In a world dominated by digital media, theatre can seem old-fashioned. You might buy tickets for a show online and tweet about it afterwards, but mostly the shows themselves are sheltered from the technology that saturates modern lives. Does that mean theatre-makers are missing a trick? The Pervasive Media Studio thinks so. Based in Bristol since 2007, it exists to foster relationships between the computing, communication and creative industries – and this year it's paying particular attention to theatre.
"The theatre sector lags behind in its uptake of cutting-edge technology. It's ripe for some innovation." So says Katie Day, a director herself, temporarily based at the studio as the producer for its Theatre Sandboxscheme. Six theatre companies have been commissioned to explore working with "pervasive media" – basically defined as mobile- or sensor-activated technology, from text messaging to the RFID chips used in Oyster cards on London's public transport – supported by the studio's technology experts and £10,000 funding each.
For someone like me, who is unable to navigate an iPod, the idea is fairly intimidating. Yet the three productions I participated in were absorbing, tender – and required no technological skills whatsoever. At the Junction in Cambridge, young company Analogue presented Living Film Set, an autobiographical show that re-creates the moment when co-director Liam Jarvis's father left the family home, 25 years ago. Using doll's house furniture positioned on a complex tabletop computer screen that, when touched, triggers video and soundtrack material, the piece subtly succeeds in putting its audience in Jarvis's childhood shoes.
In Bristol, meanwhile, Proto-type Theater enacted a test run of Fortnight, in which participants are guided around the city by text messages and emails, in search of "portals": installations concealing RFID readers that, when triggered by a chip, will play a piece of music.
In London, sound artist Duncan Speakman and theatre companyUninvited Guests' collaboration, Give Me Back My Broken Night, leads its audience through a future Soho. The maps we follow are not real, but computerised images projected from box projectors we wear like necklaces on to a sheet of A3 paper that we hold in front of us. These projectors are connected to a central computer, and there is a dazzling moment when I'm invited by my guide to redesign Soho Square – and my dream vision, drawn by a computer artist, instantly appears on my map.
All six pieces are still in development; they will be presented at a showcase in Bristol on Friday, and the hope is that they will be given full productions in the future. But even if that doesn't happen, says Day, Theatre Sandbox has achieved something vital. "It's created a group of people confident with technology, who can spread that knowledge. Mostly this technology is used in advertising, to push stuff at you: it's important to give artists these tools, so they can challenge that."
Day is aware, however, that a culture clash exists between theatre and technology."Technology seems generic," says Peter Petralia, artistic director of Proto-type, whereas theatre is interested in the personal. Jarvis says Analogue set out to mix "pervasive media with a kindergarten, arts-and-crafts aesthetic", hence the models of Jarvis's house and furniture. Technology, he emphasises, provides a set of tools – not the show itself. "You put the emotional journey first, and see what technology can lend to that."
But while technology allows audiences to immerse themselves in these productions, aren't they atomised as a result, with the collective experience sacrificed to heightened individual experience? Duncan Speakman disagrees. He has spent five years making work in public spaces, with audiences wearing isolating headphones, and argues: "When people become aware of the fact that others are doing the same thing as them, they connect. It's about trying to reconnect people who have become disconnected from their surroundings" – chiefly because of pervasive media.
Much as he has enjoyed investigating complex technologies, Speakman is wary of the "novelty whizz-bang factor" that characterises their current relationship with theatre. He compares it to surround sound in cinema: "You don't watch a film because it's in surround sound, yet that is a key technology in film today." Like all the theatre-makers involved in the Sandbox scheme, he says technology wasn't uppermost in his mind when collaborating on his piece. "Magic: that was what we were thinking about. You have a map in front of you and drawings appear on it – that's magic." He thinks it unlikely anyone will shout about the technology. "You don't say to people: come and see this pervasive media work. You say: come and see this piece of theatre – it's magic."
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