“Selling you quiet”: The new frontier of digital theatre

This is a slightly edited version of an article written for the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Storyline magazine, published in January 2015 in Volume 34.

In a technologically-saturated age, when most art forms are moving towards modes of digital creation, distribution or enhancement, theatre is perhaps the only art form whose existence cannot be adequately captured or recreated in a virtual space. True, theatre is being filmed and broadcast in cinemas across the world and being made available online, both in Australia and overseas, but it doesn’t capture the same experience as being in a darkened space with a hundred other people, watching performers in a space in front of you. Perhaps the future of digital theatre lies not in accurately capturing the performance in a recording, but in something else, in the creation of a world in which the performance can sit.

Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company, in collaboration with Google’s Creative Labs (henceforth referred to as ‘Google’), has instigated a digital theatre project which is attempting to test the boundaries of overlap between traditional theatre practices and the endless possibilities of digital technology. In short, their goal is to create a prototype in which the theatrical performance is just one element of a wider world, of a wider conversation about the performance, one which takes place on social media platforms, and actively encourages audience participation and interaction.