Month: March 2017

Our Client: The British Library’s “Mission and 2020 Vision,” according to its website, is to “be a leading hub in the global information network, advancing knowledge through our collections, expertise and partnerships, for the benefit of the economy and society and the enrichment of cultural life.” In their latest Shakespeare exhibition, for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Library’s goals were to “celebrate the diverse ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have been reinvented throughout the ages” and to show “why his work is still relevant to us today.”

Our Users: The Library provides resources for a wide range of users, from the beginning student of Shakespeare to the advanced scholar of his works. We identified three main groups of users:

1. Shakespeare scholars, both British and international: Scholars are primarily interested in access to the British Library’s vast archive of early modern materials, as well as the reading rooms and other scholarly spaces provided by the library. One of the major frustrations of international scholars is procuring enough funding to be able to travel to the Library for their research.
2. The wider public and tourists: This group is primarily looking for exposure to or an experience of Shakespeare. They would not be interested in access to archives, but in exhibits and other public spaces provided by the Library, as well as online resources devoted to Shakespeare.
3. British school groups, students and teachers, both primary and secondary: School groups, like tourist groups, seek exposure to and experience of Shakespeare, as well as an introduction to libraries, library resources, and maybe, depending upon the age, to reading or to theatre in general. They are most likely to take advantage of workshops, activities, and online educational resources provided by the Library. A point of frustration for teachers would be trying to make Shakespeare relevant to their students, and for students, seeing Shakespeare as relevant to their everyday lives.

The Problem: The British Library is trying to cater to a wide range of users with a wide range of knowledge bases, interests, and frustrations about Shakespeare. How can we bring all these groups together?

Our Goals:

1. To promote academic accessibility to Shakespeare for all users.
2. To promote accessibility to the British Library.
3. To make Shakespeare relevant to all users.
4. To foster exchange between students, teachers, scholars, and the wider public.
5. To enrich cultural life through the showcase of Shakespeare as an international literary phenomenon.

Our Solution: BardCon.

Based on the popularity of San Diego’s International ComicCon, many organizations and enterprises have adopted the convention style to promote their own interests, such as LeakyCon (Harry Potter franchise) and the relatively new BroadwayCon (musical theatre). So why not a convention that celebrates the Bard of Avon? Following the traditional style of comic-conventions, BardCon would offer a place for Shakespeareans of all ages and levels of expertise to meet and exchange. BardCon would be a multi-day event featuring a series of activities designed for our three groups of users, keeping as our main goals to make Shakespeare relevant and to promote the British Library.

Program: BardCon will last three and a half days, starting with registration on Wednesday afternoon and concluding on Saturday evening, leaving Sunday for our international participants to be able to return home. As for the events, keeping in mind that we are targeting different user groups, BardCon will offer a variety of activities to fulfill each group’s particular needs, as well as spaces that will allow the integration of the different groups.

1. Scholars—As there are a wide variety of academic conferences available for scholars, we propose to offer partially funded grants from the British Library to encourage scholarly participation in BardCon. These grants will give scholars a certain amount of research time at the British Library’s facilities in exchange for their contribution to BardCon. This would mean that scholars, mostly younger scholars, would contribute to the convention by giving talks to some of the other user groups with the certainty that they will receive research aid for their own projects. Other events proposed for this group are:

• 3MT forums for doctoral candidates in Shakespearean studies, with judges and cash prizes
• Seminars, roundtables, and workshop meetings
• Panels
• Library tours and/or resource workshops
• Book talks and/or lectures

1. School groups, students and teachers—in order to expose these young students to both Shakespeare and the resources at the British Library, BardCon will offer:

• Library tours
• Theatrical performances
• Film screenings
• Interactive workshops: performance workshops with actors, text-based workshops with teachers or scholars, printing press and editorial workshops with the Library
• TED talks about Shakespeare, led by scholars
• Trivia competitions for those students already exposed to Shakespeare’s works

1. Wider public and tourists—the general public will go to BardCon mostly for the spectacle of it and to visit the library itself. For them, we propose:

• A cosplay competition, in the ComicCon style, with judges and prizes
• Library tours and exhibits
• Panels with actors, scholars, and Shakespeare creators (such as the creators of Kill Shakespeare)

