Venues of the Future R&D project – first report
Venues of the Future is a research and development project designed to foster long-term audience engagement through technical innovation, collaboration and cross-discipline working. Technology and new methodologies are transforming the creation and presentation of theatre, beyond the stage. This project explores how digital platforms can bridge the gap between artists and audiences and create meaningful shared experiences, empowering audiences to take a proactive and engaged role. Additionally, it seeks to develop sustainable practice models that can be adopted and implemented by other venues and companies. Results and learnings are shared with the performing arts sector – this is the first collection of learnings.
The project is split into six rough sections: a Prologue, Act 1, Act 2, Act 2, Act 4 and an Act 5 finale. We are currently working in Act 2, with questions still be to answered about the grand finale and any afterlife/legacy for the work produced by the project, not just the planned toolkit and reports
The Prologue
The ‘Prologue’ phase of the project has now been completed, along with Act 1, and the project is now moving into Act 2. This comprises performances of Faith, and the ‘constellation’ of micro-commissions that will surround the performances to deepen and broader audience engagement.
The Prologue included two Roundtables in November 2023, one with a technical focus and one with a theatre focus. The general feeling was that these were useful, and that gathering in the same place allowed conversations to happen more easily. More detail on the learnings from the Tech Roundtable can be found below. The Theatre Roundtable was more about ideas than concrete actions, so while it was useful to this particular project it doesn’t hold many learnings for the wider sector at this point.
“We organised a Round Table for the technology people, where we brought some people from creative cultural technology community together, and a separate one for theatre. We discussed whether we wanted to do it together, but we felt like these two groups needed a different introduction into the project.”
The roundtables were designed to get ideas flowing and to start to shape the project. By keeping the roundtables open and creative, participants felt able to share ideas and try things out, but reaching a consensus and decision-making was hard.
“The prologue was… you apply for funding with big ambitions and then it's about aligning visions and getting everyone together.”
“We're just R&D, we're not solving the universe”
The Roundtables
The Tech Roundtable (Nov 23) produced a lot of useful discussion, and some learning from other projects that can be incorporated into this one and possibly provide starting points or benchmarks for other projects.
Legacy of digital work
There are some interesting questions around the legacy of digital work. While live work is, by its nature, ephemeral and only available to those who are physically present to see it, digital work can be preserved and shared in different ways. This potentially allows digital projects to have a further life, and to continue to exist in a live or archival sense beyond the end of the funded period. This R&D’s current intention is to “burn it down” at the end. However, if people are engaged with the project then there will be a desire for mementoes or keepsakes, and decisions are ongoing about how to facilitate this in a digital world.
Connection and belonging
Another big topic from the Roundtable was about connection and belonging. Live performance is predicated on bringing people together in a space to have a collective experience, and when making hybrid or purely digital work, does this sense of connection still need to be present to make a meaningful experience for audiences? Digital projects also have the capacity to transcend borders and boundaries, and to connect people, ideas and communities from around the world. This also opens up the audience for digital work far beyond the usual limits of time and geography.
This discussion also covered how a digital space can give people a sense of belonging. People need to understand what rules exist in a digital space in order to explore and play, and to feel happy/comfortable doing so (or deliberately be unsettled or make to feel uncomfortable if that is part of the artistic intention). Audience/user behaviours online are usually guided by the digital space (e.g. a website trying to provide a smooth sales funnel to take a user towards buying something as quickly as possible).
Audience agency
The idea of giving the audience agency to be able to stop/pause an experience and dive deeper into it was also discussed. This is something that can’t be easily explored with live performance, so offers an opportunity for digital work. In connected, virtual spaces, you are able to move between different things very quickly, which can provide opportunities for creative freedom not allowed by live performance.
The First Lab
In March 2024, the project organised a ‘Lab’ in Groningen where theatre makers, technical specialists and those working at the border of the two could gather to develop starting points for possible online and hybrid formats. “We spent two days playing around, sort of developing ideas, concepts, ways of connecting people.”
The two days were "a combination of talking and doing” and started to pin down what the constellation of work around the main performances of Faith could be, and formed the basis of the first rough brief for Substrakt. (This has evolved quite a lot since its first iteration, but gave the digital team a starting point.) The idea is to integrate some of the themes/questions/ideas from the live theatre show and build a series of ways for audiences to interact with the show itself and the idea of faith more broadly. One participant described the Lab as “a creative jumping off point”.
Another Lab will be held in August, date TBC.
