The Royal Shakespeare Company is building a live theatre performance that audiences anywhere in the world can enter through their mobile phones, VR headsets, or home screens—not just watch, but interact with in real time. This matters because live performance today is largely limited to physical venues or passive digital broadcasts. The project addresses a gap in how to create, choreograph, and deliver a single show that runs simultaneously across multiple digital platforms and physical stages, while keeping the experience genuinely live and shared. Current technology exists but the creative workflows and production methods do not. If successful, the project will produce a full-scale demonstrator performance connected to the RSC’s autumn 2020 main stage Shakespeare production in Stratford-upon-Avon. Beyond that, it could establish a new model for mass-distributed live performance—where audiences in different locations join the same show at the same time, using different devices, without losing the sense of liveness. This would change how cultural institutions think about reach, access, and audience participation, and could influence how other live events—concerts, sports, public ceremonies—are designed and delivered in the future.
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This Audience of the Future demonstrator project, led by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), brings together, for the first time, a unique team of cultural industry practitioners and researchers who are ideally placed to inform and guide the next developmental stage of Live Performance. Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) offer under-exploited opportunities for the UK cultural sector to make Live Performance more immersive. We have already seen a new era of theatre borrowing conventions from video games to tell stories - and we know that audiences want "to find fun, interactive experiences and share them with the world" (Brian Schwab, Head of Interaction Lab at Magic Leap). Our consortium will explore what it means to perform live through multiple channels, and the future of real-time immersive performance connected across multiple stages. Audiences will no longer be bound by their location - instead we will use devices such as mobile phones, Extended Reality (XR) headsets and streams into a Live Performance environment, or in the home. We will investigate the new workflows required to deliver this, and the new ways of making the creative content that bring VR/AR/MR into theatre-making and Live Performance. During 2019 each partner will develop a series of prototype projects, drawing on their extensive expertise in site-specific performance, whether this is music and audio, audience development or theatre. We will develop new models for Live Performance that focus on the future needs of audiences with the development of new technologies, working in partnership with Magic Leap, Intel and Epic Games, and specialist companies such as Vicon and FBFX. This research and development (R&D) work will lead to our main demonstrator performance, at the heart of the RSC's autumn 2020 programme, connecting to a main stage Shakespeare production in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. This project will broaden the possibilities of Live Performance, from digital broadcast, as is the case for live-to-digital work currently, to a mass distributed digital model on multiple platforms. Audiences will connect with the performance live, wherever their location, celebrating the strengths of digital connectivity and establishing a high quality Live Performance to be enjoyed, in a variety of ways, around the world.
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