The performing arts have suffered significantly from the effects of COVID-19 and almost ceased to exist in their traditional form since March 2020, with many in the sector finding themselves out of work and unsupported. While some working lives migrated online in Teams and Zoom meetings, the performing arts required a far more co-existent video experience to adapt.
Collaborative Solutions for the Performing Arts: A Telepresence Stage is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project led by the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton, in collaboration with LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore and the Third Space Network in Washington DC. In response to the COVID-19 impact on the performing arts sector, this project identifies new and creative ways for actors, dancers and other performing arts professionals to rehearse and interact together in shared online spaces and to produce collaborative live performances from remote sites. In a dramatic shift from the paradigm of the web-conference grid, the Telepresence Stage offers conceptual and technical solutions to break free of these isolating constraints and provides an altogether new platform, where our experience of online connection is heightened and re-envisioned through the superimposition of our bodies in virtual spaces.
The project team from media and performing arts backgrounds bring together their knowledge and experience of developing live networked performance research and practice for over 30 years. Through this partnership, the 18-month study combines techniques such as green-screen technology, networked video production and virtual set design to create a telepresence studio laboratory, providing full-body interactions between remote participants. Ten performing arts companies have undertaken residencies to test, explore, and perform online techniques, between their participating members in remote locations. Each residency explored and developed a live-streamed public performance demonstrating a unique range of telepresence solutions, made available via case study documents and videos, providing help guides, tutorial support and open-source resources designed to assist UK performing arts professionals to adapt and continue to work online.
Download the Telepresence Stage Handbook featuring all ten case studies.
“The project brings significant new levels of creativity to videoconference-based performance, free from the entrapment of Zoom boxes. It explores issues crucial to the future of theatrical practices: from new approaches to spectacle and illusion to understanding the nuances of telepresence intimacy, empathy and communion.”
This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of UKRI’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Programme.