Teaching in the Virtual Theatre Classroom - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 182

THe COURSe: THeATRe
TeCHNOLOgY

can easily build a variety of objects, including
completely designed and realized sets, without
wasting lumber and hardware, yet while maintain-
ing the ideas of proper design and usability. One
campus has used this idea for a Film and Television
Production class, with students reconstructing the
setting and camera set-ups for the “Odessa Steps”
sequence from the film Battleship Potemkin (Foss,
2009, p. 558).
A virtual environment also offers an excellent
method of teaching theatre history. Students may
tour an ancient Hellenistic theatre, built to scale,
and then teleport to a reproduction of the Globe
Theatre, with minimal impact on time or the
environment. (So far, no one has spoken much
about the carbon footprint of maintaining a virtual
world, but there are environmental advantages to
MUVE teaching.) Theatre educators could take
this even further. Imagine bringing students to a
virtual reconstruction of the Elizabethan Globe,
and introducing the architecture of the period.
Suddenly, an actor, in period costume, appears
and addresses the audience, and acts the role of
Shakespeare, providing a first-person presentation
of the playwright. (Some of these issues, as well
as immersion in the virtual environment, are cov-
ered in Erik Champion's excellent article, “Astral
Travel in Virtual Realms: Evaluating Conceptual
Understanding in Digital Reconstructions of Past
Cultures,” 2005.)
As suggested above, the virtual world offers
a dynamic and interactive environment in which
to teach theatre topics—an area only now being
explored for the first time. Yet, while MUVEs of-
fer a rich non-corporeal environment, the students
need not be left behind, and can in fact become
quite engaged intellectually—and so some of the
normal dynamics of a classroom remain in effect.
As educators we must still be aware that many
of the same rules of teaching still apply; this is
especially true in the areas of classroom etiquette,
peer teaching, and in-class, as well as outside of
class, communication.

Prior to teaching the Theatre Technology course,
I had used Second Life (SL) in only one instance
of my teaching: projecting a virtual Greek Theatre
and having my avatar, Phorkyad Acropolis, pro-
vide a tour of the structure, built to scale, that had
been based on ruins of Hellenistic theatres. Previ-
ously in class, I had used groundplan drawings
and photos of ruins to illustrate what we think we
know about the ancient Greek performance space.
Now, with this three-dimensional walkthrough, I
could literally show the students what it would be
like to be a spectator, or an actor, within the space.
From my experience directing a play within
Second Life ( The Perm —Schrum, 2007), and from
my time spent in the world both as a resident and
as a performer, I decided to include the exploration
of SL in a new course I created entitled “Theatre
Technology.” The syllabus promised a “'theoreti-
cal' study of current technology used in the theatre
(lights, sound, video projections, virtual reality and
virtual worlds).” The course rationale explained
the reason for offering this course:

In the past, theatre technology meant lights and
sound, and later on the computer-aided drafting
of scenery and perhaps lighting plots. With the
explosion of the Internet and the World Wide
Web in the 1990s, some theatre practitioners
have embraced digital technology as both a tool
and a medium for performance (and instruction).

At the same time, the availability of computer
technology has enabled anyone with a desktop
or laptop computer to create digital content, and
to share that content with others. Students use
Facebook and Myspace to present their personas
to the world, digital cameras and camera phones
capture various moments of their lives and, with
increased bandwidth and storage, the frequency
of people sending self-created audio and video
clips will increase.