Theatre Production in SL

Hello Everyone,

In Nuova Sicilia we're taking on a new challenge in partnership with a RL theatre house - theatre production in SL. Would love to hear from anyone who has already tried this to compare notes. Approach, challenges, techniques, etc.

Feel free to contact me either way - directly in-world or as a forum post.

Looking forward to everyone's thoughts.

Cristos

I've been thinking about this kind of thing too. Haven't gotten past the thinking stage, but I would like to hear more about your experiences, or perhaps get involved with your project.

I have some RL theatre experience as a stage manager, tech type.

My first thought is whether to present something as text, or try to do it with voice enabled?

Jake

Last year four of us did an original play; this year we have been doing variety shows that are over an hour long - but there are 12 or 13 of us now.

I wonder where you plan to do this? A sim can only hold about 40 players at the same time. Not much of an audience.

private sims can hold 100 ppl, albiet it does get laggy around 70 or so, depending on what else is in the sim

Major effort underway right now with a seasoned Broadway professional involved.

It's not a secret, but in 90 days or so there will be a lot more to talk about than now.

See if you can contact Fake Jewell. This summer, she wrote and directed the first-ever play produced in SL Gor in Iaomai. I was fortunate enough to be cast as one of the leads in it and it was an amazing experience. I'd bet she'd have a lot to share with you.

If you do contact her, please tell her I sent you her way and how you read about it here? I don't know if she reads the forums.

She's co-directing another one, a Gorean version of "M. Butterfly" (can't remember what it's called), which I've been told is having auditions in the next week or so.

Gorean theatre... who knew, eh?

In my experience with it as an actor, theatre in SL has a number of unique tech-related challenges.

- The fact you can rez sets on the fly is pretty innovative.
- Another thing to take into consideration is text-chat range -- you have to make sure everyone in your audience can "see" what the actors are saying.
- Animations and poses. They're integral to conveying the visual side of movement and emoting. That and emoting in chat is another thing on which to develop your skills.
- You don't have to memorize your lines. Ever. *grins*

Good luck and let us know when it's premiering?

I've heard a lot of cool things about your group, Osprey. I'm hoping to get a group together to come and see the next one.

Lag was our worst enemy when we did our production.

In the middle of one scene in front of an audience of about 50 (which is HUGE for SL), I walked to take my mark and suddenly hit a movement lag something or other (like when you cross sims and can't stop). I literally flew out of the building for about 8-10 seconds. I started to panic but realized there was nothing I could do. After it stopped, I ended up back on my mark. Talk about stuff you'll NEVER have happen to you in RL theatre.

Understudies are integral to a successful performance. If someone gets knocked offline and can't get back in, you'll need someone to fill in on a moment's notice.

Having a group channel for the cast and crew to cue and send directions when typical SL-related calamity strikes during a perfomance was a great help, as well.

At the SL ballet performance a while back, they had the stage right at the edge of a sim (so that the performers were in a seperate sim to the audience). I don't know what the capacity of the audience sim was (if it was set too high, the performance would appear lagged anyway, because of client-side lag) but that might be a good way to allow it to be higher.

Hi everyone

Many thanks to Ketter for the mention about Homestone. It was a huge learning curve for us all. There were things I hadn't thought about or considered.

One of our first considerations was denoting character. We had titlers, but of course when you type a line - it's still your avatar's name that apears before the text. Luckily, we had a very clever guy in our cast, Dorian Cao, who gave out mic's to everyone which meant that each character spoke from their character name - and turned the text into green which meant it stood out from the audience responses, such as gasps, applause, tears (if and when appropriate). I'm not a technical boffin - so I was beyond impressed with the gadget.

When I first thought about bringing performance to SL - I was thinking very much in terms of the animations - but they can be hideously clunky if overused. What brings the piece to life is the text and emotes. It's where the audience are focussing the majority of their attention. When writing the script, I tried to keep my emoting suggestions to a minimum. It struck me that writing the emotes for the cast meant that they couldn't bring their own interpretation of the characters they were playing and the play would have been poorer for it. The result was that each cast member developed a very distinctive style.

We couldn't take the risk of running the performance in voice - because at that time (and I'm not sure if this is changed now) voice was an optional download. However, using voice for rehearsals increased the speed and efficiency enormously. Directing a cast by typing every instruction is very laborious. However, for the performance we stuck with the text. We had about six weeks from read through to performance (slightly more than we needed - but to cover cast absences).

I was blessed by whatever drama gods were looking out for me when we got Ronnie Vale on board as stage manager. It seemed that there was nothing that she couldn't achieve. For both performances, she kept the group together in IM's giving them a shout for their cues and making sure it all went as smoothly as possible. Which left me available to leap on the set as a stand in if necessary. Though it was a private sim - we capped the numbers at 55 to cover the cast, front of house and the audience members, but we were full to capacity both performances.

What struck me during rehearsals is the skills being engaged by the performers. As with rl drama, an understanding of the script - and the character arcs was essential, spatial awareness (understanding where your characters was and how they felt) was also essential. Some of the cast split up longer lines - added in pauses - and were able to give a much better sense of the tension that they were creating.

I'd say that time zones are our worst enemies for online performance. I am in the UK, but the majority of my cast were in SL time. I ended up staying up to 5am regularly. Not sure what the answer to that is - unless I relocate!

I'd definitely do it again. Though it was hard work and sometimes very stressful. Audiences reported a very real sense of 'Theatre'. We're going to be auditioning for Flowering Jade this weekend. I'm sure that if anyone wants to observe rehearsals, they would be very welcome.

Fake Jewell

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and apologies for not responding sooner - RL business travel got in the way.


Our first, simple experiment will try out voice as the communications means.


The theatre in Nuova Sicilia has just over 50 seats. A private island sim can handle more than the 40 you mention but we'll keep it low for lag purposes. We will also be testing a stream of the play on other SIMs - not ideal - but part of the experiment.



Ketter, Fake, thanks for sharing your experiences - they sound wonderful. If you don't mind I'll contact you in-world.

Jacob, happy for you to participate in this or future productions.

Also, should anyone want to use the Nuova Sicilia Theatre as a venue, its available to anyone looking to implement their ideas.

Best,

Cristos

In the event discussion there was person named Thinker who is starting a threatre group. He even told me about SL a performance group called Actup, there Broadway island that doing some threatre stuff.
There was even playwriter workshop but I couldn't attend.
They were using skype before voice was released.
I have wonder why doesn't any one do some type of old fashion radio show like threatre in SL?
It would be easier to reach wider group of people.

Our Theatre Director, SaveMe Oh is looking for a female voice, native english or american accent - any volunteers?

Best,

Cristos