Following Puck virtually in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream experiment: Live theatre and high-tech innovations

Abstract

The thirty-minute experiment titled Dream represented a collaborative effort between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Audience of the Future. It fused live performance with motion capture technology, 3D graphics, and interactive gaming techniques, and let the audience remotely guide Puck through a virtual forest. Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, it focused on Puck and the fairies. If, for online audiences, the virtual fairies moving through a digital forest suggested a video game, the eight performances were delivered live and in real time. This Dream represents a new format for Shakespeare’s performance that evolved during (rather than emerged from) the COVID-19 pandemic.