Two undergraduate courses conduced online during the Covid-19 pandemic, in parallel, explored performance and production techniques for remote virtual environments.
A selection of scenes from The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (2005) by Stephen Adly Guirgis were rehearsed within different evolving virtual worlds, made with real-time virtual backgrounds in Zoom, shared-screen real-time 2D compositing in TouchDesigner, and a shared 3D environment in Unreal Engine. Taught by Theater Professor In-Residence (and REMAP Co-Director) Jeff Burke, with support from REMAP research staff, the courses built on the previous graduate-level Acting for Virtual Environments and the Future Storytelling Summer Institute 2020 to use shared technological platforms and create shared virtual environments to meet the specific challenges of storytelling in a time of social distancing.
As students received remote, hands-on training and remotely, collaboratively experimented with building and performing within virtual settings, they were required to consider the history of each technology and its use within the arts, key technological concepts, and different relationships, engagements and synchronizations with audiences, cameras and locations.
The work of the Fall 2020 course is informing the process of creating UCLA Theater’s production of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which will be built and streamed remotely in Winter 2021. The play places a large, time-bending group of fictional and “historical”characters in purgatory, a.k.a., hope, to consider whether or not to release Judas from eternal damnation. Its informal, expressionistic structure, with twenty-three characters and endless options for multiple casting, leads to Judas having to love, thus accept, Jesus again, in order not to return to hell—a choice which goes unrevealed. Leaving the audience to consider concepts of faith and forgiveness, guilt and redemption, divine mercy and human freewill, and the impacts of doctrine, the piece is ideally suited for an investigation that uses the actual tools of our media-enable, “post-truth” virtual society of often-binary perspectives and allegiances.
The courses and technological development for UCLA Theater’s production of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot are also being used as prototypes within the Scalable Immersive Learning (SCiL) research project, which will be announced in early 2021.
Jeff Burke—Theater 176A (Production Practice in Theater with Emerging Technologies) & Theater 138 (Performance for Virtual Environments)—Fall 2020.