Collaborative Solutions for the Performing Arts: A Telepresence Stage

Performing arts professionals must collaborate to create, rehearse and perform. COVID-19 restrictions on shared spaces and physical contact now prevent them from working effectively. This project will reframe and customise conventional web-conferencing technologies to create innovative performance spaces, enabling collaboration in a shared online environment that we refer to as a telepresence stage. Real-time video images of remote performers are merged within virtual stage sets, so participants appear to co-exist in the same online space. This enables actors and dancers to simulate presence together from their homes, studios, theatres, or other remote locations to advance online creation, rehearsal and performance. The project team from media and performing arts backgrounds bring together their knowledge and experience of developing live networked performance research and practice for over 30 years. They will develop a Telepresence Laboratory between University of Brighton UK, Third Space Network Studios in Washington DC and LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, combining green- screen technology and virtual set design to enable full-body interactions between remote performers in shared online spaces. Eight UK performing arts groups will test, explore, and perform online techniques. These groups include youth theatre, dance companies, musical theatre and regional theatres, working from remote locations using standard computing and video resources. Each 4-month residency will culminate in a live-streamed public performance demonstrating unique telepresence solutions to be immediately disseminated via multiple easy- to-use PDF help guides, step-by-step video tutorials and open-source resources designed to assist UK performing arts professionals in returning to work regardless of lockdown restrictions.