aaron vanderbeek

Rashomon was a mixed-media interactive theatre production created during a 15 week long project called Chautauqua Interactive by five Masters students at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The goal of the project was to introduce interactive theatre into a traditional theatre setting.

The production was staged on a 360 degree stage, with three projection screens situated at 120 degree intervals around the stage, speaker systems dedicated to each of the projection screens, and the audience seated in the center. Each audience member sat in a swivel chair and was free to rotate to observe any section of the stage at any moment. Using a combination of custom built hardware, custom software, and Max MSP/Jitter we monitored and recorded the direction of each swivel chair at every point during the performance. Using this data we modified the soundscape on stage during the live action and altered the order of the events in the play.

The story told during the performance is Rashomon, which was made famous by filmaker Akira Kurosawa and is based on the Japanese short story "In a Grove".

All of the details of what hardware was used, design documentation, drawings, and software is available for download at the dedicated website for this project.

The goal of the entire project was to show that interactivity could be used as a device to convey meaningful content during a theatrical performance. Interactivity, as defined by Janet Murray in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, describes interactivity as a combination of immersion, agency, and transformation. It can be argued that traditional theatre embodies a sense of immersion by creating an dimly lit atmosphere and well-constructed sets, and enables transformation by telling stories that allow audience members to project their own lives onto the characters in the story. Agency however is completely absent from traditional theatre.

We explored many options when designing accessible interfaces for audience members that were used to traditional theatre. We chose the swivel chair as our interface for the following reasons: 1. At its base level it is interactive in the sense that the audience member is allowed to navigate through a surplus of information given to them by a 360 degree stage. 2. The swivel chair is a known and intuitive interface that does not distract from primary involvement. 3. We were able to observe and record the general focus of the audience. This was especially important because we wanted the audience to represent the jury in the Rashomon story (the jury is traditionally unseen in tellings of Rashomon), and being able to respond to viewer attention was a way for us to interpret 'judgement' from the audience without asking them to make an explicit choice.

At all times during the performance there was ambient sound and/or music playing to set the atmosphere and tone of the experience. The sound came from three different sources that were placed at 120 degree intervals around the stage underneath the projection screens. During the entirety of the performance the sound level coming from each of the speakers depended on how many people were looking at that portion of the stage. During the first half of the performance, the characters' projections all speak simultaneously, forcing the audience members to collectively choose whose voice raises above the others. Additionally we monitored which character attracted the most attention from the audience and altered the order in which the characters gave their testimonies accordingly. This is playing off of the idea that the order in which you hear different sides of a story will affect your judgement of the situation. Finally during the live action in which ambient music played in the background, multilayered tracks were composed that would give the story a different tone according to which character was getting the most attention from the audience.

Experience Designer: Design was largely tackled as a group. We held many brainstorm sessions where each person was able to contribute to the design of all elements of the experience.

Sound Designer: Set the aural tone of the performance and composed, recorded, edited, and mastered all of the sound used during the performance. Selected and set up all audio hardware required for the performance.

Composer: Composed all of the layered music tracks that played during the performance.

Programmer: Implemented all of the audio processing in Max MSP.

Construction: Designed and built the housing for the chosen rotation sensor to work with a standard swivel chair. Created initial sketches of stage design.

Our production of Rashomon was performed 8 times over two days in the Rauh Theatre on Carnegie Mellon University's main campus on May 4-5, 2009.