Awardee: Peter Gil-Sheridan
Semester of Award: Spring 2021
Materials Awarded: A set of ten Oculus Quest 2 Headsets
Project Description:
The set of ten Oculus Quest 2 headsets generously afforded to us through the Frances D. Fergusson Technology Exploration Fund successfully expanded the Vassar drama department’s work into the realm of virtual reality (VR) for experimental theater projects in and out of the classroom. Our findings are extensive and below we offer useful discoveries concerning the effective (and less effective) applications of virtual technology in performance, and equally, other non-performance academic spaces:
As planned in our grant application, these headsets served my playwriting class of 10 students (DRAM-310-01) as they explored writing theater for virtual spaces. As we initially considered these headsets as a solution to the hindering role of COVID-19 restrictions on the relationship between audience and performer, students felt potent excitement. The reach of this excitement even managed to extend beyond my section that was using the headsets into my other sections not tasked with using the technology (namely my introduction course to Playwriting). In class discussions of professionally published plays, students quickly began imagining new possibilities for staged readings of plays, such as The Nether by Jennifer Haley, which deal directly with futuristic technology in their story worlds. Using this and other plays as case studies with the VR headsets effortlessly aided in me integrating department-held pedagogies and scholarship on theater-making as students excitedly referred to the technological capacities of the Oculus headsets. In this way, the headsets dilated the imaginations of many students in the realm of stagecraft and general theater-making that would have been unseen without these headsets afforded to us. These results indicate the potential for VR as an eventual next-generation tool in the technological arsenal of Vassar’s contemporary Black Box theater space.
As for my students concerned with writing full-length original works (DRAM-310-01), the results of inviting them to write alongside our Oculus headsets differed greatly. I initiated this experiment with the knowledge that it would clash with a popular pedagogy of writing: writing stories to serve the form of VR (rather than employing form to serve storytelling, as we typically teach in scholarship on successful narrative writing). Initially, the excitement for VR outweighed this general storytelling rule of thumb. However, most students began to seize up and delineate away from VR technology due to the pressure of conforming ideas to the headset’s capabilities. This outcome affirms the importance of using the form to serve the plays we write, and thus concludes that VR interacts more successfully in writing-based performance spaces when it is approached as a tool meant to expand the world of already written work.
With the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, we noticed a significant withdrawal of interest in employing virtual technology in experimental work in and out of the classroom. The “Zoom fatigue,” experienced by most of us, has acted as a considerable deterrent in our VR experiments. This continues to be true. To adapt, I assigned my teaching assistant (in addition to my research assistant) to spearhead a new round of VR experiments: recording performances of students’ written work and testing their audience’s level of engagement in virtual spaces. Successfully, we were able to record and upload these performances to streaming platforms accessible via headset (namely Youtube). The next phase of our experiments turns toward using the headsets as a tool to further engage audiences with our department’s work. We are in the midst of organizing events that will precede and follow our in-person 2022/2023 department performances where the Oculus Quest 2 headsets allow audience members to enter and explore the spaces of pre-filmed rehearsals for said performances.
As we enter this new phase of exploration with the headsets, we ultimately hope to gauge the average person’s interest and ability to engage with this technology to find long-term implementations for the headsets in our theater spaces, and also potentially expand access to other departments across campus to support scientific academic work. This type of experimentation and work would have been and continues to be impossible without the Frances D. Fergusson Technology Exploration Fund.