Hello, we are team Curtain Call, and this is our postmortem for the project for this semester. To start off, what did we do? Curtain Call was a project in collaboration with the CMU School of Drama in order to create a lobby installation for their production of Lear, an avant garde play that explores the impending death of the playwright’s father through the lens of both King Lear and Sesame Street. We were tasked with bringing the storm of King Lear to life and making the internal struggles of the characters external by creating a “Storm of Voices” using directional audio, dynamic UV lighting, and immersive set pieces.
All in all, the installation was a success. We got strong reactions from the people that experienced it, even making a few cry. The audience and crew of the play were very happy with the result. Our installation has had ripple effects on other dramaturgs’ plans for lobby installations, with several of them changing their approach to be closer to the level of what we created. And the School of Drama seems to be open for future collaborations with the ETC. But, with that out of the way, we want to go over the specific lessons we learned from this process in order to pass them on to future teams that do physical installation and/or work in collaboration with the School of Drama.
Now, to the lessons:
With installations like this where you are accompanying something else and are meant to elevate and support it, it is all about having a few, short, impactful moments. You are not here to keep people with sustained engagement, you are not the main event. Your job is to wow them when they first come in, have a second impactful moment when you surprise them as they interact with the installation, and hit them with one last impactful moment that they are left to think about as they go to the play. We feel that we delivered on each of these pretty well with the audience’s initial surprise at the sound and flash of lightning when entering the lobby. We had constant strong reactions to the first time people went under the directional speakers and heard the voices reverberating in their head, and for the audience members more familiar with the play we had strong reactions from people who took notes of the changed writing on the plaques when the lightning flashes. And the contrast in calm and the poignant reverberating “I’ll miss you”s of the after show made everyone come back out and interact with the installation even after the show was over. We were ultimately successful at delivering these moments and it had a large part in making the installation work, but focusing on delivering those moments can focus your design and really help in how you prioritize development and where you know you can make changes and improve.
You always need more testing, and even that is no substitute for actually installing in the final space. We know that being able to install beforehand is not always possible, but it is a fact that there will be unforeseen problems and the experience will not be able to have that last bit of iteration and polish unless this is done. You have to try and make up for this by being clever with technical testing. Make sure to test all of the factors. For us, it was not enough to do sound level testing, testing the speakers, testing the effect of different audio processing on the speakers, testing the effect of running multiple channels off of the mixer, testing the change in signal on long wires, and even more testing. Because we did not test long wires bundled in similar ways in the final space with all the channels running, we did not fully anticipate the effect this would have on distortion in the final setup. Cross talk between our wires and other signals in the space was a big problem. You have to get your testing as close to the final version as possible even if it means running several fifty foot wires down an ETC hallway and dealing with answering a lot of questions as to why from the faculty and staff. But, even when you do this, do everything you can to get as much time in the actual space. There is no complete substitute for doing this and there will always be problems if you don’t.
You also have to be clever with your playtesting of the experience. It is basically impossible for us as students to fully replicate the situation where the audience would experience the installation. We can’t get 100 people in a lobby where we are not the primary thing they are coming to see, make sure they are regular theater goers and drama students so they have the right context, and then have them go see the actual work and judge how we impacted that work based on what we had done. And even if you could recreate that situation for testing it is so hard to have all the parts ready for a physical installation to replicate the totality of your experience. You need to test the individual factors and parts of your project in order to get the best impression you can with the restraints you had. We did vertical slices of the experience in the ETC lobby, we stress tested the umbrellas and clouds to see if they would sag or if people would notice them the way we wanted, we tested the audience lines for reactions and understanding with people that had a wide variety of experience levels with the play. When you can’t fully playtest the experience you don’t just not do it and hope your assumptions are right, you do even more work to verify each part and make up for the unknowns that the process has thrown at you. You will still be surprised by how it all comes together and people react, but you will have a much larger chance of actually succeeding if you do this.
Lastly, really know your audience, and cater to them. Drama students are a rowdy bunch. They love to yell, they randomly break out in song, they talk with each other and share everything. Use this to your advantage. Some of the most successful parts of the installation were the things that leaned into this. The toys on the pedestals that encouraged the drama students to play with them, the voice lines and flashes of text that encouraged them to share and talk about them with other people, and we had many people shout and sing in order to activate the sound reactive clouds.. We saw so much of that in observing the audience throughout all the shows. Installations that lean into the fact that this can be a high interaction audience if you present them with the right interactions will be far more successful than ones who don’t. Let them contribute, prompt them to shout, give them things to talk about. Do not be afraid to rely on interactions that ask a lot of the audience, as long as there are also opportunities for people who want to be more passive in their experience of the installation.
This was also true in how we worked with their expectations of what a lobby installation was. Because drama students are so used to what drama installations are with their props and question asking, we really surprised them with our use of large scale decorations and weird technology. If you can play with people’s expectations you will be able to get an even stronger reaction than if you just develop devoid of the context of your audience.