1. Integration events—The main event will be the Shakespeare Ball. This ball will take place Friday night. We would invite all our guests to come dressed up in period gowns to enjoy a night of food and dancing to live music. In addition to this, some other spaces for interchange are:

• A vendor room with a variety of stands selling books, comics, films, souvenirs, posters, and other things.
• Different exhibits
• Autograph and picture sections with guest writers and actors

Access and funding: Different access packages will be offered. Scholars can either participate in the convention by applying for a grant or by paying a flat conference registration fee. School groups will pay a modest fee depending on the number of students per group and the activity they wish to attend. The general public are welcome to buy passes for one day or for the whole conference if they wish. The Shakespeare Ball will be treated as a separate event, and all groups of users would have to buy a pass for it. In regards to funding, we will cover some of the costs in the same fashion that comic conventions tend to do:

1. Selling passes
2. Charging a small fee to those interested in participating in the cosplay competitions
3. Charging vendors who wish to have a stand
4. Charging the public for meet and greets, getting autographs and/or pictures with actors
5. Getting sponsors and donators

The articles we read for today’s class compare Play the Knave to karaoke. The analogy suits the design of the game–the text of a Shakespearean play flits across the screen line-by-line, karaoke-style, and players perform the text as they read it. Since our past class discussions have centered on what constitutes an edition, what counts as a performance, and how products can be designed to suit the needs of the user, I’d like to explore how the karaoke-style gameplay of Play the Knave not only blurs the line between game and pedagogical tool, as suggested in one of Bloom’s articles, but also creates a new style of edition of Shakespeare. Moreover, I think that reading the Sutil article against the two Bloom pieces suggests that the game is structured to encourage two simultaneous performances of the text during gameplay–the live performance of the people reading out the lines, and the digital one where the avatars move. But how does this idiosyncratic textual environment change the user’s experience of the text?

Since the game presents the text of entire scenes, or even plays, we can think about it as a new type of edition of the text. In our class thus far, we’ve spent a considerable amount of discussion on what constitutes an edition of a text, and what constitutes a performance of the text. Play the Knave seems to occupy both spaces at once. As Bloom emphasizes in her articles and website, the game presents the plays’ text to its users karaoke-style, meaning that the text appears on the screen one line at a time, through the entirety of the scene being performed (“Theatre Full of Others” 1). Bloom also mentions, however, that her program allows for the sequential performance of an entire play, the clips of which can them be stitched into a continuous film of a play (“Videogame Shakespeare” 121). If the entirety of the play’s text can show up on the screen during gameplay, the game itself can act as an edition of the text.

The karaoke-style gameplay of Play the Knave crafts a different experience of Shakespeare than do other editions of the text because it forces the user to encounter the text in a hypersegmented, sequential way–the user gets the text one line at a time, can’t access past lines without replaying the scene, and can only enter the text at the beginnings of the scenes that the game makes available for play–depending on the game’s structure, it might not be possible to skip straight to the “to be or not to be” passage in Hamlet in the same way you can flip to it in a codex. Traditional print editions of Shakespeare offer the users multiple routes into the text–on a first encounter with the text, a reader could read it silently the entire way through, read parts aloud, act it out, or skip to any part the reader wants. The codex offers this kind of flexibility simply because its physical structure lets you flip to any part of the book, and doesn’t limit your time on any page of the text. The whole text is available at once. The karaoke-style game structure of Play the Knave, however, displays the text one line at a time, forcing the actor to experience the play line-by-line.

I think it’s important to a discussion of the reading experience Play the Knave presents to talk about how the game segments the plays into playable scenes. It’s difficult to tell from the website and articles, and so this piece of the conversation is one I’d like to encourage us to have in class. Is it segmented into traditional acts and scenes? French scenes? What are the scenes called on the menu? Can you skip to any scene you want, or does the game force you to experience them in order? This matters to the experience of the play since once a scene is selected, it plays through to the end of the scene. The ability to choose scenes is thus the only way to shuffle through the play for a particular moment in the text. If the game sticks to traditional scene divisions, it enforces the editorially entrenched divisions. If it goes by French scenes, I’m curious to know what the scenes have been called on the menu of the game–do they have numbers? Descriptive names? If so, how do the names influence the perception of the scene?

