"What Dreams May Come:" The Future of the Multimedia Theatre

The humanity has always strived to find the most integral, holistic and adequate expression of the unique way humans perceive and interpret the world. As early as 32,000 years ago an anonymous artist created paintings in the Chauvet cave. The New York Times journalist Manohla Dargis poetically describes the sight: "amid gleaming stalactites and stalagmites and a carpet of animal bones, beautiful images of horses gallop on walls alongside bison and a ghostly menagerie of cave lions, cave bears and woolly mammoths" (Dargis). Using repetitive patterns, the ancient painter managed to reproduce the movement of the animals which made the pictures look like a primitive prototype of the modern cinema. Scientists suggest that in the light of a bonfire the play of the shadows upon the whimsical relief of the wall made the pictures come alive. Human beings have always lived in a universe made of stories, tried to explain the world around through narratives. Pictures in the Chauvet cave are a story of what it meant to look at the world through the eyes of the Paleolithic man. In his documentary "Cave Of Forgotten Dreams," Werner Herzog is offering a story of Chauvet cave the told in a rich and imaginative language. This story is not only 3-D in terms of its technical realization, it is also multidimensional in the way it is intertwining visual details with the music of the ancient pentatonic flute played by experimental archaeologist Wulf Hein and with the rich palette of scents of the cave discovered by Maurice Maurin, Master Perfumer. In Herzog's documentary, the distant past comes alive, indeed. The famous director is looking for connections with the present day and finds them in parallels with the music of Wagner and works of German Romanticist painters, the cinema, and the shadow play show. But, probably, the most insightful connection between the ancient cave and the modern culture is the multimedia theatre as a playground of senses and emotions. In the same way as our ancient predecessors 32,000 years ago, the modern multimedia theatre is attempting to tell a story which is not just a linear narrative of a single individual, but rather a holistic reconstruction of the innate human striving for continuity, connection, and communication, the desperate and inspired attempt to explore and convey the amazing complexity of being human. 32,000 years of evolution are a good predictor. The future of the multimedia theatre is not bound to particular technological gimmicks, rather, it will be defined by the ultimate features of human perception and interaction with the self and the environment - interactivity, non-linearity, self-reflexivity, openness to change, new experience and learning.

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The most obvious direction in which the modern multimedia theatre is heading is increasing the interactivity of the performance and turning it into an act of co-creation, where the dialogue is more important than the statement. "A multimedia performance is not simply a performance that uses audiovisual means and many different sources of information", writes Patrice Pavis in his Dictionary of the Theatre (1998), "but one that introduces a whole different dimension into the live performance as customarily defined: the place where an actor meets a spectator" (Pavis 225). Many promising forward-thinking ways to facilitate this meeting, make it more productive and immersive, have been developed over the past decades. In the Participatory Virtual Theatre at the Rochester Institute of Technology, motion capture is used to manipulate avatars of the live actors on a virtual stage. Special software is used to collect and analyze the audience response (Geigel and Schweppe 109). More feedback from the audience, the further blurring of the frontier between the spectator and the actor are, probably, the trends that will manifest themselves more and more actively in the nearest future. With the development of technology, an increasing amount of work is being done by the multi-functional devices like tablets and smartphones. Smartphones have even come to be viewed as an 'organic' extension of a human hand. So, it seems likely that for the next decade a smartphone is going to become the key facilitator of the interaction between the audience and the company. As usual, the youngest actors are among the quickest to take up the trend. When Company Three performed Brainstorm at the National Theatre in 2015/16 ("GCSE Drama: Using Multimedia"), they used smartphones to help the young actors communicate with each other in the most 'natural' way. The screens of their phones were projected on the wardrobe placed on the stage so that the audience could become part of the interaction. Obviously, this trend is going to last. The future multimedia performances will witness the audience texting the actors and the director to suggest changes and comment on the production shaping each performance in a new and unique way.

Possibilities for the increased interactivity include not only the enhanced feedback mode but also encouraging the co-creation of the performance. The audience might be invited to use their smartphones to change and adjust the light, edit the music, document and broadcast the performance in line with the experiments of the director Katie Mitchell in "Waves." Mitchell gives more creative freedom to the actors not only in terms of acting, but also the set design, the light, etc. Liz Kettle, an actor in "Waves," comments on this experimental approach, "You can create some very beautiful things very simply. So, I like being able to adjust lights. And I like to be able to introduce props and things and deftly move around" ("Multimedia"). There is a lot of space to involve the audience in the process too. After all, the multimedia theatre closely resembles jazz music in the way it makes room for improvisation. Music is a perfect metaphor to help explore the possibilities the multimedia theatre provides for improvisation and the experiment. Characterizing the multimedia theatre, Pavis writes, "... communication can take unexpected forms. It is not discursive, linear or hierarchical. The text is treated more as noise or music, as a malleable substance, than as a place that produces meaning" (Pavis 225). Multimedia theatre is musical in the way it favors ambiance, atmosphere, and immersion over the structured narrative. Today, when every user can be a content creator, every music lover can create music with the help of a special app, more freedom is going to be given to the spectator as well. The future when the audience will be able to sample and mix a performance with the help of special software is not too distant.

