Phil Porter & Prospero: Revelations in Theatre.
Phil Porter speaks about Prospero and the Making of the Desire Path
The Desire Path is a kind of promenade opera experience told through Prospero and using the GPS feature whereby you’re taken on a journey along Londons Southbank.
Understanding these new technologies is crucial for the evolution of Theatre. If you’re theatre-makers, artists or educators who feel like you want more from theatre then maybe it’s time to delve into these new technologies, exploration awaits you.
Prospero is the new palette for creatives who want explore the interrelationship between Theatre and Technology. But don’t just take our advice. Listen to Phil Porter, a playwright who has been collaborating on a new immersive GPS walk that uses Prospero called the Desire Path that takes place in Central London. Phil collaborated with composer Martin Ward to create this experience
Prospero & The Desire Path with Phil Porter
In the Interview below that’s broken up into bite-size chunks we will be discussing
What is the Desire Path?
Evolving Promenade Theatre into a Digital World
Why is Theatre so behind?
Being able to create multi linear narratives in GPS walks
Being able to look at the Bigger Picture
The Desire Path is a kind of promenade opera experience told through Prospero that uses the GPS feature, whereby you’re taken on a journey along the South Bank. You’re put in role as someone investigating something. The content you’re hearing is kind of operatic: some it’s spoken, some of its sung, but within it all and appearing on your screen, you’re getting clues that move the investigation on.
Just by testing the prototype we were blown away by how well it was working, without wishing to blow our own trumpets - and the trumpets of Prospero - which is crucial to it.
What was great about it was when you do it [the walk] you’ve got this multi billion pound set, because you’re walking along the South Bank and through the GPS controls we know where our audience is at any given time, so we can refer to what their seeing, which is the city of London.
I’ve never been a huge fan of promenade theatre because I associate it with mainly with having to get up and walk after each scene. I quite like it in theatres, when the actors and stage managers do the scene changes for me. Rather that than having to wonder over there! There’s something un-energising about promenade theatre.
But this just felt like all the best thing’s promenade could offer. It’s so much more dynamic and active for an audience member.
With this it felt like there was a whole world to explore.
What excited us was that the more we write, the bigger we could expand into the area of London. It can start to feel like the experience of going onto the internet, or onto Google Maps and being able to explore where you want to explore, for example going on street view and going, ‘I’m gonna go up this road now and see what’s their’ you know?
Years ago, when I was doing work experience with C&T, they were a very different kind of company. Then they were doing a Theatre in Education projects, with a van on tour, being inspired by theatre practitioners like Boal. [These practitioners] are interested in the idea of '‘so how do we actually make the audience active and how do we get participants to choose their own adventure within something, rather than us just dumping a story, a world and a pre-rehearsed play on people’
And so that’s been burning away for all that time and then, with C&T, once the technology sort of caught up with some of those ideas it was like like ‘hey, we can easily put those two great ideas with theatre together with this new technology and create some amazing stuff.’
Im sort of astonished that there are not more people making those connection within Theatre, or if they are they’re making it on such a basic level it feels so far behind.
If there’s one thing that the internet has taught us it is that coherence is probably over rated. If we free ourselves from the traditional notions of narrative that we see when we go to see most plays or watch most TV and film and we say okay ‘thing’s can be experienced in any order and also not everything we encounter has to entirely make sense. Then we slightly loose that requirement to provide a sort of perfect ending to something.
I see and consider the internet as one giant messy narrative. The fact that there’s so much to encounter that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t actually make it any less compelling as a narrative. It actually makes it more addictive. There are some clues we might come back to over and over again and everyone’s having a different experience of it.
I think maybe it’s more about the world and less about the ending.
When I am writing play’s one of the things I always really like to do is trying to find ways of seeing everything that I’ve written all on one page - so it’s some kind of map of what I’ve done. With Prospero that’s always seemed quite appealing. You can look at the Smartscript in one go and see the structure of it, if not the detail.
Phil has a huge amount of insight an experience in being a playwright and his inspired approach to exploring the potential of these new technologies really opens up a framework for us as creators to move and work forwards with.
We’re now offering demos on how to get started with Prospero, and how you could use it to support your own creative projects. This is new territory and it can feel daunting, but also it’s a huge potentialgame changer for what is creatively possible.
How might you explore it? Book a demo now or buy a Prospero membership on our website