The game’s structure especially rewards physical acting above voice acting, pushing its viewers towards a performance style and experience of the text that either leans towards declamatory acting or outright clowning. I’m not saying this as a criticism of the game design–I think it’s  neat–but I think it’s important to think about the implications of how the game structure asks the players to think about Shakespeare’s texts. As Bloom argues in both articles, the kinect-based motion capture technology encourages users to move as they read the lines (“Theatre Full of Others” 2). Moreover, the limitations of the kinect system mean that it has difficulty representing very small movements or very sudden ones, pushing the players towards a declamatory acting style since large gestures and deliberate movements show up well onscreen (“Theatre Full of Others” 8). The game’s structure thus rewards the sort of movements characteristic of declamatory acting with interesting movement from the avatars. However, it doesn’t reward voice acting in the same way–there’s not a points system that rewards you for stressing certain words, or reading the text fluently, or with passion, and I’m not sure how this sort of a system would even work. If the game’s structure makes motion matter much more than the text, it makes sense that declamatory acting could easily fade into clowning of the sort we see on one of Bloom’s demonstration videos on her website:

The users here move incongruously with the text on the screen–making their characters do push-ups and lean backwards. The game essentially rewards this acting style–the avatar also does the push-ups. It’s an interesting visual moment, if disconnected from the script. All the same, it shows that the game has the potential to encourage not only scene appropriate physical acting, but a clowning style that essentially ignores the words onscreen. The game prioritizes physical acting above an experience of the text, which, again, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but is important to think about when discussing the impression it might give someone encountering Shakespeare or that play for the first time.

Essentially, the game encourages an experience of the text that is continuously grounded in embodied motion. It encourages a gestural Shakespeare, but the fact that players can’t backtrack to previous lines or watch the entire play scroll by before performing it means that their acting is contextualized by only whatever they’ve previously read of Shakespeare–whether that’s intensive study of the Shakespearean corpus, a couple plays in high school, or just the five lines of text that scrolled across the screen before their current line. I think this also encourages an understanding of the text and an acting style that responds mostly to the words currently on the screen, but that might not take into context the rest of the character’s development or the arc of the plot.

Moreover, Play the Knave isn’t just a text grounded in embodied motion, it’s also a text that gives players constant feedback on their motion, both from the audience around them and from the avatars onscreen. Even this choice changes some of the physicality of the players’ performances–the videos on Bloom’s website show that the players and audiences alike have a tendency to watch the avatars’ performances more than the live one. Accordingly, a couple of clips had actors face each other during conversation scenes, but with both of their faces turned towards the screen rather than to each other. While this also makes sense since the screen acts as a prompter, the constant feedback clearly also influences how players choose to move.

The other question I’d like to pose to the group this week is whether the game encourages the players to produce one performance of the text, or two of them at once. Both Bloom and Sutil’s language suggest that the digital environment mocap creates differs from its real world counterpart. Bloom defines the digital in her paper by quoting Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s argument that a digital environment provides an illusion of perfect transmission and reproducibility (“Theatre Full of Others” 5). I’d love to invite Dr. Bloom to correct my understanding of the definition (it was a little difficult to follow as a non-specialist), but I understood it to mean that the digital gives off an illusion of a perfectly reproducible thing. Within the game, the appearance of perfect reproducibility occurs with movement: the motion onscreen seems like a reproduction of the human motion in front of the camera and its depth sensors. Yet, Bloom herself admits that part of the reason why the game encourages declamatory acting is because of the flaws in the game’s ability to reproduce motion accurately–it can’t capture subtle movements or sharp, sudden ones well, causing the avatar to move erratically or unnaturally when the mocap program can’t process the human movement quickly or accurately enough (“Theatre Full of Others” 8). In short, flaws in the technology mean that the motion onscreen will always be somehow qualitatively different from the ones in front of it–whether that’s in level of detail the lens captures or in a misanalysis of where the person is. This seems to agree with Sutil’s argument that mocap doesn’t translate motion onto the screen, but maps it onto the digital, creating a different thing (Sutil 206). I’d like to raise a question for the class to consider in response to these flaws in transposing the motion to the digital environment: are the onscreen performances the avatars give the same performance as the one their human counterparts put on? Or are they two distinct entities?

