Adelaide Fringe goes spectral to let you decide the action
Virtual reality and 360 degree video are the theme of a play at The Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Immersive 360-degree video has popped up in an unusual play at the Adelaide Fringe arts festival which begs the question: just where do you look?
Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid is an especially unusual play because the actors outnumber the audience.
Only two people at a time see the 20-minute play. Needless to say, there are multiple showings: five a night. The season, which runs until March 9, is booked out.
Its opening at Adelaide Fringe coincides with the rise of virtual reality and 360-degree immersive video. Samsung and LG unveiled 360-degree cameras at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week and others such as 360Fly are already selling.
In the play, the 360-degree quandary is depicted by having the two audience members dress up in ghost costumes while standing in a black triangle, with the actors performing around them. Which part of the play do you watch? Do you spin like a top taking it all in?
In Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid, you are surrounded by three scenes at pivotal moments in the personal life of Maude and Steve, in the 1950s, 70s and 90s. There’s a relationship between their encounters that reverberates across time.
The two ghost audience members are indeed Maude and Steve, who revisit their mortal selves to discover where things went awry.
The actors don’t shout over one another: instead, the ghost costumes are fitted with smartphones playing the thought track of the character you look at.
I was the ghost of Maude, so I could hear the despair of her thoughts standing just centimetres away. Your take on the play will depend entirely on what scenes you look at, and when.
The play is a collaboration between performing company Sandpit, Google Creative Lab in Sydney and Grumpy Sailor Creative, which developed the spatial audio system.
The system uses the phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer to calculate where you are looking.
Show co-directors Sam Haren and Dan Koerner have a history of presenting unusual play structures. Haren said he had an interest in adventure books where the plot changes based on audience reaction. In one of Haren’s plays, the audience collectively decided the story’s direction.
“We’re interested in creating digital things that connect to the real world,” he said. “Our passion is to play around with the structure of storytelling.”
He said immersive 360 degree video challenged the rigid control exerted by film directors.
“Cinema is really about controlling what the audience is looking at, in a very deliberate way. What we’re doing and what VR is doing is going back to a theatrical way where the audience is more empowered to govern how they follow the experience.”
Google’s Creative Lab has supported the arts for a decade as part of its role in assessing how new technology is adopted. “We look at the future, a little bit ahead of where the company is,” said Tom Uglow, a creative director at the lab in Sydney.
Past collaborations included the Youtube Symphony Orchestra, with players conscripted from across the world, which led to a live concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall and a live-streamed broadcast in Sydney in 2011.
Another project involved crowdsourcing 5,000 hours of footage which was edited into a 90-minute movie called Life in a Day.
Another was a collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a separate online cast of characters who expanded on the play in social media over three days.
Chris Griffith travelled to Adelaide Fringe courtesy of Google Australia.
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