Bristol Old Vic Announce Research Into Audience Experience

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Image for Bristol Old Vic production Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead. Kathryn Hunter as Janina surrounded by the Complicité ensemble. Image by Camilla Adams
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead. Kathryn Hunter as Janina surrounded by the Complicité ensemble. Image by Camilla Adams

The Bristol Old Vic has announced a £150,000 research project to investigate why and how people become so immersed in the theatre. 

The project will focus on Complicité’s new production Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead with up to 140 audience members over 10 performances involved. These audience members will wear wristbands with state-of-the-art sensors that will monitor their heart rates and other physiological responses to the performance. This data will then be used to see if audience members reacted similarly to each other at certain moments in the production. 

In addition to this, there will be three preview live broadcasts on 7, 9 and 11 February and a sample of on-screen viewers will be monitored in the same way as those in the theatre. The aim of this stage of the project is to compare the responses of the two audiences and use the data to enhance the at-home viewing experience of theatre and try to more closely mimic the feeling of being in an audience. 

The project is being run in conjunction with MyWorld and their partners the University of Bristol, Bath Spa University, the University of Bath, and the University of the West of England. 

Charlotte Geeves, Bristol Old Vic’s executive director, said: “Presenting theatre shows on screen is still a relatively new and very exciting medium. We have spent the last few years learning how to translate our stage work to screen in order to engage audiences in a different way. It involved a lot of experimentation to get to where we are today–generating industry-leading, high quality filmed theatre distributed across the world.

“Being part of one of the MyWorld research projects enables us to continue innovating. That we’re able to do this with Complicité–one of the world’s leading theatre companies, known for their immersive storytelling and experimental theatre-making–is hugely exciting for us.”

Words by Cerys Gardner


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