Moreover, the avatars provide continuous feedback on the players’ performances, which becomes especially interesting when we consider whether the avatar’s performances are another facet of the players’ performance or count as a separate performance of the text–if it’s the same one, players see their own performance in what seems to be real time; if it’s not, they see a mapping of their performance onto a second, digital performance. Regardless, the effect is similar–they are at once performers and spectators during the same reading of the text.

Play the Knave fills an interesting gap in Shakespeare products and in educational technology by offering a way to gamify Shakespeare’s text. The software arguably acts as an edition of the text even as it acts as a prompt towards performance–it presents the text line-by-line while an onscreen avatar mimics the motion of the players, encouraging players to act out the lines as they read. Yet, the mere fact that the game’s structure encourages performance at the same time as one encounters the text can’t help but influence readings of it, tying the text to declamatory gestures, and in some cases, reducing the player’s focus on the words themselves and encouraging clowning. The limitations of the kinect’s mocap technology also have interesting implications for how we think of the performance Play the Knave prompts–the flaws in reproducibility suggest that the digital performance might be well-classified as a separate performance of the text than the live performance from which it derives its motion.

Bibliography

Bloom, Gina. “Videogame Shakespeare: Enskilling Audiences through Theater-Making Games.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 114–9.

Bloom, Gina, Sawyer Kemp, Nicholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell. “’A whole theater of others’: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave.” Shakespeare Quarterly, (forthcoming).

Playing the Knave. Utah Installation 1. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9cZlOnrkc. Accessed 20 Mar. 2017.

Sutil, Nicolás Salazar. “The Language of Motion Capture.” Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement, MIT Press, 2015, pp. 197–209. Google Scholar, https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=fD87CQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT7&dq=motion+and+representation+sutil&ots=oW-NMiwPy0&sig=5H2jH0Ccqn3PVoajn_gq_kBMNu4.

Videos – Play the Knave. http://playtheknave.org/videos/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2017.

 

Our mission: To “redesign Shakespeare” for the Cleveland-based Great Lakes Theatre (GLT).

Our solution: To repurpose the GLT’s two-week “Shakespeare Summer Camp” into a more extensive, community-focused series of workshops that take advantage of the empty theater and classroom spaces of the quiet summer months as well as the GLT’s already-existing network of connections with schools, public libraries, and local performance venues.

Our client: GLT advertises itself as “northeast Ohio’s professional classic theatre,” driven by its ambition of bringing “the pleasure, power and relevance of classic theatre to the widest possible audience.” Although the GLT brings several low-cost performances to local libraries and schools and runs theater workshops within the school system, the substantive part of GLT’s repertoire, and the substantive part of its revenue, is based on main-stage productions of Shakespeare. Throughout all of April this year, for instance, the company will be performing nothing but Hamlet, hoping to attract both traditionalist and more progressive audiences by alternating between a male and a female actor for the play’s titular role.

The problem: The theater’s financial situation, as it is specified on GLT’s website, is unpromising. The GLT is not receiving sufficiently many or sufficiently large donations to produce more than three long-term main-stage productions a year, let alone try to launch an advertising campaign for those plays or promote a touring troupe. Moreover, the cost-prohibitive $55 ticket-entry for regular adults seems to be both a side-effect and a vector of the financial problem. Audiences, increasingly accustomed to movie-theater prices for stage entertainment, are preferring either not to come at all or to purchase cheaper seats on the wings and far corners of the theater rather than pay for the best spots, many of which remain vacant from performance to performance. Even the GLT’s decision to provide on-stage seating at a significantly cheaper rate ($15) is failing to attract audiences who might wish to sit close to the play’s action. Another important problem: the company stages plays only during the school year (from September through May) and makes no profits with which to pay the cost of the theater house during the long summer months, besides a brief two weeks in June during its youth summer theater camp.

Our three big-picture goals: (1) to reinvigorate the funding situation of the GLT; (2) to renegotiate its image as a theater of “classics” in order to avoid the hint of elitism associated with theater (as opposed, for instance, to movie-theaters or Netflix); and (3) to expand the depth of its interaction with the local community and thereby foster greater audiences.