The outcomes of the Lab aimed to be starting points for the Curatorial Team and the wider project team, to be a source of inspiration and conversation. “Like everything in this project we approached these sessions as places of openness, collaboration and exchange,” explains one participant. While this allows creativity to flourish, it does require some careful thinking about Intellectual Property. Partners such as DEN are heavily funded by public money, and offer everything they do under a Creative Commons Licence, freely available for non-commercial use. An organisation such as Substrakt is a commercial entity whose work is proprietary. When Substrakt creates a new platform or product, the IP remains with the company. When two partners with such different business models work together, conversations need to be hard about how to share process and make learnings available while protecting the IP of work done.
Following the Lab’s discussions, Annette Mees has drafted a series of briefs for artistic micro-commissions which will form the constellation of works around Faith and faith.
Key learnings so far
There have been lots of discussions and decisions to make about the project, including around:
– budget and timings to ensure ambitions are realistic and achievable while still artistically interesting
– decision-making and hierarchies with so many equal partners with different expertises
– accessibility in terms of technical complexity
– finding common ground between the artistic and tech teams, and helping both sides to move from abstract ideas to clear briefs to concrete deliverables.
Where arts meets tech
The first phases of this project have made it very clear that bringing together people from different sectors – arts and technology – requires some groundwork to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Levels of digital and technical literacy vary widely between sectors, people and countries, and this needs to be understood, taken into account and mitigated in order to work together and conduct some meaningful R&D. “What has come to light quite quickly is how little understanding there is in the theatre production side of what it takes to make something digital and what works in digital land, and I think partly because this is what's happening technically and what's happening creatively are happening in physically different countries.”
In the same vein, some people (particularly from the arts side) needed reassurance that their ideas and opinions were valid when it came to making creative decisions that relied on technical knowledge. The interdisciplinary nature of this project is, and should continue to be, one of its strengths, but it also comes with some compromises and requires flexibility. It is also clear that common ground needs to be found when it comes to technical literacy, so that time isn’t spent either trying to reinvent the wheel or making over-ambitious plans that are not technically achievable within the available time and budget. “There's a learning there about aligning your frame of reference, aligning your understanding, because everyone's got a different starting point for these conversations.” Another partner commented: “It is not only the cultural differences of two industries, it's combined with the cultural differences of different countries. So like just the exponential amount of cultural differences leads, it just takes more time.”
“I think one of the conclusions is that having people that can hold the middle ground [between arts and tech] is really important. And I would also put kudos at Annette’s door because here, because she has to manage two ways of thinking. You need people who can speak easily with both worlds, especially when you do R&D."
Timings and deadlines
It also seems important that timelines are agreed quickly and then adhered to. Because all partners have other commitments and projects, without a structured timeline with clear deadlines for both decision-making and delivery, the project risks not achieving its goals. “We’ve struggled to meet all together. We have four partners and they all have different priorities. It’s hard to get them all at the same time at the same table. Everybody wants to do this project but it’s not the main focus for any of the partners.”
“A big learning is for everybody to get focused. People need to step up and take charge of different aspects.” As the project moves into its later phases, “we need a leader.” The hierarchy of the project at the moment is very flat, which makes sense during the idea generation phase, but as decisions need to be made so Substrakt can start building and refining, a clearer line of decision-making would make sense: “the biggest thing that's come out so far is about clarity about decision making. Everyone's kind of deferring to each other all the time. Wirth this kind of flat hierarchy across this many partners when you're trying to do new stuff and you actually need to move things forward at quite a rapid pace, there does need to be a decision making point. It doesn't always have to be the same person and you can obviously devolve responsibility and divide it up in different ways.” Another partner noted: “here's an early stage lesson about the governance of a project like this, about who whose word is final.”
Agile working
The actual R&D side of the project has also thrown up some challenges, which can be addressed in the next phases. “People who work with tech and are working with innovative working methods every day… are more agile in their mindset, than the people who run theatre venues… it's very hard for them to be agile and to be more future oriented… it is hard to think about another future than the future that they already have lined up.”
Faith has been a crucial hook
“I think hooking the R&D up to a show [Faith] been a great decision. I thought, oh that's going to be useful, but I realise that it would be fundamental, because it gives us a hook while we're going through the nebula! It’s something that everybody can see and understand rather than trying to talk and then hope that everyone's on the same page.”
Next steps
As Act 2 continues and Faith enters its final rehearsals before its premiere, the project is moving on. “I don't think that will solve these issues in this R&D, but what I hope is at the end of this we can provide a way of thinking and a framework of thinking things through and asking the right questions, which will help more cultural organisations to think more about that side of the internet, like how do we make art, how do we allow people to talk about the themes that we as a company are interested in, how do we bring people together around the reasons that we wanted to make the show, not just the show itself.”
“Now it’s about taking that content strand via the Lab and the commissions and the conversations, and to map that onto the more infrastructural technical conversations that are going on between Substrakt and sort of starting to mash those two up. And I think that's where we are.”
