Interactive Audience Gameplay in Third Law

Tjaša Ferme: Hey, theatre, science, and innovation fans, this is Tjaša Ferme, your podcast host for Theatre Tech Talks: AI, Science, and Biomedia in Theatre, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Tune in.

Last May, I went to see a show called Third Law at Culture Lab created by What Will the Neighbors Say? And they used some really interesting technology that we will unpack in today's conversation with the director Coral Cohen and sound and video designer Ettie Pin. Coral Cohen and Ettie, I'm so excited that you're here with me. We're going to be talking about a very unique experience that you created called Third Law with What Will the Neighbors Say?

I saw the show and it was a trip in the best possible way, and it had some very fun technical inventions and enhancements that I want to talk about today. But maybe if we just jump in and you tell the audience what the show is really about and what kind of experiences audiences embarked on as they came into the show.

Coral Cohen: Third Law is an interactive audience game that allows the audience to, in some way, change and create the show along with us using an interactive game board that's projected onto the floor. So they're actually using their bodies in physical space to change and affect the play and the actors and the lights and the sound and a few other things.

Tjaša: What was the impetus for this? What was the inspiration for doing this and doing it the way you did it?

Coral: What Will the Neighbors Say? came to me in the summer of 2022 and asked if I wanted to devise a project with them. They had some grant and space and a residency. And basically they just had a name, Third Law, and they wanted to explore audience engagement. So from there, we started devising with a group of six performers, Ettie and a lighting designer, Jacqueline Scaletta.

And through that process, we wanted to explore how the audience affects the work. And it's also coming out of our post-pandemic, although we're still in a pandemic, but coming back to theatre after being away and being far away from each other. So I was really interested in proximity, how people are in space together, how to create the environment for people to get close to each other, to interact with each other without the pressure of a prompt.

So using the natural way that people interact with space and with each other to teach them how to play this game, and then the game forcing them into interacting with each other and with the play itself without any pressure or force. So we were really interested in that involuntary action and passive choices that people are making and how we could use the passive choices to then create more active choices through teaching them pretty organically the game.

It really came out of just the idea of: what does audience engagement mean? How do we collaborate with the audience and engage them with our work in a physical way? And how to make theatre in a way that has the audience and their interaction in mind from the very beginning versus coming to a play and then trying to find moments of interaction with the audience.

Ettie Pin: I think we also wanted to just both interrogate and we wanted to come at this from an exploration and an interrogation of the prompt of “interactive theatre” and what that means or “audience participation theatre” and what that means, and finding a way in which we can engage the audience that is very likened to the kind of dopamine rush that you get from playing a video game. Something where taking an action, a physical action, changes the environment.

Being able to have that tactile response that is so interesting while also incorporating what is so fantastic about live theatre and why people go to see live theatre is to have an experience with people around them, within community, in a physical space. Taking the idea of gameplay, a video gameplay, into a physical space that can be manipulated was something that we discovered upon that interrogation and really ran with.

Tjaša: I love that. So does “Third Law” actually mean something? Is this a video game otherwise? What's the connotation? I'm not very familiar with it.

Coral: It's referring to the third law of thermodynamics [motion], which is every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Tjaša: Ah! Okay, okay, that makes sense. Because yeah, I wasn't sure. Thematically, you were really talking about the Garden of Eden, so there could be some kind of a law that's maybe in the Bible called the Third Law that... I'm not religious, never studied Bible or anything like that, so I don't know. I wouldn't know it. But also at the same time, it reminded me of the third rail. You know like in the subway system, the third rail is like, don't fall on that. You're going to get electrocuted. So I was trying to decode what the meaning of the title was and if there's a warning in it.

Ettie: I mean, it's quite interesting, you have the number three in general or thirds of things is this recurring... It's a recurring theme throughout history. It's a very satisfying number. You have the rule of thirds. You have Third Law. You have thirds in composition. This is something that keeps coming up and keeps coming up in a quite satisfying way. And you'll notice that within the play there are two actors at any given moment.