We also have a few procedural goals: In order to keep costs down and solicit more crowd-sourced feedback in the GLT’s redesigning of Shakespeare, we wish to draw especially on the GLT’s existing human and spatial resources: its connections with local schools and public libraries. We hope that in doing so we can help the GLT remaster its trademark as a “classic” theater to signify something closer to “community” rather than “canonical” or “aristocratic.” We hope also to reverse the standard equation that thinks of Shakespeare-appreciation as the end and the theater-house as the means; we wish to make the theater-house, the GLT itself, the end of the Cleveland community’s efforts, and let Shakespeare be the means.

Our product: The So You Think You Know Shakespeare? Summer Series (SYTYKS)

We propose to remodel the two-week youth summer theater camp into a two-month-long fleet of workshops, seminars, camps, tutored reading clubs, and for-credit high-school and college-level summer courses that would take place in various public venues around the GLT’s Hannah Theater, as well as throughout the Cleveland metroplex. Staying true to the GLT’s mission statement of catering to the widest possible clientele, the SYTYKS summer series is designed to be scalable and adaptable to the interests and availabilities of participants, aiming to make Shakespeare a meeting ground for a broad range of activities, hobbies, and curiosities. It divides generally into three elements: the theater camp, the high-school and college-level summer courses, and the adult-oriented workshops.

1. The central pillar of the SYTYKS summer series builds on the GLT’s already-existing and growing summer camp. The redesigned summer camp (composed of a “Summer Shakespeare Playhouse” for children < 10 yrs. of age and a “Summer Shakespeare Intensive” for children > 13) would distance itself pedagogically from the frustrations and clichés of traditional summer camps and theater workshops. Rather than have every camp-day be dedicated to the all-consuming goal of a final pre-determined performance, for which props, lighting, and costume-design are a secondary thought, often hastily brought together at the last second by volunteering but exploited “drama-moms” and “drama-dads,” the redesigned summer camp would be based on a “build-your-own” and “maker-community” model.
   
   1. The Playhouse. Primary school children (aged 5-10 years) signed up for the “Summer Shakespeare Playhouse” would partake in age-appropriate role-playing, art-making, and even game-making activities after the Kill Shakespeare model. Visited daily by storytellers who adapt Shakespeare’s plays to young audiences to foster their imaginations, the kids would be encouraged to build their own Shakespeare-themed games or build props or parts of sets for their own using LEGOs, cushions, pillows, mattresses, papier-maché, and other non-hazardous arts-and-crafts materials. Final projects of especial merit would be displayed at their local schools or at public libraries. Sessions would take place at local recreation centers.
   
   2. The Summer Shakespeare Intensive. Middle-school and high-school age groups would begin their six-week “Summer Shakespeare Intensive” by exploring the possibilities of set-design, costume-design, and lighting by collaborating in hands-on workshops with volunteer stage technicians and various kinds of craftsmen and -women, including carpenters, jewellers, 3-D printers, seamstresses, &c. In small teams, the students would then decide what kinds of props, costumes, and set-design elements they want to play with and can feasibly build within one week. Using those various items, they would then begin exploring the possibilities of stage performance through improv sessions and performance workshops with the help of visiting volunteer actors, including perhaps the Hip Hop Shakespeare company or other touring troupes like Notre Dame Young Company. After gaining more confidence on stage, students would then begin adapting 15-minute one-act plays from Shakespeare original, and begin scheduling their rehearsals. A final performance and reception would then be held at the Hannah Theater, with tickets at student-pricing for all.
   Note: The Summer Shakespeare Intensive is on application-basis only, but it welcomes especially students with disabilities and from lower-income economic classes, and can offer some financial assistance to deflate costs of participation for accepted participants.

