Article Preview
TopIntroduction
As Dixon depicted, the theatre always tended to include in its practice new technologies in order to “increase performance and visual art’s aesthetic effect and sense of spectacle, its emotional and sensorial impact, its play of meanings and symbolic associations, and its intellectual power” (Dixon, 2007). In this article, we are particularly interested in using motion capture in performance, which has progressively attracted directors all over the world. We could highlight such performances as The Tempest staged by Gregory Doran in 2017 in Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Imaginarium Studios in Great Britain, I.D., an opera based on Arnaud Petit’s music staged in France in 2017, Orestia22 of Theatre na Podoli Ukrainian company staged by Illya Moshitsky, Anti-Gone staged by Theo Triantafyllidis in 2019 in the United States, and Mandala staged by Thomas Villepoux in 2021 in France. All these performances have very different aesthetics and use different technologies and approaches. They are bright and attractive, but the process of creation stays unknown to the public, professional theatre-makers, and researchers.
In this article, we share our experience of making a creation-as-research, The Wizard Without Shadow, in order to bring to light the different steps of our staging, the difficulties, and different methods that could be applied for their solving. In our approach, we take into consideration all the steps of production, beginning from the digital creation of the avatars. We try to balance between the gaming approach (Ward, 2005) that combines technical 3D modeling and rigging with the creation of the story of the character and the theatrical approach based on Stanislavsky’s system, which means to “develop a set of behaviours that give the avatar the semblance of responding convincingly and with emotional authenticity to any situation an audience could perceive it finds itself in” (Weinbren, 2016).
In our creation-as-research, an actor who narrates a story performs in front of a screen, where a virtual universe is projected. The story is played by numerous digital shadow-avatars: flat silhouettes, virtual marionettes (as defined by Plessiet et al., 2019) animated with pre-recorded movements. We apply a hypothesis that depending on the physical actor’s point of focus, the audience will be more attracted to the screen or the actor or will divide attention between both (Ternova & Gorisse, 2022). This research is based on empirical and analytical methods and aims for a better understanding of the pipeline of a theatrical staging with motion capture, as well as exploration of the nature, limits, and potential of a pre-recorded live-controlled virtual performance. This paper is an extension of The Wizard Without Shadow (Ternova & Gagneré, 2021) presented in the ARTECH21 conference.