There's a character A and a character B. The third character ends up being the creator, which is the sum of the audience. I think if you look at it that way, you can really see these three entities, two of them being the actors at play and the third entity being the audience that is controlling them.

Tjaša: Amazing. So when you came into this project, did you know what you wanted to build or did it kind of develop through the process and got clearer as you were working on it? What did that look like?

Ettie: I don't think that there was any real... Nobody came into this project having a very clear idea of what we were going to end up with at the end. Part of what makes, I think, What Will the Neighbors Say? such a compelling organization and one of the reasons that I've really enjoyed working with them is that their emphasis is on collective creation and everybody bringing something to the table.

This is a project and a show that I don't think could have been created from a single mind. It was a collection of minds that were all playing off of each other and bouncing off of each other until we landed on something that everybody in the room was interested in and everybody felt incredibly compelled to move forward with.

So I think we all brought something that we wanted to work with and work on with the understanding that the prompt is audience interaction, audience engagement, and how to work with that. And from that it was just, let's get everybody in a room together. Let's throw things at the wall. Let's see what feels compelling and this is what came out of that.

Tjaša: I have competing questions in my mind. I guess this kind of process making has its own challenges. So I'm curious how you as an artist and as a human you grow through these challenges and then how you can show up better in a society and in your family and your friend group. What does this training really do? How does it show up outside in the world, not just inside of a piece and inside of a theatre group?

The theatre being this petri dish in which you can present ideas and opinions and theories to an audience or a group of people that otherwise wouldn't have access to those things or otherwise wouldn't have the thought of or been exposed to.

Ettie: I think that theatre in general as an art form is uniquely positioned in a way that it can allow for the audience to gain a greater understanding about a particular subject or a particular set of values that they can then take out into the world, which is a very Brechtian view of theatre—the theatre being this petri dish in which you can present ideas and opinions and theories to an audience or a group of people that otherwise wouldn't have access to those things or otherwise wouldn't have the thought of or been exposed to.

And I think it's very uniquely positioned in that way. In terms of the way that we are using that to our advantage I think is specifically in the way in which the audience has to work together with each other to create change in their environment. When you're within the experience, you're being prompted to be so much more aware of your environment and the design within your environment than you would be in a different experience, in a different theatrical experience.

And the exercise of working together with the people in your space, the people around you that you don't know who are just coming in from a bunch of different walks of life to create a collective piece together with the tools at their disposal, given being the game board that we've provided them with, it allows for a spirit of collaboration and a spirit of collective creation that will be new to a lot of people that I think they will continue to think about as they leave our space and as they leave our experience.

Making theatre is that collaborative leap of faith that you are coming into a process and you are building trust with people you don't know and trusting that time and that work together will lead somewhere.

Coral: Making theatre is that collaborative leap of faith that you are coming into a process and you are building trust with people you don't know and trusting that time and that work together will lead somewhere. And I think with this project, because we didn't come into it with any specific idea of what it would be or what it could be, we didn't have a plan for a final presentation or a full run yet, it was really developmental, we really went into it like we have this time in this space and let's try and do something.

And if it ends up nothing, then we made some friends along the way. And if we make something great, then we'll go from there. And I think without that pressure of a final performance, we were all really able to just be in space together and go down different pathways, different ideas, try out everything and really see, and so that we could build that consensus and that community around what it was we were making, listen to everyone.

And I think something that is really important in my process is making sure that every voice is heard, including the stage manager, including all the designers, including everyone that's in the room because we are making something together. And it's really, really important to me that everyone feels ownership of the work that they're making. And because of that, I think it's important to spend the time to make everyone comfortable and everyone feel like they're really making something that they love, that they stand behind, that they want to explore.

So we spent a lot of time exploring a lot of things that had nothing to do with the end product that we came up with that I think in its own way built to later things. I mean, we started out with three plays actually, three plays that were written by playwrights that were commissioned by the company to write three plays. We narrowed it down to one, then we created the piece around that project.

