New Terrain in Interaction Design - Computers as Theatre - page 201

i.e., the choir was often used as “heaven” and the crypt as “hell.” The plays
performed in the church tended to treat biblical stories in a sequential way
so that a “whole” emerged at the end of the year. The dramatic form came
to be known as a cycle , containing several plays within the larger whole.
In the late 12th or early 13th century, plays began to be performed out-
side of the church. Although the messages of these plays remained more or
less religious, a certain amount of comedy and even ridicule seeped into
them (thanks, in part, to irreverent forebears such as the Feast of Fools , be-
ginning around the 11th and continuing for several more centuries, per-
formed around Christmastime in the church). The exterior architecture of
towns came into play in terms of staging.
Once the plays moved out of the church, two sorts of staging techniques
were adopted. Movable platforms, called pageant wagons , were developed
primarily to stage cycle plays (see Figure 6.7). The pageant wagons carried
each play in a particular cycle to several places throughout the town, and
the wagons moved from one venue to another, presenting the plays in suc-
cession at a variety of places. The wagons carried mansions that continued
to represent places or loci within the play. Actors often used the platea for
performance space. You can think of this as a kind of spatial distribution
system. Fixed platforms were the alternative form of staging, using existing
architectures or built in public squares. The mansions might be scattered
Figure 6.7. The little play shown on each pageant wagon has its own plot.
As the audience experiences all three (or more), a larger plot emerges
so that we have nested dramatic shapes.