Final Mission: three travelers

During my Cycle 3 of Choose Your Own Adventure: Live Performance Edition, I explored how to allow for more timelines. I realized that the moments of failure for the audience provides excitement and raises the stakes of the performance. How to make a system that encourages and provides feedback for the volunteers while also challenging them?

I feel most creative and myself when creating pieces that play with stakes. I love dance and theatre that encourages heightened reactions to ridiculous situations. The roles of the three travelers started to sink in to me the more we rehearsed. They needed to be both helpless adventurers somewhere distant in time and space while also being all-knowing, somewhat questionably trustworthy narrator-like greek chorus assistants. Tara, Yildiz and I added cheering on the volunteers to blur those lines of where and who we are.

The new system for Choose Your Own Adventure included: MIDI keyboard as a controller, Live Webcam for a live feed of adventurers and photo capture of successes, FocusRite Audio hook-up for sound input and sound level watcher, GLSL shaders of all colors and shapes, and Send MIDI show control in order to trigger light cues.

The new system provided more direct signs of sound level watching and cues to the volunteers. The voice overs were louder and aided by flashing text reiterating what the audience should be doing. The three travelers became side coaches for the volunteers as well as self-aware performers trying to gain trust. I found myself fully comfortable with the way the volunteers were being taken care of and started to question and wonder about the audience who was observing all of this. How can an audience be let in while others are physically engaging with the material? I thought about perhaps close camera work of the decisions being made at the keyboard? Earlier suggestions (shout out to Alex Christmas who gave this suggestion) included an applause-o-meter to allow for the non-volunteers to have a say from their seats. A “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” style audience interaction comes to mind with options for volunteers to choose how to interact and have the audience come to their aid. What does giving audience a voice look like? How can it be both respectful, careful and challenging?