And then for this iteration that you saw, we actually ended up writing a whole new play—the play that you saw, the text that you saw, for the piece, for the system that we made. So it really went down this really circuitous path, and it was all towards the idea that we are making something that has never happened before. And we are all committed to this singular vision of interaction, of engagement, of co-collaboration. I think that's the biggest part of it all the time.

I think something that we forgot to mention earlier is that I was really interested in putting the audience in the director seat, having a script basically, and then being able to cast and light and sound and stage to a certain extent, the play. And so I really wanted to take that spirit of collaboration into the work with the audience. So instead of just having them watch or say one word or something like that, they're really engaged in what it means to create work in a way that is fun, because it is fun.

It's fun for us when we're in rooms together. It's fun for us to make work together. It's fun for us to just sit around and talk about these crazy ideas and then see what they look like up on stage. So collaboration is super, super important. And I think to take it to your other question of what it taught me or what I take into my day-to-day life, I think it's really about attention.

And I think as a director, that's the most important thing that you have in the room is that you're paying attention, deep attention, and listening to what your collaborators are saying, what is happening and being able to move all of that into the next step. I really don't see myself as a generator of ideas as much as maybe like a gatherer into my everyday life. I really try and take that deep listening and deep attention into my relationships and all the work that I do.

And if I don't have the ability to give something or someone that kind of attention and that kind of listening and that kind of presence, I try not to be in those situations. I think it's really, really important to give attention and attention in a really active way. And I think that has been what I learned. I think it's difficult in this day and age with so many distractions. I'm very, very easily distracted.

I like to have a podcast playing and work happening and a million things happening at once. But I think that when I'm with people, when I'm with collaborators, when I'm with friends, that deep attention is something that I'm always trying to strive for.

As a designer, most of my job and my experience within the work that I create is being acutely in control of specific aspects of a production, a project, a show. And within this one, the prompt is specifically to create a palette for which the audience can play within and then allow them to make decisions.

Ettie: And to briefly tag on to the question as well, just personally, I think that this experience, more so than any others, has highlighted a relinquishment of control. As a designer, most of my job and my experience within the work that I create is being acutely in control of specific aspects of a production, a project, a show. And within this one, the prompt is specifically to create a palette for which the audience can play within and then allow them to make decisions.

So there's not a lot of ability to be precious about the way in which the design you've created gets used. That relinquishment of control is I think a very difficult lesson to learn, but also one that is quite poignant, bringing it out into the world back into your life in a personal sense.

Tjaša: I would love to talk more about the interface that you devised, basically the palette of choices that you presented to audience members that they could choose from, what were they, and also what did they influence. I remember beings and all of a sudden we collectively figured out the numbers of beings are basically the players that you choose.

Oh my God! Then I remember the mushrooms, but now I forget what the mushrooms were. I think maybe sound design, I don't know, type style of acting. I know that the lights sometimes went into more reddish depending on what we pressed. So yeah, if you can talk a little bit about the options, the interface, and how you came up to those possibilities.

Ettie: We'll start with the really basic version of it, which is the internal game board, which is the visual arena in which the audience stays in for the majority of the experience. And within the game board, there are a lot of choices for the audience as to what they can influence.

So those options being the lighting of their environment, the sound of their environment, the actors who are playing the roles of the play that's happening around the outside, and also a button that provides more context for the action that they're seeing, which we have decided is knowledge. So these are the four main vectors that the audience can control within the game board.

And we've provided options for the audience to adjust the lighting and sound in a way that either intensifies them, which propels the action in a particular way. It affects the way that the actors are playing a scene or to lessen that intensity and allow for more breath and less tension within a scene. Moving past that, there are a lot more vectors within that as well.

The play has been designed specifically in four distinct ways that are all based on an individual prompt or an individual style of theatrical form. So for example, that could mean film noir. That could mean panto. That could mean naturalism. So there are four main versions of design, which we've identified as worlds.

And we also allow for the audience to decide which world they want the lighting to live in, which world they want the sound to live in, and to mix and match those at their leisure, at their desire. So those are the main vectors that can be controlled by the audience within the experience.