Any kind of improvisation and interactivity suggests that the linearity of the narrative will be broken by the freedom of choice. Non-linearity of the multimedia theatre is certainly a challenge, but also a tremendous opportunity for the exploration of the human experience. "...non-linearity better reflects the human mind, thoughts, history," writes Robert Sharp in his meditation on the multimedia theatre as a new art form, "We are constantly affected by the actions of others, and each thought (indeed, each life) is affected not by one, but several narratives that have gone before. ... There is circularity to our lives and our history that is ideally represented by a non-linear medium..." (Sharp). Thus, non-linearity of the narrative better represents the unique experience of being human. "I suppose I got rather bored of the mainstream theatre and its way of organizing narrative with sort of just consecutive scenes and lots of words," says the director Katie Mitchell, "And I knew that it wasn't how I experienced myself or relationships or life. And everything was slightly more chaotic. As I was looking in this work was for some trace or something that represented this chaos, but still had all that feeling in it" (Mitchell qtd. in "Multimedia"). In the nearest future this non-linearity in the multimedia theatre can be enhanced not only through the usage of parallel narratives on the stage and on the stage screen, but also on the screen of the audience's smartphones, tablets and computers. Parallel universes can be created between which the viewer can choose with just one click.

Fragmenting the narrative and presenting it in the form of an interactive collage or mosaic offers a perfect opportunity of exploring the modern cultural metaphors of the quantum field, Schroedinger's cat and a cultural supermarket. It is also highly productive in the way it creates a testing site to work with the notion of choice. Hattie Mohanan, an actor in Mitchell's production "...some trace of her," dwells on the essential character of the multimedia appeal: "The people who've really taken to it [multimedia performance], I found, have loved the fact that there is choice and you could come back again and again and you almost create your own evening, you create your own journey ... you can create whatever experience you want" ("Multimedia"). A stunning example of the director employing this freedom of choice in a brilliantly orchestrated way is offered by Rupert Goold's 2007 production of Macbeth which contained two alternative scenes: one visually rich with an intermedial projection of Banquo and another one played in an austere classical way suggesting that the ghost is only a play of Macbeth's guilty imagination. The audience was left to choose the perspective they liked most. "The audacity of this refusal to plump definitely for the ghost's presence or absence, but to grab instead for every crumb of cake, sent a buzz of interest through the auditorium," comments Imogen Russell Williams from the Guardian, "Some loved it, some disliked it intensely; the discussion it sparked was ubiquitous" (Williams). Obviously the dialogue and the discussion triggered by this cunning strategy are precious. Introduction of such alternative renderings into more intermedial productions is a matter of time. In the future the audiences might choose between the two versions by putting on their augmented reality goggles or taking them off.

Though, the performances marked by the director's dictatorship seem to be as popular tody as ever, more and more theatrical and other art forms (hyperfiction, for example) offer to their recipients this freedom of choice. New technologies support this quest for individualization of experiencing theatre. Modern VR-equipment makes it possible to offer the audience to explore the fictional worlds and/or to pick alternative storylines. A bright example is "Hands-On Hamlet," a long-term pursuit of the Belgian project CREW. The performance is said to address "the key questions raised in Hamlet: how to be a moral subject and how one is determined by cultural mind-sets" and its initial results include prototypes from CREW's Live-virtual reality-production which show "the progress the company has made in avoiding anything reminiscent of a game and in making the visual medium more spacious and less cinematic" ("Hands-On Hamlet - CREW."). Each immersive show can accommodate not more than 6 participants and lasts 20 minutes. The future of such kind of performance lies in expanding the borders of what can be done in the virtual world in terms of the roles that can be played and also the freedom of choice that is granted to the audience, but also in using technology to turn this type of the theatre into an accessible and affordable type of entertainment for wider audiences across the world.

Interactivity, openness to change and improvisation, non-linearity and other features of the multimedia theatre highlight its high potential for self-exploration through the metatheatre. Sean Jackson, an actor in Mitchell's "Waves", says, "I think a lot of people that come to see it, are as interested in seeing it being done as they are about ... what's bei...