2. Shakespeare For-Credit. For students less interested in performance, the SYTYKS summer series proposes a duo of three-week long for-credit summer classes for high-school and college students: “Shakespeare + Music” and “Shakespeare + Science.”
   1. Students attending the “Shakespeare and Music” course will have the opportunity to study the history of music in theater and film in order to inform their decisions as original song-writers and composers. Using monologues, sonnets, and other verse forms by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as inspiration, students will adapt and set 16th-17th century verse to music, or compose original scores for potential stage or film productions using GarageBand and other digital audio recording softwares. Classes will take place at local community colleges, in technology classrooms outfitted with keyboards and synthesizers. Students are encouraged to bring their own talents and instruments for three-hour creativity “sprints.” Final evaluations are based on short writing assignments and a capstone performance hosted at a downtown café, open to the general public. Students are made responsible for the set-up, tear-down, and advertising of the capstone performance.

   2. Students in the “Shakespeare + Science” course will begin by studying theories of matter, physics, and health from medieval and early modern medicine and science, as they’re found in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and comparing them critically with up-to-date theories of quantum physics, astrophysics, germ-theory, and molecular chemistry. The course will focus the majority of its attention on a series of lab sessions in which students will reenact basic alchemical experiments, optical experiments, anatomical dissections, and astronomical experiments that shook and defined the early modern period. Outcomes of these courses include literary-critical skills from direct engagement with primary texts of the early modern period, historical-critical skills, and an understanding of the methods and processes of elementary modern science. Two courses are designed, one for aspiring science majors in high school, the other for non-science-major undergraduates.
      
3. Shakesparenting. The SYTYKS summer series wants to be especially attractive to students, since they are the future of Shakespeare and of theater-appreciation. But in line with the community-based approach of GLT, we propose to include a series of reading/book clubs, seminars, and informal get-togethers for parents and for retired members of the community, centering on themes of family and adult life. Weekly, flexible, evening meet-ups and group-ons (both directed and self-directed) at local cafés and bars will focus on the plays of the Bard, as well as modern adaptations (possible group names: The Bard on Tap, BrewBard, Coffee and the Bard, Ladies who Bard). At retirement homes and hospice centers, Shakespeare’s plays will serve as the basis both of arts-and-crafts workshops (e.g. Shakespeare in Needlepoint) and of directed reading groups organized by Case Western medical students in Medical Humanities classes. At YMCA centers and parishes of various religious denominations, seminars on the tragedies and comedies, facilitated by literature professors and parenting specialists, will help parents and expecting parents model, reflect on, and anticipate on present-day real life scenarios in family life.

Our promotion plan: Finally, as part of our advertising campaign for the SYTYKS summer series, we offer to revise the existing webpage to better promote the event. The single photo on the current webpage, albeit cute, hearkens only to a homogeneous community (white, upper-middle class, nuclear-family). We propose to replace it by a photo gallery, containing photos of participants from diverse racial and ethnic communities, signaling especially to disabled members of the Cleveland community that they are welcome to perform on the GLT stage, not just to sit in its seats. Trusting student-interest to drive parent-interest more effectively that parent-interest will drive student-interest, we propose to promote the SYTYKS theater camp more heavily at schools and on social media platforms, keeping traditional paper advertising costs for the “Shakesparenting” events, which will be published in parish bulletins, Sunday morning radio talk-shows, &c.

Our hope and vision: To rejuvenate the community’s interest first and foremost in its theater, the Great Lakes Theatre. We believe the works of Shakespeare carry sufficient cultural cachet, sufficient sentimental attachment, and sufficient intellectual depth to assemble participants from youth to retirement age who are already looking for non-financial ways to participate in the GLT’s passion for classic theater. We are certain that a reinvestment in the space of the theater, especially familiarizing young students with the stage and the back-stage, would help promote audiences, especially audiences who want to be as close to and familiar with the stage as possible. The usual benefits of Summer Shakespeare camps and workshops include helping students grow social and public skills as well as pass the obligatory academic hurdle of reading Shakespeare, aka “passing the Bard exam.” In addition to helping young learners build social skills, public speaking, team-work, leadership, &c.; in addition to helping high-school and college-age students earn hard skills in science, arts, crafts, music, literature, and history; in addition to forming future Shakespeare-enthusiasts, builders, makers, and artisans; in addition to helping parents and retired members of the community navigate difficult obstacles of adult life, we hope the So You Think You Know Shakespeare? summer series will help Cleveland rediscover the cross-generational, “classic” appeal of its very own Great Lakes Theater.