lights and sound for a live audience, but there is no live performer in the space, only pre-recorded narration.
We are grappling with what virtual theatre is simply because of the speed of its proliferation due to the global pandemic. Film has gone through a transformative process over decades, allowing its audiences to gradually experience the shift in its many different forms–movie theater, drive in theater, VHS, and now on any device you want. The acceleration of virtual theatre coupled with the lack of live performing arts has destabilized audiences–making us define something that is in the midst of becoming, that is in process. I am intrigued by what's next, by how we utilize our theatrical tools in service of storytelling, and by offering artists substantive work. Virtual theatre doesn't need to be film or theatre. It can contaminate both spaces simultaneously or one or the other. It just needs to meet the imagination of its creators, grab the attention of its audiences and support its makers. Let's celebrate this moment, born out of necessity. How exciting to be in this present period where there are boundless ideas, creative reframing of theatre in the virtual space and the potential of the democratization of performance and artistic work."
MJ Kaufman, Playwright and Television Writer
“It has to be both. It is both a live experience we share from different homes and corners across the globe and also a flat screen in my living room. Over the last year, I notice myself as a viewer of theater vs. film. I’m used to watching films in my own home on a screen, used to getting up in the middle to refill my glass of water or pet my dog. If the phone rings, I can pause it to answer. But watching theater on a screen in my house is entirely different. It consumes me. It requires a much closer, more careful watching. I can’t pause it and I can’t walk into the next room for a minute and still hear what’s going on. The urgency and liveness are intrinsic to its nature. That’s what theater is; it is a co-creation between audience and artist. It doesn’t go away online. Getting to share that feeling across continents over the course of this year has been a sensation I never even imagined before.
Over the course of this year, I have had a number of virtual productions go up, and after each one there has always been someone, usually someone I know from my work in TV/film, who asks to see the recording. And typically the recording is not available - either it was performed and not recorded or the recording was only available for a limited period of time. But the TV/film people have a hard time understanding this. If it happened on a screen, they want to know why isn’t it replicable? Well, I think, because it’s theater. And theater by definition is not replicable. Its ephemerality is where its magic and power come from, and we all play a part in creating that. Which means you can’t watch it on demand. It’s there and then it’s not anymore, and that’s why it's special.”
Kamala Sankaram, Composer and Performer
“For me, the important distinction between film and theatre is the collaboration with the audience. Theatre, unlike film, allows for immediate feedback from the audience to subtly change the performances of those onstage, leading to infinite variations in timing, volume, prosody, etc. These changes deepen over the course of the run as the performers, through this continual feedback, allow their performance to evolve. In this way, theatre, unlike film, is a living, breathing organism. And that's what I've been trying to capture in creating live performances over the internet, both with all decisions will be made by consensus and Only You Will Recognize the Signal.”
Katie Rose McLaughlin, Choreographer, Director and Co-Creative Director of Theater in Quarantine
“Virtual Theater, as long as it is live, is theater and not film. In film you can do many takes and you can also edit what you shot in post to make it into something else. You can utilize film techniques in creating virtual theater, create and manipulate your shots the way a filmmaker would, but the fact that you can't go back, you can fix something makes it theater.
What excites me about the work we're doing at Theater in Quarantine is that we are theatericalizing the digital space. We're creating content that uses experimental theater making methodologies, but twists and turns them into a digital form. In virtual theater you can direct the audience's eye in a very specific way, unlike live theater. In live theater we use lights, set, sound, etc to try and direct the audience's focus, but in digital theater we can use the camera to put it exactly where we want it to be. And because we're using experiential theater techniques, we can always adapt the form to fit the content.”
Virginia Grise, Playwright and Theatre Maker
“Why can't it be both? I think we have the opportunity right now to think about theatre in more expansive ways beyond the black box and the genre binary. How do different art forms and aesthetics inform each other, push up against each other, create something new? As theatre artists, we can cross the strict lines of what people think theatre is or is not and choose to remain infinitely curious about craft, content and form.”
Jared Mezzocchi, Director and Multimedia Designer
"I caution us to be asking such a binary question. Instead, we should be asking, 'how can film and theater help the virtual space in unique ways?" I think the pandemic has encouraged all of us to interrogate our forms and bring out the best parts of our discipline in order to create evocative, unique, and innovative work. In grad school, I was told "collaboration, first and foremost, is individual." Here we have two individual disciplines being asked to collaborate. It's a chance to reverse engineer each of these forms to understand what is essential to crafting stories in the theater and in film. Those findings will distill what is essential in the virtual space, too. By leveraging theatrical practices in a digital space, we are encouraged by liveness and risk. By leveraging film practices in a digital space, we are reminded of composition, editing, and montage. Together, there is an opportunity to generate work between the gaps. Working in the gap is where innovation flourishes, out of authentic survival. This is not film, nor is it theater. But it is a collaboration in the space between. To title it one or the other, or gatekeep it from one or the other is a dangerous discourse because, in doing so, we might misconstrue innovation as failure."
Barbara Fuchs, Professor of Spanish and English, and Director of Diversifying the Classics, UCLA
“Theatre deploys artifice while cinema is committed to reality,” Susan Sontag observed. [1] As digital theater becomes more sophisticated, filters, augmented reality, and other technical solutions increasingly make it possible to modify actors’ appearance, place remote actors in a shared virtual space, create virtual scenery, or even simulate an audience. Yet those same strategies—born of a longing for verisimilitude—reduce the distinction between theater and film, so that it becomes more urgent for artists to reassert the theatrical qualities of their work. Whether through bricolage or irony, the simulations enacted are simultaneously dismantled, calling attention to the fissures of representation that most clearly distinguish theater from film. The most successful of these experiments want it both ways: on the one hand, audiences must be sufficiently persuaded that online theater can tell a story that they are willing to engage with in the new form, even if only as an alternative to in-person experiences; on the other, the conspicuous artificiality of that form, and the very need for simulation to supplement it, privilege alienation over verisimilitude. Simulation is thus more than an attempt to compensate for what digital theater cannot replicate: its fraught relationship with analog equivalents foregrounds the self-awareness of digital theater as its distinguishing characteristic, its postdramatic signature. In this sense, the simulations of digital theater in the context of pandemic are quite distinct from film: in a context of profound longing for in-person performance, they insist instead on a Brechtian distance from realism as a condition for theater.”
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adapted from Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic (forthcoming, Methuen Drama Agitations, Fall 2021)
[1] Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1966): 24-37, citation on 26.
Leah Keith, Founder, Creative Producer, and Agent of Rhythm of the Arts
“Virtual theatre is theatre, hands down. Theatre and film use extremely different mindsets, aesthetics, and devices to tell a story, even if the venue (a screen) is the same. How do we transfer the magic of live theatre to a screen? Even if it is pre-recorded? Is it possible to make the audience feel and respond to virtual theatre in a way that is comparable to live theatre? Those are questions we theatre artists ask ourselves as we create virtual theatre. We honor and lift up the essence of what theatre is while being able to connect with audiences via a screen.”