Tjaša: Ugh, now I want to play again. No, it had this a little bit of an intoxifying qualities like a game does, mostly because there was space for what kind of choices will people be making, how quickly will they grasp what's what and what they're controlling, how long will be the process of exploration, and just like a bumblebee stumbling upon categories and being like, “oh, what's that? I perceive this.” My friend was like, ”I perceive this."

Sometimes you make choices exclusively because the people you like went to a certain circle and you're just like, "Me too." But also there was so much space for, again, what drives this audience choice making? Because sometimes it felt mischievous, then it felt like, “ooh, I'm going to make you do this. No, we want those players.”

What I'm saying is sometimes maybe the choices don't come from a mature place. You're playing. And within the space of play, all these sub-emotions and modalities come to surface. So maybe if you can tell me what were some of the most extreme experiences that you went through during the run of this play.

Ettie: I think the thing that we found the most fun as creators in this is to see what audience did what. All of our audiences were so extremely different in the way that they approached it. And there were a lot of them that approached it from a very analytical, theatrical standpoint, and a lot of them that approached it from a more mischievous situation.

I know we had some people come that their entire goal was to just every time we got to choosing the actors, they just wanted to make the characters lesbians. That's all they wanted to do. So they just kept trying to pair those people together. That is a perfectly wonderful and brilliant way to play this game because it is your choice. You get to create the world that you want to create. So doing that in a mischievous, fun, silly way is I think fantastic.

Coral: Yeah, I think we designed it so that you could interact with it and have fun and enjoy the experience at various different levels. So there's watching the play level. There's the playing the game level. There's hopefully a combination, but some people are more interested in one or the other, and some audiences were more interested in one or the other. I think some that were sadder for us to watch were when people were really interested in watching the play and didn't interact with the game at all.

And we actually found the more theatre-y audiences, we had a buyout by a theatre group, they barely interacted with the game at all. And so that was really interesting. I think we really designed it to be the whole thing. The game is really the piece and the play is the piece. They go hand in hand. They're not two separate things, but it was really interesting seeing how much certain audiences or certain audience members interacted with one or the other.

One thing that I think we were all really interested in was we had actually a game design class come and do it on their own. And what was really interesting about that was that they were completely uninterested in watching the play. Completely. They had their backs turned to the actors at many points. They were just interested in figuring out what the game was and trying to find the stress points of the game itself.

They were trying to crack the code, which was really interesting to watch, but also disappointing because we were like finding out the nooks and crannies of the game actually isn't how we designed it or why we designed it. It's interesting and it's interesting that that's what they were interested in, but we really designed it as an entire holistic experience.

And I think the best shows were really the ones where the audience was really engaged with the game, changing a lot of things, but also watching the play and interested in what's happening at the play and laughing and interacting with the play itself as well. One thing I also wanted to mention was that I think some people had different levels of understanding of the gameplay mechanics.

And our hope was that it would still be an engaging, exciting experience regardless of how much you were understanding what you were doing. So if you were just randomly going to places and stuff, ideally and our hope that is still fun and you're still engaged and you're still enjoying the play, or if you really understand the different levels and all of the different little things that we put in there and Easter eggs and stuff like that, then you're engaged in a different way.

But we really wanted it to be an experience for anyone to experience in their own way and have their own experience. And watching it as the creators from the booth was really such an exercise in letting go because you would watch people interact or not interact and not do things, and just wanting to be like, "Oh my God, if you only added one more person to that circle, you would experience something so fun," but you can't do that.

You can just watch. And I think that is just a larger feeling of any show that you create, you can't really control it once you've created it. So really intense process of letting go and letting the piece have a life of its own like any piece of work you ever make. But in this situation, the variance between a more boring, one light look, one sound, one group, one pair of actors the entire time watching that for us was kind of sad, but you know what?

It was what that audience engaged with. It was what they were interested in seeing. And so you just have to let that go and say, "That was that one. And then the next one, it's going to be a totally, totally different show." And it always was. And I saw every single one and every single one was completely different.

Tjaša: Wow! So rewarding. But yeah, like you say, a spiritual lesson in letting go. I think that James was telling me that literally a person needed to go and basically activate the play/video game to begin. That unless audience members started it, prompted it, you literally would... The actors would've just waited until it was the end of the thing.

They wouldn't just start by themselves because, oh my God, we've been waiting here for ten minutes or something. So I wonder maybe what were your experiences with people figuring that out, what was the shortest, what was the longest time of basically actors just standing and waiting so that they can begin to play?

Ettie: I think one thing that I did not consider when we were putting this project together is how much of an exercise in human psychology and social psychology this would be. Putting a bunch of people who don't know each other together and saying, "You have to work together in order to affect your surroundings."

Even just being physically in space with those people very close to each other and then watching how different groups of people develop that relationship with each other, get closer to each other physically and also psychologically and create their own rhythm and their own social structures and understanding of the space is different every single time and it's compelling every single time from the outside.

In terms of that first initial circle, I would say that one of the very important things to us in creating the show was the act of discovery and walking into a space not having an understanding of what you are supposed to do and there not being rules for what you're supposed to do, but just having a curious nature and figuring it out and trying things and seeing if they work.

We went through a lot of different stages with test audiences to figure out what the best method of that was. I think the longest that we ever sat in that initial state was seven minutes. Or was it nine minutes? It was either seven or nine minutes. And we had some very interesting things happen because it wasn't just people standing around doing nothing. It was at one point somebody, I think, yelled the word “start” or went and poked an actor.

There were things happening. It just wasn't the thing that we intended to happen to start the play. So to be able to see the ways in which people interact with their surroundings and also trying to figure out an easy and gentle way to corral them towards a very particular action without directing them to that action was definitely an interesting logic puzzle to figure out on a creative end.

Coral: We really wanted the audience to discover the play and discover the game just like we did in our creation of it. So yeah, like finding the line between direction and discovery was something that we were constantly working on and, I mean, even changed day to day, even in previews, performance to performance, just trying out different things. And part of that is giving them that aspect of play and that aspect of discovery and trying things out.

I mean, poking the actors was not great, but yelling “start” was really fun and could have been something. And I really love how people were even from the beginning trying to figure out what it was they were doing. And that trying in that engagement and that desire for something to happen is exactly the impulse that we created the piece from. And so it was really, really important that the audience found that sense of play and found that sense of discovery in the experience itself.

Tjaša: Amazing. How did you build this whole sensor thing? Where were the sensors? What was reading the sensors? How did this all happen and come about?

Ettie: Right. I'm going to take that one because that's on me. There were actually a total of zero sensors used for the entire show, which is a pretty crazy thing. The technical driver of the show is a really fantastic video media program called Isadora by a company called TroikaTronix.

And what I think is really interesting about Isadora as a system and as a program is that it was developed by Mark Coniglio, who is a composer, a programmer, and a performer working with a dance company, and they ran into basically an issue where they wanted to have this interactive media and there was nothing at the time that was able to create what they needed it to create.

So he built a version of it that allowed... Just a program that allowed for interactive theatre and media interaction that was driven by the performer, which for me positions this program as the exact epicenter of the impetus of what we're doing. It's an audience-driven show. It's a person-driven show. The interaction is being driven by the people creating the piece, which ultimately becomes the audience.

So we start with Isadora, and Isadora ultimately drives all of the other pieces that are at work in the show, that being ETC Ion for lighting, Ableton Live for sound, also QLab for sound, et cetera. But in terms of actually just figuring out who is where and how to control this machine, there were a couple things that were tossed around and a couple ideas of how we were going to do it.

Sensors were one of them. The other was AI counting, but we found the simplest version of that and the most responsive version of that was a human eye counting and triggering things once certain quotas were filled. Because the one thing that sensors don't do very well and AI doesn't do very well is they're very stringent in their rules of what counts as somebody potentially being in a circle or not. And it doesn't allow for the machine to breathe with the show.

The thing that humans do very well is that they're able to make decisions in the moment, and it allows our machine to breathe with the audience, to adjust to what particular audiences do or how particular audiences are interacting with the machine. So what you end up with is a game board and a machine that feels significantly more responsive than if you were to try to automate the way in which it was counting people.

I think that primarily Third Law is a human machine, and making sure that the way that technology is being driven is inherently human is a central pillar to the way that our show is built and how it operates.

Tjaša: Awesome. Exciting. It was really precise. It was really precise, so I was like, oh my God, this had to be automated. But it's funny that the truth is the opposite. Obviously, yeah, machines don't have a sense of context or figuring out the subtleties of being in the gray zones and making decisions based on that. It has to be so specific that sometimes that just means it's unresponsive. And with the shows that we built in the past, we usually had an automated version and a human version.

And unfortunately, I mean, for us, unfortunately, because we wanted to have everything automated, oftentimes the human had to override the system and make the decisions to propel the show forward. But interesting to know that you have tried different options and at the end decided that no, this is a human operated machine and that this is what's going to drive it ultimately.

Ettie: That was definitely just a very important point in the way that we created it, but also there are definitely points of automation within our show. Once it gets past the triggering stage, once a particular button is triggered, everything past that is automated. But I think it was really important to just have, again, a human mind because a human mind will always be more flexible, will be able to problem solve in more creative ways.

And in terms of the way in which technology is being integrated into art and the division between the human and the technological, the human and the artificial, I don't think that there is a version of that that will ever be able to replace the human creativity and flexibility that just a human brain brings to the table.

So being able to craft a machine that is an extension of the human brain, an extension of the operator that feels very automated, very all-encompassing is a very important thing. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it has to be flexible in a way that I don't think technology necessarily can ever fully achieve.

Tjaša: So when you say that there was an intersection of that once something was triggered, everything else was automated, let's say that we're talking about choosing of the players, which meant that you had a decision tree, but you had all the options in in terms of who the possible player combinations are. Let's say when they're chosen, the lights come up probably, most likely. So we had all of that programmed. And then depending on the trigger, one of them came to be.

Ettie: Absolutely, and it would be the same way. So as soon as the beings button is triggered, the operator would just press the beings button and everything past that, we jump into another menu. The lights do a particular thing. There's a certain sound that happens, and now we're in a different space. All of that is basically like firing a cue. But because it's complex and because it has to follow whatever the audience chooses to do in whatever moment, it is significantly more complicated.

And it's one program that is driving several, many programs in order to achieve that. But that is also the case for lighting and sound, moving between the worlds is completely automated, the way in which cueing happens within those worlds, the intensity up or down, all of that is automated. It just requires the operator to trigger a single button more or less.

Tjaša: Yeah, cool. Okay, what's next? What's happening with this? Are you building anything new? Are you trying to go on tour? What's on the deck?

Coral: We are definitely planning on doing the project again and more. We're looking into a few different options, so definitely touring. And also, we're really interested in having another run in New York City at some point in the future. So we're looking for partners to make that happen. I think we did what we can in the space that we had and the budget that we had, and we're really excited to see if we can get some financial backing to build up our equipment and our just production all around.

I mean, one thing was that we were using consumer grade projectors for the entire run, and it would be really great to get better projectors, for example. So we're really looking long-term at how we can sustain the piece and help it grow in the way that we all feel it really deserves to.

Ettie: From a technical standpoint, I will say that my mind is very much in expansion of the amount of vectors that are operable or controllable, a way in which we can take the machine that we've built and the rules in which we have built it and the way that we've developed it and expand it further, push those limits further, have the audience in more control of more aspects of their environment. So really taking the baseline of what we've been able to create and allow it to grow and fill whatever space we end up in with this new piece.

Tjaša: Yeah, I'm super excited. I hope to see it again.

Ettie: Fantastic.

Tjaša: It was so much fun. Thank you for your time and your thoughts and energy. This was great. Yeah, and can't wait to see what's next with the project and next from this group.

Ettie: Amazing. Thank you so much for having us.

Coral: Yeah, thank you so much.

Tjaša: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of the show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts. If you love this podcast, I sure hope you did, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. If you're looking for more progressive and disruptive content, visit howlround.com. Thanks for listening, and have an amazing day.